QUEBEC CITY—It was 20 years today Marcel Aubut announced the Quebec Nordiques were leaving town, and arguments still rage as to why the team left, or whether it really had to leave.
With a brand new $400-million arena next to the beloved Colisee set to open within weeks, the future is open to the professional game in town. That said, the major junior team, the Remparts, is here now and, for the foreseeable future, both the only game in town and the only significant shinny tenant for the rather unattractive Videotron Centre.
When the Remparts move in, for a time at least they’ll have the most luxurious home of any CHL team, and right now they’re icing an appealing, exciting team that makes locals want to watch.
The franchise won the 2006 Mastercard Memorial Cup with Patrick Roy behind the bench and future pro stars like Alexander Radulov and Marc-Eduard Vlasic in the lineup, and the opportunity is still there for the team to win it again this spring despite a 5-4 overtime loss to the OHL champion Oshawa Generals on Sunday.
Like the two games that preceded it in the tournament, the Remparts-Generals game was both tight and massively entertaining. After two years in which the host team under-performed after being beaten early in their league playoffs and left sitting around for weeks, the Remparts went right to the bitter, Game 7 end in their league championship series against Rimouski this spring and have been a terrific team to watch so far.
At 1-1, they could still win the Memorial Cup. Right now, however, it’s the 2-0 Generals who appear to be the best of a bunched field. Kelowna and Rimouski will try to provide a counter-argument to that Monday night, but D.J. Smith’s team came to Quebec City riding the high of winning the OHL title over Connor McDavid and the Erie Otters and appear determined to keep that momentum rolling.
It wasn’t easy on Sunday, nor did the Generals make it easy on themselves, again blowing an early lead. Then, up 3-2 in the third, they coughed up two goals to diminutive Remparts forward Dmytro Timashov, his first in 16 games, to trail late into the third before Ottawa Senators draft pick Tobias Lindberg tied the game and sent it to overtime.
That was on a power play created when Quebec forward Guillaume Gauthier chose to go head hunting on Oshawa defenceman Mitchell Vande Sompel, and was sent to the box.
Of such decisions are wins sometimes turned into defeats.
With the Generals outshooting the Remparts by a ratio of two-to-one most of the night, Quebec goalie Zach Fucale had to be excellent, and was, particularly in the opening part of the overtime session when the Generals won faceoff after faceoff in the Quebec zone and kept pushing for the overtime winner.
As a second overtime loomed, Oshawa centre Cole Cassels blocked a shot with his leg in the Generals end, and was in such immediate pain that he dropped his stick and glove before skating to the Oshawa bench hunched in agony.
It wasn’t clear whether he would come back. Smith wasn’t sure he should let him. “I didn’t want him to be caught out there and not able to get off the ice,” said Smith.
But Cassels did go back out there to take a faceoff in the Quebec zone to Fucale’s left. He won it back to defenceman Stephen Desrocher.
Desrocher, 19 years old and undrafted by the NHL, is an intriguing player, sometimes a little too much of a risk for Smith’s liking. For this game, the Generals coach split up his top pair of Josh Brown and Dakota Mermis to counter-act Quebec’s offensive weapons, and that left Desrocher playing with Brown much of the time.
Desrocher had scored in the opening Oshawa game against Rimouski off a Cassels faceoff win with a big shot from the top of the circle. This time, he worked his way in closer to the Quebec net, then ripped a shot past Fucale to keep the Generals unbeaten.
“I guess I was the lucky one to get the final one,” said Desrocher, so excited he delivered a rather audible curse word on his post-game, Sportsnet interview. “I knew I didn’t have a shooting lane at first and I tried to get it around a guy and get it on net.”
So that’s three games at this Mastercard Memorial Cup tourney, all one-goal decisions, all featuring at least seven goals. It’s a pleasing style of hockey, that’s for sure, making up for the absence of McDavid and the marquee attraction he would have provided.
After closing off the top bowl for the first two nights, tournament organizers opened it on Sunday, and it was partly filled. This is an intriguing time for the tourney to be here, seven years after the IIHF world championships proved big things were still possible for hockey in Quebec City.
The Generals, who featured Eric Lindros in their lineup 24 years ago when he refused to play for the Nordiques, and the 20th anniversary of the loss of the team to Colorado have provided an interesting backdrop to the competition.
Controversy? Not really. The Generals weren’t booed out of the building on the weekend because they were once Lindros’s team, and it’s not clear how badly the city wants an NHL team again, or whether it will work better this time around as has proven to be the case with the Jets in Winnipeg.
It doesn’t really matter at the moment, as there’s no evidence that the NHL is anxious to put a team here despite the presence of the gleaming white rink some call “The Smoke Detector” for it’s similar appearance to the household alarm.
So they’re left to enjoy the Remparts. There’s a lot to enjoy.