Now that the week of mourning is near its end, Canadians can begin to think about hockey again.
For a few days it was tough. The truth was no less dispiriting for having been inevitable: last Tuesday night , Montreal’s Game 6 elimination in Tampa ensured that, for a 21st successive season, no Canadian team would win the Stanley Cup.
Twenty. One. Seasons.
What are the chances of such a long drought?
The numbers: this year the National Hockey League has seven of its 30 franchises in Canada. That is about par for the course, with slight variations because of league expansion and the occasional franchise shifting cities.
The chance of a Canadian team not winning the Cup this year was roughly 1 in 1.3; the chance of the streak lasting, say, six years is one in 4.5.
But 21 benighted seasons?
The chance of that is one in 211.
What went wrong?
One idea commonly offered is that Canadians care about hockey way too much, thereby placing excessive pressure on their cities’ players, who suffocate under all that love.
But that is baloney. The American teams that have won the Cup have often been from cities with intense fans: Detroit has won four times since darkness fell upon the border. And can there have been more pressure on a team than the 1993/94 New York Rangers, who restored the Cup to a franchise that was regarded as cursed for not having won it since 1940?
Four other explanations for the total eclipse come to mind.
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1. Blame Toronto
The Maple Leafs have long been a dysfunctional franchise. Every now and then they tantalise with possibility, yet inevitably they find a way to lose. Their management has been awful. They traded away Tuukka Rask for Andrew Raycroft. They have been no help to Canada in its pursuit of the Cup.
2. The Crosby lottery
One of the worst things to happen to Canadian hockey was that in the 2003/04 season, five of the six Canadian teams made the play-offs. And then, after the 2004/05 season was lost to a strike, the league (head office: New York) decided that the top spot in the 2005 draft (first prize: Sidney Crosby) would be based on a lottery that diminished teams’ chances in proportion to their recent success at making the play-offs. To Canadians, that seemed pretty rigged in favour of the American squads. Pittsburgh won the lottery and took Crosby; in time the best player of the past 20 years brought his city a Stanley Cup parade. He could just as easily have done it in Canada.
3. Game of inches
Calgary had a chance to win the Cup on home ice against Tampa Bay in 2004. In the third period of Game 6, with the score tied, a puck went off the skate of Calgary forward Martin Gelinas and appeared to cross the goal line. Replays later showed that the puck did not entirely cross the line; it did so only partially, which is not enough to count as a score. Calgary, crestfallen, lost Game 7. Still, the Flames came thisclose to winning.
4. Just bad luck
The big picture is that the NHL has awarded the Stanley Cup 88 times and Canadian teams have won 41 times. In the long run the Canadian teams have captured more than their fair share of Cups. And besides, Team Canada have won three gold medals in Olympic men’s hockey since 2002, compared with a grand total of 0 (zero) for Team USA.
You win some, you lose some.
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