Canucks emerge from loss with hope for future
Every Canadian hockey fan base is tortured; it’s part of the job description. Montreal might be the closest to serene, but they’re manic. Ottawa lived through Eugene Melnyk. The honeymoon is regrettably over in Winnipeg, and the Calgary Flames are such a mess players keep trying to escape.
The Leafs, of course, are in their own category in regards to torture. It’s a thing.
Then there were the last two Canadian teams in these playoffs. The Edmonton Oilers have two of the best five players in the world and have still found ways not to win, and the Vancouver Canucks were best known for online chirping and onice irrelevance and long-ago riots before an unexpected thrill ride this season. A Game 7 between Edmonton and Vancouver was going to be torture for somebody.
And then everyone went home happy, or near enough. For five games, this was a delightful series between a stoppable force and a movable object. The Canucks were down to their third-string goalie, Arturs Silovs, and had trouble getting shots on net. Luckily for them, the Oilers were down to their firststring goalie, Stuart Skinner, who gets pulled in the playoffs with semi-regularity. And since neither team could impose their will on the other guys for extended periods, the series was a gas.
Then the Canucks slept through most of the final exam in particularly agonizing fashion. Before the game, the Canucks lost their leading goal scorer, Brock Boeser, to a blood-clotting issue. The Oilers recorded 13 of the first 15 shots on goal, and the Canucks were outshot on a first-period, four-minute power play. After they fell behind 2-0 and finally woke up, Vancouver’s Sam Lafferty took an offensive-zone penalty 180 feet from his own net, and it was Vancouver kid Ryan Nugent-Hopkins who made it 3-0 for Edmonton.
This was Vancouver’s third Game 7 since 2011, and they hadn’t scored in the previous two. I got a text from a very professional friend who is also a Canucks fan. He said: “We’re a tortured fan base. There’s something in my soul telling me to burn a cop car. That’s normal, right?”
Then came the jolt. The Canucks scored, and then scored again with 4:36 left. Skinner was permeable. The Oilers called timeout. The Canucks are an exceptionally emotional team, it seems.
The Canucks didn’t get a shot on net the rest of the way. On their best chance, with 13 seconds left, J.T. Miller’s slot shot hit teammate Nikita Zadorov. The Oilers won 3-2. They are the last Canadian hockey team standing, and will be decided underdogs against the Dallas Stars in the conference final.
“We know how to make it stressful,” said McDavid to the CBC right after the game. Conor Garland, who scored Vancouver’s first goal, told reporters there are still games he lost in junior hockey that haunt him; this one would, too, he reasoned.
That’s hockey in Canada in the spring, all right. For a time it had been so fun. In Game 1, the Canucks were down 4-1 and won 5-4. Game 2 was the Connor McDavid show: a goal and three assists as the Oilers came back from three one-goal deficits to win 4-3 in OT. Game 3 was the Silovs game: the Canucks won 4-3 despite being outshot 45-18. Game 4 was duelling heart attacks: Vancouver tied the game with 1:41 left, only to surrender the winning goal to Evan Bouchard 62 seconds later. Vancouver won Game 5 by scoring with 33 seconds left. Game 6 was the only dud.
Add Zadorov’s comedic stylings — “They have good fans, diehard fans. I mean, there’s pretty much nothing else to do in that city except watch hockey,” he said early in the series — and the emotional stakes and it was worth watching. Every other Canadian market has better crowds than Toronto’s stockbroker convention, but Vancouver chanted player names one by one, howled and beseeched, and it almost helped enough. When the game ended, Vancouver gave the Canucks a standing ovation. A riot it wasn’t.
You could argue that hope in Canadian hockey is the worst torture of all — and this could still be false hope, really — but that was a nice, unexpected season for a market that had been in the wilderness for a while. The ending had an impact, though. That same professional Canucks fan friend texted after the game: “I’ll be honest, my desire to burn a cop car is down a lot after we closed that hard.” Hope.
The Leafs, of course, haven’t played an all-Canadian playoff series with fans in the stands since the Ottawa Senators in 2004. That devastating loss to Montreal in 2021 was an empty-building COVID special, but in 2004 you could feel the hatred build, feel the petty nastiness and the city-vs.-city joy. It was before social media, so Leafs fans have never played another Canadian fan base in an honest-to-goodness series in the Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/TikTok era.
Maybe one day. If you’re going to be tortured, you might as well play someone who really knows how it feels.