A Canadian team hasn’t won the Stanley Cup in two decades. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not just a case of bad luck.
We’ve mostly forgotten about it, the Canucks’ drama-free 4–0 loss to Boston in game seven, but the images of the aftermath will stay fresh for a while yet. The rioting in the streets of Vancouver played out on screens across the country and eventually in the city’s courts, where dollar estimates were made for damages of fan rage.
OK, go ahead and say it: Those weren’t fans of the Canucks or hockey at all, just anarchists, louts and losers. Maybe. But try telling that to the players who were locked away for hours in the arena’s family lounge, under siege. Did it matter to them whether those were dyed-in-the-polyester fans or not? No, all the players knew with certainty was that their loss sparked chaos.
Sentences have been served and insurance claims have been paid for property that had to be repaired or replaced, yet the damage to the Canucks remains inestimable. Some will tell you that a bit of that team died that night, that the Canucks’ instant folding the past two springs tracks back to game seven. As often as not, however, teams that come so close to the Cup use defeat as a building block. I believe that Vancouver team became unwound in the aftermath. Before the start of the next season, I talked with a couple of players and they still seemed shell-shocked by their time in the bunker. Sure, the Canucks have managed to come away with regular-season silverware in the last two years, but in the post-season they’ve rarely looked like a team that could win a game, never mind 16 of them. They wasted neither fans’ nor anarchists’ time and energy unduly, winning just once in two playoffs since.
Funnily enough, though (unfunnily to some, surely), Canadian teams defeated in the Stanley Cup final going back to 2004 have staggered away. Calgary and Edmonton won 15 playoff tilts in 2004 and ’06 respectively but in subsequent springs had only the draft lottery as a cheering interest. Ottawa made the final in ’07, but won just two playoff games over the next four seasons.
These, however, are only awful facts that build up to a larger truth about Canadian teams and those of us who cheer for them.
From the geographical to the philosophical, myriad things divide Canadians, but there is one thing that we all can agree on: Americans don’t understand us. Before that fateful game seven in 2011, I fielded a call from a producer at ESPN who asked me if I could find him hockey fans in Toronto who were rooting for Vancouver to bring the Cup back home to Canada. His preference was “a sports bar with fans wearing Canucks jerseys.”
I helpfully corrected him on two points. One: It’s a sweater. Two: You’re more likely to go down to the Metro Convention Centre and find a congress of sasquatches than you are a bar full of Vancouver fans in Toronto or anywhere outside the Pacific time zone. I was greeted with stunned silence on the other end of the line.
Though Americans can’t fathom us, they do pay some attention to us. They have noticed, for instance, that no NHL team based in Canada has won the Cup since the Canadiens’ miracle run in ’93. In fact, one of their finest has even studied us. I speak not of the schools of Canadian studies at Duke and Berkeley, but of Nate Silver, a fresh young mind whose fusion of statistics and soothsaying has become appointment reading in the New York Times. Silver’s calculations put the Cup-less run into a stark perspective: “If a champion were randomly chosen from all NHL teams active each season, the odds that a Canadian team would have won at least one Stanley Cup since 1993–94 are 99.2 percent,” he wrote.
Those are the numbers, plain and simple. He falls down, however, when trying to determine causes for 20 years of heartbreaks great and small. He talks about a weak Canadian dollar back in the ’90s and fan bases so loyal that owners lose any incentive to ice competitive teams.
These are the clouds in Silver’s linings. No, the Canadian teams’ collective drought is one area where the empirical must trump the statistical, a matter for which the old polling qualifier, “accurate within three percent 19 times out of 20,” was written. What Silver sees as a near-impossibility, all Canadians even remotely interested in the game know is an inevitability. We all know the Canadian teams will lose in the spring. We know why as well, although, being Canadian, we don’t talk about it. Apologies to Walt Kelly, the late Pogo cartoonist, but what he once said of a beloved but trash-spoiled swamp is apropos of our Canadian NHL teams’ disappointments: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Let’s set aside the Toronto Maple Leafs who, since 1967, have rarely threatened to undo this country’s delicate emotional balance by rolling the Cup down Bay Street. A championship in Toronto is too awful a prospect to consider for those outside the 416 and 905 area codes—a city can stand only so much hate in the hinterlands. Yes, the Leafs have made the conference final three times since ’93, first with the sainted Pat Burns behind the bench, twice with Pat Quinn at the helm. Not even the guy who lives for team and phone-in shows would mount the case that they were really championship-quality teams. Since the cancelled 2004–05 season, the franchise has left nothing to chance, missing the playoffs entirely until this season, when it seemed they could scarcely be avoided.
Let’s also set aside Montreal, where fans can be counted on to point to the franchise’s storied history. Mention that the team hasn’t won since ’93 and they’ll let you know that their team also won in 1986 and, if they’re old enough, that Danny Gallivan is the greatest play-by-play man, his being the voice rattling around their frontal cortexes. Paradoxically, they’re also the first to celebrate, too prematurely as it turns out, teams they believe are destined for greatness. Maybe Montrealers see the sweaters and imagine that ghosts from yore are wearing them.
