THere’s a question looming over the Edmonton Oilers as they begin Saturday night’s Stanley Cup Final against the Florida Panthers. It has been more than thirty years since a Canadian team, the Montreal Canadiens, lifted the Cup. The question is: If the Oilers don’t bring the Cup to Canada, does it matter? If American teams claim the Cup forever, can Canada at least still claim the soul of hockey? The answer is complicated.
Let’s go back to another Oilers era. In August 1988, Wayne Gretzky left the Oilers, a team with which he had won four Stanley Cups in five seasons. It was a heartbreaking exit. Gretzky famously cried during the press conference to announce his departure. And indeed, it felt to many as if something more profound had changed than Gretzky’s move from zip code to zip code. The deal – he was traded to the Los Angeles Kings – wasn’t just huge in terms of dollar value and player numbers. It was huge for the sport. Gretzky was a superstar, and his arrival in the US – in Los Angeles, no less – launched him into the sporting stratosphere. alongside Michael Jordan and Bo Jackson. Kings owner Bruce McNall a tour by the team traveled across the US during Greztky’s first pre-season with the team, hitting unconventional places: Phoenix, Dallas, Las Vegas. They were greeted by sold-out crowds at each one. Suddenly hockey was big. Bigger than it had ever been. Hockey had made it in America.
A few years later, Gary Bettman, an American – a basketball man, no less – came in as the new commissioner of the NHL. It was 1993, the year the Canadiens would win the Cup, marking the end of Canadian victories for three decades. In November, NHL referees went on strike and Bettman quickly embodied a role he still fills for many Canadians. “What’s particularly chilling for many is that Bettman’s style could be a sign of what’s to come in the NHL,” Mary Ormsby wrote in the Toronto Star that month. “The big, heavy foot of American influence is just the beginning of change in what was essentially a Canadian game.” There were already new teams in San Jose, Tampa and Anaheim. Two years after Bettman’s arrival, the Winnipeg Jets left for Arizona. The following season the Quebec Nordiques went to Colorado. Before the decade was out, there were teams in Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Texas.
Back up north, the teams that had not yet left Canada were broke and in danger of leaving. In 1998, Edmonton arrived within hours of the Oilers’ loss. The Ottawa Senators also teetered on the edge in 1999 when then-owner Rod Bryden wanted to sell (to Portland, Vegas or perhaps Houston). And there seemed to be little sympathy from the NHL and its owners. In September 1999, the league and its owners said they would commit to keeping the teams in Canada — but only if they got tax credits or if the NHL could take some of the hockey betting revenue from provincial sports lotteries. The Canadian Federal Government came throughbut a year later the Calgary Flames were still there begging to sell 14,000 season tickets to keep the team in town. Things changed after the new collective bargaining agreement was signed after the 2004-2005 lockout. A hard salary cap was put in place and coincidentally, commodity prices rose, boosting the Canadian dollar. The tax issue is still a problem. But today it has turned into concern about the lower, or non-existent, US state taxes pursuing the best players away from the high-tax Canadian markets. How else do you explain that Florida has sent its two teams to the Cup finals five years in a row, and Canada has only sent one in that span?
Yes, Canadian teams did have their chances. Just four years after the Flames almost left, they were in the cup finals. But they lost to Tampa Bay. A year after the full-season lockout, the Oilers reached the Finals but lost to Carolina. The next year the Senators got there, but lost to Anaheim. Montreal reached the finals in the Covid bubble year of 2021. They also lost to Tampa Bay. You see the pattern: Canadian teams lose to expansion teams in southern US states. The only break was 2011: Vancouver’s loss to Boston. But the relatively northern location of that American city offered little comfort.
And every failure has fueled existentialism. If a Canadian team doesn’t win the biggest trophy in hockey, is hockey still Canadian? If hockey isn’t Canadian, then what is Canada? Because, like it or not, an inordinate amount of Canadian identity has been wrapped up in this game since Confederation. Its icy outdoor beginnings, its rugged physicality and its central location in so many communities have all combined to create an avatar for national identity in a country that has struggled for generations to define itself against its hulking, powerful southern neighbor. If there was one thing that wasn’t American, it was hockey. At least until Wayne left.
But all that time in pain is wasted. These questions about the soul of hockey residing somewhere will never lead to clarity on why it’s still important to watch, no matter which team wins – or which city they come from. It is not the nationality of hockey that matters, but its nature. And the nature of hockey today is the same as it was when those guys at McGill University developed the game in the 1870s, taking over from the tumultuous, disorderly, playful versions that had been around for a hundred years or more. frozen ponds across the road from the nineteenth century. Canada. The soul of hockey is not in geography; the soul is deep in the inherent chaos, the fundamental unpredictability which still lives on in the game today.
Take the Oilers, for example. A year after Gretzky left, the Oilers started the 1989-90 season in the dumps. Last place in the Smythe division at the end of October. Only 16 points during the first month. And without their first Cup-winning goaltender, Grant Fuhr, they relied on “promising but unproven” (as one pre-season scouting report put it), Bill Ranford. Oilers head coach John Muckler was not optimistic. “The Oiler dynasty ended a year ago,” Muckler had said after an early-season game in Buffalo. “We are now in a major phase of reconstruction.” Later that week, the Oilers began what would become a 15-3-2 run. The following May, they won the franchise’s fifth Stanley Cup – and Ranford took home the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP.
This year, many believed the Oilers could compete for the Cup, but a month into the season that was far from certain. They were second to last in the Pacific division. Their power play was terrible, their goaltending was even worse. And McDavid scored just two goals in all of October. “That’s not what we expected at all,” McDavid told reporters about the start at the beginning of November. But, he added, the team was capable of great things. “It may not seem like it right now, but we are. Everyone has more to give. Myself included.” Three days later, the Oilers began a run of 27 wins in 33 games. Now there they are, at the Final. If they don’t win, what does that mean? It means nothing about Canada, but a lot about hockey.
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“Hockey is hard,” Dallas forward Tyler Seguin said last week, after the Oilers eliminated the Stars in the Western Conference finals. “You need a lot to work well. ….We had something special [and] lost to a team we thought we could beat. Sometimes those are play-offs. Sometimes it’s that one bounce, one goal, one save. That’s why we all love it. This is the most difficult trophy in the world to win.”
That’s hockey. You just never know what will happen.