Here they come
Usually hockey players come with mullets, missing teeth, bad suits, looking like they haven’t seen the sun in a few years. And while the latter is certainly true here, McDavid and Leon Draisaitl actually look pretty good. Although the German could do with some socks, no?
Bonjur Hi!
Well here we are, at the mountain top of North American sport, a Game 7 to decide a season. This is the absolute best we can do over here. That’s right: not even a Super Bowl, with all it’s pomp, circumstance and juiced up capitalist spectacle, regardless of the match-up, can match a Game 7. And the reason for that is we know the Super Bowl is coming. We know it’s going to happen. We plan for it. We create adverts for it, months, and sometimes years in advance. If it’s February, we know we’re going to get the big show, the massive ratings, the chicken wings, the weight gain, the hangover.
But we never know when we’re going to get a Game 7 for all the rings. Sure, we know there’s always chance, but where, when and how takes time to present itself, and then sometimes those chances just go poof, into dust. And if you don’t buy what I’m selling, just consider this: we haven’t had a Game 7 to decide a championship here in North America since before the pandemic. And that’s kind of a long time ago already, is it not?
So no, we never know when it’s coming. After all, it was just a few days ago that the Florida Panthers were rollicking along with a 3-0 Stanley Cup Finals lead over the Edmonton Oliers. It was only a matter of time before a boozed-up team from the Everglades started chucking the old cup around a rooftop pool at a post-playoff bash, somewhere around the southern extremes of the Sunshine State.
Except it didn’t quite happen that way. The Oilers, suffocated by Florida, figured out a way to breathe oxygen back into their dying season.
We didn’t see it coming, or at least I didn’t see it coming. That’s because Edmonton, a team that had averaged over 3.5 goals a game this season, a team that saw the best player on the planet Connor McDavid, and Leon Draisaitl, one of the best players on the planet, combine for 238 regular season points, managed just four goals in the first three games. The Oilers were just smothered by Florida, like the New York Rangers, who the Panthers slowly and meticulously choked out of the playoffs a round earlier.
Then suddenly, goals flooded the ice. Eight in Game 4. Five in Game 5. Then five more in Game 6. Lamps were lit over and over and over and over, and Florida, who had looked totally unsolvable, whose goalie, Sergei Bobrovsky, seemed completely unbreakable, suddenly found themselves exactly where they didn’t want to be. Game 7.
But their plight is our delight. We get to follow what is arguably the most anticipated hockey game of the century.
Only one team has overcome a 3-0 series deficit in the Stanley Cup finals and it was over 80 years ago: well before helmets, before glass, but just after chicken wire lined the boards. A long, long time ago, and these days, it simply doesn’t happen. Tonight, it might.
Stick with us, more to come!
David will be here shortly. In the meantime, here’s Colin Horgan on tonight’s game:
No NHL team has come back from 3-0 down to win a Stanley Cup Final since the Toronto Maple Leafs did it against the Detroit Red Wings in April 1942. Now, 82 years later, the Edmonton Oilers may change that history. On Monday night on the edge of the Everglades, the Oilers will face off against the Florida Panthers in Game 7 and try to win their fourth straight to take the Cup and become the first Canadian NHL champions since the Montreal Canadiens in 1993. If it goes the Oilers’ way, the game will most likely be crowned one of the NHL’s all-time best – or at least one of the most memorable in league history. And the Oilers captain, a generational talent, will have come back to where his career with the team began.
26 June 2015 was a Friday and there was a buzz in the BT&T Center in Sunrise, Florida, home (still, under a different name) of the Panthers. It was NHL draft night, and the assumed No 1 pick was an 18-year-old from north of Toronto who’d lit up the Ontario Hockey League for three years and led Canada to a World Junior Championship the previous winter. Connor McDavid had been playing on another level his entire life, allowed to skate at age six with the nine-year olds and granted “exceptional status” to enter the OHL at age 15, a year early, where he became the most decorated player in the league’s history.
The Oilers were, on the other hand, coming off another dismal season. They’d finished second-last in the Western Conference. By 2015, the Oilers had become something of a perennial joke at the draft. The team picked first overall in 2010, 2011, and 2012, seventh overall in 2013, then third overall again in 2013 – each one a reflection of Edmonton’s poor performance. No matter how many top draft picks the Oilers added to the roster, they found themselves back at or near the bottom of the league over and over again. But then, here was McDavid. Could he finally be the answer?
“I think my expectations exceed any of those that anyone else puts on me,” McDavid told the Globe and Mail after the Oilers selected him first overall. “I just have to make sure I am playing my game. If I meet my expectations, the chances are I will meet everybody else’s as well.”
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