QUEBEC CITY — As the 97th MasterCard Memorial Cup dawns, this much seems clear: it’s too close to call.
Sticking one’s neck out to pick a winner of this year’s tournament might leave one feeling exposed like, oh, the folks who said Mike Babcock would never in a million, trillion, ga-zillion years join the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Few knew his mind. And few can accurately take a snapshot of the four-team field here in La Vieille Capitale and confidently say which team should be favoured.
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As always, only two of the four have actually played each other, and those two — the Quebec Remparts and Rimouski Oceanic — had to go to double OT in Game 7 to decide a winner of the QMJHL final.
Try to compare either of those two with Kelowna or Oshawa? Or the Rockets with the Generals? Good luck to you. While it might have been nice to have Connor McDavid here, this quartet of hockey clubs are about as closely bunched as you can imagine.
Here’s four different ways to look at the competition:
HOME SWEET HOME: Right off the top, the fact the Remparts come into the competition having fought for their league championship right to the bitter end sets this event apart from the past two years. In Saskatoon in 2013 and last year in London, the host Blades and Knights, respectively, had both been eliminated early in their league playoffs. By the time the Memorial Cup rolled around, they’d been sitting around for weeks, and it showed as neither team played well.
Here, the Remparts have had an unpredictable season at times under Phillippe Boucher, including the final when they won the first two games at Rimouski, but then lost the series. Still, Memorial Cup history tells us home teams often win when they otherwise don’t seem to be the strongest squad, such as 2012 when the Shawinigan Cataractes took home the big trophy. The Cataractes are the only host team in the past seven tournaments to win, but before that, seven out of 15 Memorial Cup competitions went to the home side.
The Remparts loaded up as best they could for the sole purpose of winning the last big hockey competition at Le Colisée, particularly with the addition of goalie Zach Fucale, already a Memorial Cup champion and world junior championship gold medallist. We know a goalie can dominate a short tournament, and he could do it here.
THE STARS ALIGN: No team has flashier names, you could argue, than the Rockets, who boast a lineup that includes Edmonton prospect Leon Draisatl, Winnipeg blue-line prospect Josh Morrissey, Washington-owned defenceman Madison Bowey and winger Nick Merkley, the highest rated prospect for the 2015 NHL Entry Draft playing here in Quebec City.
All those pieces didn’t fit perfectly at times during the regular season after Draisatl and Morrissey were added via the trade route. But with seven consecutive wins to close out the WHL playoffs, they’re all fitting nicely now. Draisatl, the third overall pick last June by Edmonton, is certainly playing like a star now with 28 points in 19 playoff games. He’s the quintessential point-producing stud down the middle, an element none of the other four teams have.
Beyond this, the Rockets have to feel comfortable as an organization here. This is the franchise’s fifth appearance at the MasterCard Memorial Cup since 2003. Even first year head coach Dan Lambert competed as a player, winning it all with Swift Current in 1989.
GO WITH THE GIANT SLAYERS: It would be hard to characterize the Oshawa Generals as David in a David versus Goliath context. After all, the Generals did overtake Sault Ste. Marie at the end of the season to finish as the CHL’s No. 1 rated team. But what we can say is that Oshawa took down McDavid and the Erie Otters after the Otters seemed to be poised to ride McDavid’s excellence all the way to a Memorial Cup berth.
Beyond that, it was the way they did it, using centre Cole Cassels at times to shadow McDavid, and as often as possible deploying the defence pair of Josh Brown and Dakota Mermis whenever McDavid hit the ice. That strategy seemed to bring out the best in all three players and the Generals, giving the team a tight focus. Cassels, in fact, ended up scoring the winner in overtime in Game 4, then had four assists in Game 5 as the Generals finished off the Otters. It’ll be interesting to watch when he collides with Draisatl on Tuesday.
Oshawa knows there were more than a few folks rooting for McDavid to get to Quebec City, and even feel they didn’t necessarily get all the credit they deserved this year in the OHL as experts pointed to the overall strength of the Western Conference.
Now they get to prove they should have been the favourite for this event all along.
CAN’T TEACH SIZE: Everybody brings some heft to this Memorial Cup, but nobody has built their team around it in quite the same way as Rimouski with its Twin Towers: 6-foot-7 defenceman Samuel Morin and 6-foot-4 centre Frederik Gauthier. While Alexis Loiseau, Anthony Deluca, Christopher Clapperton and Michael Joly deliver the big goals, and Jan Kostalek has the offensive flash from the back end, it’s Gauthier up the middle and Morin on the back end who really speak to the strength of this Oceanic squad.
Rimouski defends brilliantly, second to only Blainville-Boisbriand in the Q during the regular season, and better than everyone in the post-season, even the Armada, who they knocked off in six games. Gauthier’s size and brilliant faceoff talents are a big part of that, as the Maple Leaf prospect gives Rimouski possession at critical times and a crease presence at both ends of the ice that has proved to be crucial this spring. It’s not hard to see Babcock using the big fellow some season down the road in the NHL in the same situations.
Morin, the Philly prospect, is the biggest body on the Oceanic blueline that also includes 6-foot-4 Guillaume McSween and 6-foot-3 Andrew Pico. He played all the big minutes against the top Remparts forwards in the QMJHL final and was able to use his size effectively just enough to help the Oceanic eke out that memorable Game 7 triumph.