The three-in-three is junior hockey’s death march. When leagues announce their schedules, players look for those blocks of games that run consecutively Friday night, Saturday night and Sunday afternoon. When they spot one, they highlight the dreaded dates and gulp.
This brings us to the Quebec Remparts who, by virtue of their 5-2 victory over the QMJHL champion Rimouski Oceanic Thursday night, have a three-in-three with a place in the national championship game at stake.
It’s not your usual three-in-three, mind you. In fact it’s the farthest thing from the worst one.
A three-in-three is almost always a by-product of travel, a necessary piece of scheduling when teams are on extended road trips out of their conference. The Remparts, though, don’t have to leave their own arena across this three-game set. It’s a perk of being the host of the Memorial Cup tournament.
The home team could have avoided a play-in game with a win over Rimouski in the last game of the round-robin Wednesday, but absolutely flat-lined in a 4-0 loss to the Oceanic. That these games came on the heels of a seven-game series in the Q finals makes it feel all the more absurd.
You have to like the chances of the Remparts’ opponents in Friday night’s semifinal, the Kelowna Rockets. The WHL champs have had two days of prep work and been able to watch Quebec and Rimouski take small bites out of each other across 120 minutes. The opponent getting the last of the three-in-three is in the catbird seat. For years, when Ottawa was a major program, they feasted on well-softened OHL rivals who were playing their third in three in the capital at the end of the eastern road swing.
So how to like the Quebec Remparts to knock off Kelowna and land in a championship game against Oshawa on Sunday? Well, there were a few positive signs for the home team.
Back in January you would have bet that the player to most likely lend some star power to the Memorial Cup was Anthony Duclair. During the world junior championships he played on the gold-medal winners’ top line alongside Maxi Domi and Sam Reinhart and on his best shifts he glowed as brightly as they did.
The New York Rangers had kept him with the big club through the first couple of months of the season, loaned him to Hockey Canada for the tournament and then decided to return him to the Remparts for the balance of the junior season. Given that Quebec was going to host the Memorial Cup, the Blueshirts knew they could only recall Duclair in the event of a return to the Stanley Cup final for a second consecutive year. The prospect of that vanished when the Rangers sent him to Phoenix in the trade that brought defenceman Keith Yandle to Manhattan.
Whatever was happening at the level above the CHL mattered not to the Remparts: They would be looking to load up through trade in advance of the tournament but it seemed like they wouldn’t be able to deal for anyone near Duclair’s quality. Fact is, in pure skill, no one was better. He was going to make not just the team better but the league.
He didn’t light up the league, didn’t even really come close. It seemed he took a step back — 50 goals in 59 games in 2013-14, 15 in 26 on his return from world juniors. Yeah, he was slightly better than a point a game through the QMJHL playoffs, but he was in an extended goalless slump coming into last night’s tilt. Especially in the loss to Rimouski, he looked to be on the limp and had trouble getting off the ice at one juncture.
The tie-breaker didn’t start well for him. On the game’s very first shift he took a run at Charles-David Beaudoin and bounced off him. He looked pretty fragile at that juncture.
He did seem to warm up as the game wore on and in his best moment he scored probably the most critical goal of the game. He trailed linemates Adam Erne and Kurt Etchegary on a rush and wired a wrist shot past Philippe Desrosiers. It was a surehanded, never-in-doubt goal-scorer’s goal and it came just after Rimouski tied the game at one and looked to be coming on.
Duclair had a couple of scoring chances later and was criminally unlucky not to score on one rush to the net, but no matter. The Remparts’ first line looked really in form for the first time in this tournament. Erne scored what turned out to be the winning goal with just over three minutes left in the second period and added to his unfolding legend this spring — if you’re a goal-a-game player at this time a year that passes for legend. But really, if Duclair gets going, Quebec’s top unit is good enough to make life miserable for opponents even in a three-in-three. If Kelowna makes a couple of mistakes and takes a couple of penalties, the Remparts’ first line can make something happen.
Duclair was disappointed when he was sent back to junior after the under-20s. Any advice to look on the bright side would have been hard to follow. But the Memorial Cup is his third shot at a championship: The WJC was the first and the Q playoffs the second. Two out of three wouldn’t be bad.