Edmonton Oilers captain Connor McDavid is stopped by Florida Panthers goalie Sergei Bobrovsky during Game 3 of the Stanley Cup final, in Edmonton, on June 13.Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
After losing the game and, more than likely, the series on Thursday night, the Edmonton Oilers were rambling about comebacks.
“We’ve showed that we can beat [Florida],” said head coach Kris Knoblauch, after not beating it even once all season long. “It’s not like we’re getting outplayed.”
One wonders what would constitute ‘outplayed’ in Knoblauch’s mind? Losing a doubleheader every night instead of just one game?
I get that he’s an employee and this is what he feels he has to say, but for the love of God, put a little wink in there. Something that tells the rest of us that you’re in on the joke.
I’m still waiting for the hockey coach willing to lay their own head across the tree stump and say something wild. Guarantee a win. Call out one of your stars.
Something, anything, to get people whipped up. But not in hockey. This is show business run by tax lawyers.
It’s getting late to talk about possibilities here. The Oilers are halfway into the wood chipper.
Another Stanley Cup final is headed down the tubes for the NHL.
This one hurts more than usual because it isn’t an institutional letdown. It’s a Canadian one.
The few ratings numbers that have been released haven’t been great. They’re up in Canada, but not up in a way that suggests the Oilers have captivated any non-sports obsessives. According to the NHL, seven million people across North America watched Game 1.
When the Toronto Raptors were rolling to the 2019 NBA championship, the nightly number crested eight million. And that was just in Canada.
“Our game?” Yes, we’re still the best at it, but we don’t care the way we used to.
Early in the week, Léger released a poll after asking Canadians and Americans if they intended to follow the Edmonton-Florida series.
The headline was that a majority in this country – 58 per cent – were not paying much or any attention. This was reported in Canadian outlets in the same way tractor production used to make the third page of Pravda – as an obligation, not a prompt for conversation. Nobody talked about nobody caring.
The number that stopped me was the claimed percentage of Americans following the Stanley Cup final – 27 per cent.
So you’re telling me that a quarter of the United States – roughly 85 million people – are interested, but only three million or so are watching? I call shenanigans on that one.
This is one of those questions people answer with, “Hockey? Uh. Sure. I care a little,” while not even knowing to a certainty that Florida has a team. It’s something you say to sound interesting.
If that effect is at work in the United States, how amplified must it be in this country? There is still some pressure here to claim to like the Stanley Cup. Not because it’s good, or because you’ll watch, but because it’s all we’ve got.
If Canada doesn’t have hockey, what do we have? What is our cultural export?
Don’t start rhyming off Canadian-born artists and performers. None of these people live here. The good ones left as soon as they could. The only star who stayed is Margaret Atwood, who we should surround with a phalanx of Mounties. If something happens to her, we’ve got nothing.
People around the world are only familiar with America Jr. up here because we’re wearing skates. Other than that, forget it.
With that in mind, we took the trouble to brand hockey with our collective personality. It was a game of elaborate manners played by soft-spoken rural types who, once loosed on the field of play, were honest-to-God trying to kill each other.
Other sports claim to be vicious. Hockey was the only one in which participants routinely lost half their teeth.
You go through the scanty representations of hockey in popular culture – Slap Shot to the Gordie Howe Simpsons episode to Shoresy – and they all share a narrative prop: “Canadians are so nice, so why is hockey so gruesome?”
There is a consensus that removing violence improved the quality of the game. But it left it without an identity.
What is hockey to us now? The ratings would suggest that it has become a purely local concern. If your team is in, great. If not, on to the next.
People in Ottawa (or Toronto or Winnipeg or wherever) don’t watch the NHL. They watch the Senators. This is the difference between a league that is growing and one in decline.
Big picture in this country, hockey has become something we consider rather than enjoy. What does it say about us? Why don’t we win at it? Is its culture poisonous? It’s a talking point, not a rallying one.
The divide between what hockey was (a prismatic expression of Canadianness) and what it is (a flagging business struggling to engage its customer base) is most obvious during a Stanley Cup final.
No one has to love either of the teams involved, but if a plurality of Canadians can’t even be bothered to tell a fib and say they have a passing interest, that’s worse than bad news. That means whatever nostalgic hold the game had on our national imagination is in the midst of being let go.
Next to Canada, the loser in this trend is the NHL. Without Canada, it is Major League Soccer.
So what does the league and all of those in its employ do? They keep running out the same dreary show to less and less interest. Same bland quotes. Same bored expressions. Not one fighting word – never mind any fighting – to be found.
Maybe they’re waiting for some magic formula – a Toronto versus Edmonton final? – to come along and save them.
None of this is an existential issue. Hockey in Canada is never going away. There’s too much infrastructure built up around it. But it can stop mattering. That warning signal is flashing now.
If you can’t get Canadians up for a series featuring the greatest player in the world, who is Canadian, and plays in Canada, then I don’t know what to suggest. Maybe they should start with a poll.