In my 20-plus years working on the front lines of these heartbreaks, the best Canadian team not to win a Cup was the 1995 Quebec Nordiques. After a game at the Forum, Montreal coach Jacques Demers told me the Nords were “giants… they’re that good and young.” He was right. Joe Sakic and Peter Forsberg were one year removed from the Cup. Unfortunately, at that point they’d also be one year removed from Quebec, having relocated to Colorado. It might have seemed the Nordiques were victims of a loonie that was worth less than 70 cents U.S. in the absence of a cap on payrolls, but, in fact, the team was young enough that it wasn’t at immediate risk of free-agent flight. When owner Marcel Aubut’s push for a new arena was rebuffed, he cashed out as quickly as he could. If he hadn’t, we wouldn’t be having this conversation about a 20-year Cup drought.
The second-best team not to win it all was the Ottawa Senators in various iterations. After Ottawa was drummed out of the playoffs by Pittsburgh this spring, the boosterish media in the capital referred to the team’s “storybook season.” The team should be admired for getting through an awful run of injuries, but the Senators skated into the sunset with just five of the 16 wins necessary for a championship. If there is a “storybook” for this franchise, the script was written in 1999, at the end of a breakthrough 103-point season. Opening at home against lightly considered Buffalo, the Senators were stoned twice by Dominik Hasek. The home team lost 2–1 in game one, when they took 25 more shots than their opponents, and 3–2 in double overtime in game two. Fans’ gasps after soft goals left so little oxygen in the arena that several Ottawa players narrowly avoided mortal asphyxiation. The fans’ dread filled the vacuum—“Go Sens” became “Uh-oh Sens.” To the players’ credit, they made the playoffs each of the eight springs thereafter, although for a time it seemed their sole purpose there was to offer the Leafs a beatable opponent.
For those whot willfully court heartbreak by cheering on a Canadian club, it’s hard to say what is more pleasantly soul-destroying: Annual failures of a small sort or epic runs that fall barely short. Calgary in ’04 and Edmonton in ’06 were analogues in near-victory: Decent teams that upset favourites en route to their respective finals, only to fall in game seven on the road.
Arguably, Calgary was closer to victory. “People asked me when we went to Tampa Bay for game seven if we could win the Cup again, because they waved off what everyone thought was a goal Marty [Gélinas] scored in game six that would have given us the Cup,” says Craig Conroy, a centre with that Flames team.
Arguably, Edmonton endured far more adversity. “We had some brutal luck, losing Rollie [starting goaltender Dwayne Roloson] in the opening game of the final in Carolina,” Ryan Smyth says.
Both Conroy and Smyth still marvel at their fans’ boundless support. “I remember seeing the Red Mile before games,” Conroy says. “In the Flames’ room you could actually hear the fans outside the arena.” Likewise, Smyth has fond memories of fans rallying. “When we flew back from Carolina to Edmonton after game five [when the Oilers staved off elimination] there were hundreds of fans waiting for us at the airport. Still amazing,” he says.
After the Flames’ run, many of their key players scattered, like the roster was a puffball and the lockout a stiff wind. After the Oilers’ run, just one major piece was removed, at either his or his wife’s request, but it was the piece that mattered most: franchise defenceman Chris Pronger.
Smyth wouldn’t speculate about what might have come to pass if the Oilers had played game seven at home. “A lot of things worked out for us to get that far, some things fell through,” he says. Conroy did, however, saying it “might be easier to focus without distractions on the road.” Then again, he comes at it from a different perspective. Now an executive in the Flames’ front office, he went to Vancouver to see game seven against Boston. “I thought I’d have a chance to see a Canadian team win the Cup at home and that it would be a special experience,” he says.
It was a special experience, just not the one he anticipated. “It was incredibly tense out there before the game, not really like what we had in Calgary that year,” Conroy says. “I don’t know if it was game seven with everything on the line or not.”
Therein lies the one thing Nate Silver can’t show on a flow chart. Working in Canada’s NHL arenas for a good long time, I’ve seen the glazed looks in players’ eyes during bad times. I’ve waited for players to emerge from trainers’ rooms where they try to outlast not just dozens of reporters but hundreds of fans gathered at exits. Two years ago, former Canadiens defenceman Patrice Brisebois admitted he suffered from depression after being booed mercilessly in his home arena. I’ll bet he could put together an old-timers game stocked with those who’ve been hounded by the black dog. Every loss is harder because of their often toxic fishbowl existences, a claustrophobic environment best described this spring by Montreal’s Carey Price after his team’s elimination in the first round. “That’s the one thing I miss, being anonymous,” Price says. “I don’t even go to the grocery store anymore. I hardly do anything anymore. I’m like a hobbit in a hole.”
Or a team in a bunker after a loss in game seven, as the Canucks were two years ago. Yes, Wayne Gretzky and Patrick Roy suffered celebrity greater than Price and still won, but those who are able to thrive in it are the exceptional few and they come along every generation or so, not often enough. Until their successors happen on the scene, the Cup won’t cross back over the border.
Playing where the game matters most puts near-great players under pressure they’d never face elsewhere. It burdens all and breaks a few. Not mathematically demonstrable but with 20 years of evidence to back it up.
This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. Subscribe here.