There always comes a time, around the second week of June, when the relaxing virtues of the scent of lilacs and the song of melodious vireos are no longer enough, I need something stronger. It’s Saturday night in northern America, and the magic of childhood memories takes me back to the family living room where we washed down our Yum Yum chips and chocolate bars with glasses of Coke or Seven Up while, on a screen that was nothing giant, our heroes dipped their forelocks in the champagne from the cup.
So it’s decided: I make a man of myself, I take out my credit card and I take my monthly package from TVA Sports, telling myself that my guilty pleasure is worth a meditation session, with Michel Therrien in the role of the guru with the low voice and hushed tone of a great Zen master.
I already knew the script : the team of gifted players, elegant skaters and natural scorers, against the goalie hot of the hour and his training “built for the series”. On the map, 28 degrees of latitude between the two arenas. Palm trees versus spruce trees.
But also, the best player in the world, Connor McDavid, who has spent the last nine years away from the spotlight, in the tundra, and who, at 27, finally finds himself in a position to seize the chance and drink the mud in the big trophy. No one wants to become the best-player-in-history-to-never-won-the-Stanley-Cup. 27 years old is the peak of a professional athlete’s development. Sidney Crosby won his first Cup at age 21; Gretzky had 23, Lemieux 25. Afterwards, the window begins to close…
So I had found my champion. A certain logic of greatness had to be respected. As I had passionately wished that Messi, in Qatar in 2022, would defeat the Blues to join Maradona in the Legend, I now wanted McDavid to become, without possible debate, the best of the best.
But venturing into the playoffs with a goalkeeper shaky in front of the net is never a good idea for serious Stanley aspiring players. Saturday night, the Oilers let the first puck aimed at him pass, then the first shot of the second period. It hurts your average efficiency. He had just allowed two goals on five shots…
He made up for it two days later by keeping his team in the game until the third period, but the big guns of the Oilers, far from taking advantage, found another way to lose by shooting on goal, during these forty minutes of play, a grand total of seven times!
I watched the puck drift across the Albertans’ power play, passing the puck back and forth, looking for the crack in the wall of red sweaters in front of them and waiting for the opportunity to take the perfect shot worthy of being among the best games of the week, and the wizard coach living room that I was stamping in his chair moaning: go ahead, shoot, good God! From any angle, jumping puck or ball in traffic, we don’t care: as soon as you see a piece of Bobrovski, stop thinking and tell me puck in that direction…
During these two games, I understood why Connor McDavid was the best player on the planet, but also why the Oilers will probably not bring the Cup back to Canada this year. Every time he touched the puck, extraordinary things happened, flights, feints, flips, brakes, laser passes. And this speed of penetration into the opposing zone, this calm knitting through the rows of sticks. He had the palette of an artist.
At the same time, in the rare space that he opened with his skates, he turned in circles. Imperturbable, the Panthers’ double coverage left him fluttering for a moment before closing in on him. From a spectacle point of view, the form of preventive defense that these Panthers practice creates a vaguely claustrophobic optical illusion that “Senator” Serge Savard, in an interview with Jean-Charles Lajoie, described as follows: “There is no more space on the ice rink. It’s like a rugby match…”
At the time when big Serge played, defending in hockey consisted of placing two strong guys at the blue line, who were sometimes allowed to advance forward to support the attack. And up front, the Lafleurs of this world had wings and Cournoyer wasn’t nicknamed the “Roadrunner” for nothing. Each team could also count on a trio playing a more defensive game. However, among the Panthers, the best defensive forward in the league plays on the first line. In fact, their philosophy amounts to aligning five defenders ready to convert into attackers as the opportunities arise.
And this is why the Stanley Cup will remain, once again this year, in the hands of a team whose fans chant “ USA! USA! » during the national anthems. But it’s also, in a way, because the wave pool in the largest shopping center in “Edmonotone” is incapable of competing with Miami Beach. As none other than Réjean Tremblay judiciously pointed out at the beginning of June, the fact that a club based in Florida finds itself in the Cup final for a fifth year in a row is perhaps not purely a coincidence. By the way, how do you assemble a “built for the playoffs” team?
Could it have something to do with the fact that nine out of ten humans love heat, but hate taxes? Rich hockey free agents don’t think otherwise. For them, landing on the edge of the Arctic under a “socialist” regime is as tempting as pushing horse droppings across a frozen pond with a twisted branch. In Gary “Call me Gary” Bettman’s NHL, we leave the folklore to the Canadians and keep the millions.