Florida Panthers right wing Vladimir Tarasenko celebrates after scoring during the third period of Game 6 against the New York Rangers in the Eastern Conference finals of the NHL hockey Stanley Cup playoffs on June 1, in Sunrise, Fla.Lynne Sladky/The Associated Press
The Tampa Bay Lightning brought big-time hockey to Florida in 1992.
They played their first game in a fairgrounds. It wasn’t shown on TV because the club was in a scrap with its broadcast partner.
The 10,000 who did see it weren’t entirely clear on what was going on. According to contemporary reports, they cheered in all the wrong places.
One guy did get it right. When journeyman Chris Kontos scored his third goal for Tampa in that home opener, a single fan stood up and threw his hat on the ice. Security tried to throw him out of the building.
It’s a ways from that sideshow to what the place represents now. If this country is the cradle of the hockey, Florida is where it has chosen to live now that it’s grown up and moved out.
This year’s iteration of the Florida Panthers represent the seventh Stanley Cup finalist from that state in this century.
Second place: California and Pennsylvania (five each).
Third: New Jersey (four).
Just barely showing at the tail end of the pack – B.C., Quebec and Ontario (one each).
Making a couple, three finals could be a fluke. Making nearly a third of them between two franchises is a trend.
Florida’s secret sauce is Canadians (plus Russians, Finns and Swedes). The roster backbone of all seven of those finals teams is imported.
It’s not like either club has a secret pipeline. The best Lightning and Panthers teams were built through the draft (Steven Stamkos, Victor Hedman, etc.) or cunning acquisition (Matthew Tkachuk, Dave Andreychuk, etc.). Florida is better because it is smarter.
That’s the end of the advantages Canadian teams can copy. The rest of them are down to the fact that Florida is the anti-Canada.
First – and it is always first, second and third in the minds of pro athletes – is the money. Florida has no state income tax. A player who makes US$5-million in Sunrise brings home about a half-million dollars more than a player who makes the same amount in Ottawa.
Viewed through this lens, the Maple Leafs don’t overpay for players because they are careless. They do it because they are careless and they have to.
While the Canada Revenue Agency’s ongoing tussle with Toronto captain John Tavares over a signing bonus is perfectly correct, it will also be burned into the brain of every future free agent. Canada is where your money goes to die.
In a recent anonymous poll of NHL players, The Athletic asked which was their least favourite road trip. A significant plurality (42 per cent) picked Winnipeg.
“I don’t have anything against the people or the city,” one player said. ”It’s always so cold.”
It’s become a cliché that a certain sort of hockey player hates the cold, ergo he must hate his own country. After leaning on it as a punchline throughout the 1990s, NHLers learned to stop talking about it.
But they can’t help telling on themselves. For the first year he was with the Panthers, Tkachuk was incapable of giving an interview about his new home wherein the weather didn’t come up about a hundred times. He framed it as ‘I didn’t just come here because of the weather,’ which is a way of saying you went there for the weather.
The least quantifiable, most impactful difference, is pressure.
Former Panthers defender Radko Gudas once quantified it thusly: “You know you’re putting your flip-flops on and you don’t have to worry about a cold car. And I would say you don’t think as much about hockey as you would in a colder market. You’re able to free your mind more.”
Memo for the Calgary and Ottawa – install transmission heaters in team parking lot; hand out copies of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
The main front-page art on Thursday’s Edmonton Journal was a guy who got the Stanley Cup tattooed on his back as part of a radio contest. In Fort Lauderdale’s Sun Sentinel, it was a 100-year-old D-Day veteran who’s getting married in Normandy.
Same world, different realities.
The NHL is a league of two solitudes. About a third of its markets are compulsively obsessed with the product. Another third could take it or leave it.
This gives the NHLers a unique choice. For X amount of money, would you like to be recognized and stared at like a zoo animal wherever you go? Or for slightly more, would you like to get all the perks of fame, but still blend in?
Some athletes in some sports seem to thrive on pressure. They seek it out by insisting on joining the biggest teams in the biggest markets.
Not hockey players. No genus of athlete talks about pressure more. No cohort of pros is less inclined to push for the chance to play under the brightest lights.
A great soccer player who doesn’t want to end up at Real Madrid is as unthinkable as an established hockey star who tries to force his way onto the Montreal Canadiens. Hockey is in part defined by the pursuit of optimal work-life balance.
It’s hard to imagine the quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys going on a rant about how local writers don’t respect him or fans don’t get how hard it is. Too many people would laugh at him. It is a regular feature of hockey in Canada, and everybody thinks it’s totally normal.
Mitch Marner’s “we’re looked upon as kind of Gods” comment cuts two ways. Nothing is more disappointing than a higher power that doesn’t answer prayers. This has created a love-hate spiral between Canadian teams and their fans.
There is no way to measure any of this. The proof is in the results.
Five Canadian teams have made six finals since 2000. The Lightning have made five. If you made your living recruiting for NHL teams, which of them would you rather sell? If a Canadian fix is being contemplated, it’s simple. Rewrite the tax code and rewire our cradle-to-grave state. Encourage global warming. Care much less about the only cultural product that still draws a cross-country audience.
Easy-to-start cars, carefree minds and hockey dominance should follow.