It has been 20 years since a Canadian team won the Stanley Cup.
Since 1993 when Patrick Roy led the Montreal Canadiens to the franchise’s 24th Stanley Cup win, only five Canadian teams have made it as far as the final pairing: Vancouver (’94 and ’10), Calgary (’04), Edmonton (’06) and Ottawa (’07).
While Canadian players have been integral parts of every team that has sipped from hockey’s Holy Grail since then, the fact that the NHL’s top prize has not been hoisted by a team from the land where hockey reigns supreme should be a bigger deal. As the NHL Playoffs draw near, there are currently four Canadian teams in position to have their season extended – Montreal, who sit first in the Eastern Conference and in third place overall, Winnipeg, Vancouver and Calgary. But of those teams, only Montreal is assured of making the playoffs.
Winnipeg, Vancouver and Calgary are currently 5th, 6th and 8th, respectively, in the Western Conference playoff race, where two additional teams (Los Angeles and San Jose) are within four points of the 5th-placed Jets. Calgary is likely to drop out of the running, having just lost Mark Giordano for the remainder of the season, and fans in Winnipeg are waiting nervously to hear a report on bruiser Dustin Byfuglien, who left Wednesday game in Ottawa with an upper body injury.
While Vancouver appears safe, they’re without No. 1 goalie Ryan Miller and one half of the tandem expected to fill the void with the free agent acquisition on the sidelines, Jacob Markstrom, let in three goals in under 10 minutes Tuesday night against San Jose.
The NHL Playoff formula can be confusing – the top three teams in each division make it automatically, plus the next two highest-placed finishers in the conference – but count on TSN and Sportsnet to keep you well-informed of who’s in and who’s out down the stretch.
The bottom line is this: there is one Canadian team with a legitimate shot at winning the Stanley Cup this year. One, out of seven.
More Canadian teams will likely miss the playoffs than make it and that includes those lovable laughable scamps in Toronto, who will be an astounding 1-for-10 in playoff appearances since the 2004-05 Lockout season.
Several years ago, when Canadian teams were moving to American markets and the government was thinking about stepping in to help what few NHL teams this country had left, those franchises could have gotten away with blaming the fledgling economy for their struggles. Now? That’s not going to fly. The dollar isn’t to blame. Poor talent evaluation and a lack of organizational stability and direction are the prime culprits.
To be fair, the NHL Entry Draft is the biggest crapshoot of the drafts in “The Big Four” – hockey, football, basketball and baseball – because teams are trying to project what an 18-year-old kid will develop into three, four, five years down the line.
That being said, Canadian teams have whiffed on the draft a lot over the last 20 years. While there are plenty of first-round misses from each team you can point to during that stretch, nothing illustrates the point better than the 2003 NHL Entry Draft.
Of the first 25 players selected, 15 have gone on to become All-Stars. Of the four Canadian teams that had selections in that “First 25,” two of them missed out on All-Stars.
There were 10 guys that didn’t make an All-Star team in their careers taken amongst the first 25 picks and Canadian teams landed two of them. Montreal (Andrei Kostitsyn, No. 10) and Edmonton (Marc-Antoine Pouliot, No. 22) missed the mark, the former passing on the likes of Jeff Carter, Brent Seabrook and Ryan Getzlaf, while Ryan Kesler (who went to Vancouver) and Mike Richards went with the next two picks following Pouliot.
And 2010-11 Hart Trophy winner Corey Perry went at No. 28 too.
Toronto didn’t have a first-round pick that year because they like to trade draft picks away, preferring instead to hand out bloated contracts to marginal talent.
Look at the teams that are in the hunt for the Cup this year – they’ve all been built through solid drafts and smart moves over an extended period of time. Even a team like the New York Rangers that has handed out some of the worst contracts in NHL history has managed to reboot and build a perennial Cup contender around a core comprised of players they drafted, a couple free agent signings that panned out and players acquired in quality trades.
Montreal is built around players they drafted and groomed – Andrei Markov, Tomas Plekanec, Carey Price, P.K. Subban, Max Pacioretty; the list goes on. They’ve augmented with a few trade acquisitions and free agent signings, but for the most part, they’ve scouted well, drafted well and stayed committed to their picks and now they’re seeing the results.
Calgary and Winnipeg appear heading in the same direction, while Ottawa is in the very early stages of a rebuild, having parted ways with Jason Spezza, one of the few remaining players from the team’s Stanley Cup Finals team, after last season. Toronto and Vancouver have quite a bit more work to do, but at least the Maple Leafs have acknowledged as much. The Canucks will realize the predicament they’re in soon enough too. Hopefully, this will lead to a full-blown Canadian renaissance – a period where all the teams from this country are in contention year in and year out. Until that happens, however, it appears the hopes of this country fittingly rest on the shoulders of the Montreal Canadiens.
Maybe the last Canadian team to win the Stanley Cup can be the next Canadian team to win the Stanley Cup too.
Let’s go Habs!
