The last nine teams to win the Stanley Cup have one thing in common and the 10th will, too.
It is a streak that is both surprising and illuminating, because it tells us something valuable about how to build a champion.
The common element is simply this: the last nine Cup winners all had a defenceman who was within four years of being nominated for the Norris trophy.
Bear in mind that there are only three nominees a year for the league’s best-defenceman award, and a great many of them are repeat contenders, so the chance of a 10-year overlap with Cup success is quite unlikely.
This year’s Cup finalists — the Pittsburgh Penguins and San Jose Sharks, who go at it starting Monday – will extend the trend.
San Jose have Brent Burns, who along with Drew Doughty of Los Angeles and Erik Karlsson of Ottawa is among this year’s Norris nominees.
Pittsburgh have Kris Letang, who was up for the prize in 2013.
Why is this streak occurring? Because no skater spends more time on the ice than a defenceman, and in the play-offs, coaches lean on their best blueliners even more than usual.
With elimination as the price of error, your best defenceman tired is better than your sixth-best defenceman refreshed.
Burns’s 25 minutes and five seconds of ice time per game is more than a minute and a half ahead of anyone else on San Jose. And Letang’s 28:46 is nearly eight minutes ahead of the next busiest Pittsburgh man who will be in the finals.
Trevor Daley, who had been in second place, broke an ankle in Game 4 of the semi-finals against Tampa Bay Lightning, a game during which Letang stepped up to play an unreal 31:38.
The Norris trend is also happening because there are no once-in-a-generation forwards out there lately.
Yes, Sidney Crosby is a regular-season powerhouse, when he is not injured, but his post-seasons have been uneven – to the point where this year’s success has a redemptive edge to it.
Over the past six weeks, Burns and Letang have been outstanding. Burns, a converted forward, leads all defencemen by a mile with 20 play-off points; next is Tampa Bay’s Victor Hedman at 14, with Letang at 10.
Letang is a better skater than Burns, which enables him to take risks on offence and then race back to cover on defence.
Letang does, however, take too many penalties — including a four-minute minor in Game 4 against Tampa that cost Pittsburgh a goal, in a game they ended up losing by a goal.
What these two have in common with all the best defenders is fluidity. They make hard plays seem easy.
Here is a Burns example from the semi-finals. He has the puck at the point. The St Louis defenceman kneels down in anticipation of a fearsome slap shot.
Instead Burns glides to the left, gets around the defender, fires the puck on net, and keeps skating until he is back at the point. The whole thing was one big, smooth circle. Very impressive.
Letang and Burns continue a tradition — the defenceman who dominates at both ends of the ice — that dates back to Eddie Shore with Boston circa 1930 and continues through Doug Harvey, Bobby Orr, Paul Coffey, Ray Bourque and Nicklas Lidstrom.
To be more exact, Letang and Burns are more in the mould of Shore, Orr and Coffey, inclined to take defensive risks to create offensive opportunities.
However in the final games of their semi-final series, both Letang and Burns showed an ability to adapt, reining in their offence to shore up the defence.
My hunch is that it will be Burns lifting the Cup this year. Not only does he fill a champion’s need for a dominant defenceman, but the team around him is at the peak of their powers and they know it.
San Jose have the look.
Their all-world power play unit – Joe Pavelski, Joe Thornton, Logan Couture, Patrick Marleau, and then Burns at the point — is, fittingly, like a shoal of sharks: constantly sniffing for weakness, suddenly striking from any angle.
San Jose’s 17 power play goals lead all teams in the play-offs, though Pittsburgh are not far behind with 15.
On defence, aside from Burns, the Sharks have Marc-Edouard Vlasic to shut down other teams’ stars, and Martin Jones has been solid in net in this his first play-off campaign.
Depth players such as Chris Tierney and Joel Ward have also been coming up big.
Pittsburgh and San Jose split their regular season matches: San Jose won 3-1 on November 21 and Pittsburgh won 5-1 on December 1. The latter was the Penguins’ first victory on San Jose ice in 18 years.
A San Jose title would be their first Cup and, oddly, the first time they ever have ended a season with a winning game.
Back before the play-offs, my pick for the Cup final was Washington Capitals over San Jose in six games. It is the less likely half of that duo that somehow has survived.
For Pittsburgh, with less depth on defence because of the injury to Daley, and with San Jose rampant, the road ends here.
Stanley Cup prediction: San Jose over Pittsburgh in seven.
Norris nominee within four years
2015 Chicago: Duncan Keith won the Norris in 2014
2014 LA: Drew Doughty was nominated last year and this year
2013 Chicago: Keith won in 2010 and 2014
2012 LA: Doughty was nominated last year and this year
2011 Boston: Zdeno Chara won in 2009 and was nominated in 2008, 2011, 2012 and 2014
2010 Chicago: Keith won in 2010 and 2014
2009 Pittsburgh: Kris Letang was nominated in 2013
2008 Detroit: Nicklas Lidstrom won in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2011 and was nominated in 2009
2007 Anaheim: Scott Niedermayer won in 2004 and was nominated in 2006 and 2007; Chris Pronger was nominated in 2004 and 2007
Follow us on Twitter @NatSportUAE
Like us on Facebook at facebook.com/TheNationalSport
