There’s a question hanging over the Edmonton Oilers as they begin Saturday night’s Stanley Cup Final against the Florida Panthers. It has been more than 30 years since a Canadian team, the Montreal Canadiens, lifted the Cup. The question is, if the Oilers don’t take the Cup to Canada, will it matter? If American teams forever claim the Cup, can Canada still claim the soul of hockey? The answer is complicated.
Let’s go back – to a different era of the Oilers. In August 1988, Wayne Gretzky left the Oilers, the team with which he won four Stanley Cups in five seasons. It was a harrowing exit. Gretzky famous cried during the press conference to announce his departure. And indeed, to many it seemed as if something deeper 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 number of players. 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, next to Michael Jordan and Bo Jackson. Kings owner Bruce McNall visited the team across the US during Greztky’s first preseason with the team, hitting then-unconventional locations: Phoenix, Dallas, Las Vegas. In each of them they were welcomed by a sold-out crowd. Suddenly, hockey was big. Bigger than ever. Hockey was successful in America.
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A few years later, Gary Bettman, an American – a basketball guy no less – appeared as the new commissioner of the NHL. It was 1993, the year the Canadiens would win the Cup, marking the end of Canadian victories in three decades. In November of that year, NHL referees went on strike and Bettman quickly stepped into a role he still plays for many Canadians. “What’s particularly galling to many is that Bettman’s style may be a sign of things to come in the NHL,” Mary Ormsby wrote in the Toronto Star that month. “The big, heavy American influence is just the beginning of the change in what was essentially a Canadian game.” There were already new teams in San Jose, Tampa and Anaheim. Two years after Bettman arrived, 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.
In the north, teams that had not yet left Canada were bankrupt and threatening to leave. In 1998, Edmonton arrived in a few hours of losing the Oilers. The Ottawa Senators were also on the brink in 1999 when then-owner Rod Bryden was looking 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 owners said they would commit to keeping teams in Canada – but only if they obtained tax benefits or if the NHL could receive a share of hockey betting revenue from provincial sports lotteries. The Canadian federal government came throughbut a year later the Calgary Flames were still begging sell 14,000 season tickets to keep the team in town. Things changed after the new collective bargaining agreement was signed after the lockout in 2004-05. A hard salary cap was introduced and, coincidentally, commodity prices soared, boosting the Canadian dollar. The tax issue is still a problem. But nowadays, this has turned into concern that the US is lower or non-existent. state taxes court the best players away from high-tax Canadian markets. How else do you explain that Florida has sent both of its teams to the World Cup finals five years in a row, and Canada has only sent one in that span, huh?
Yes, the Canadian teams really had their chances. Just four years after the Flames almost left, they were in the Cup final. But they lost to Tampa Bay. A year after the season-long lockout, the Oilers reached the finals but lost to Carolina. The following year, the Senators got there – only to lose 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 losing to expansion teams in the southern US states. The only break was in 2011 – Vancouver’s defeat to Boston. But the relatively northern position of that US city was not very reassuring.
And each failure awakened existentialism. If a Canadian team isn’t winning hockey’s biggest trophy, is hockey still Canadian? If hockey isn’t Canadian, what is Canada? Because, like it or not, an enormous proportion of Canada’s identity since its confederation has been implicated in this game. Its frigid outdoor beginnings, its rugged physicality and its centrality to so many communities have combined into an avatar for national identity in a country that for generations has struggled to define itself against its huge and powerful neighbor to the south. If anything was un-American, it was hockey. At least until Wayne leaves.
But all that agonizing time was wasted. These questions about the soul of hockey residing anywhere will never lead to clarity about why it’s still important to watch, no matter which team wins — or what city they’re from. It is not the nationality of hockey that matters, but its nature. And the nature of hockey is the same as it was when those McGill University kids developed the game in the 1870s, adapting it from the rowdy, rowdy, fun versions that existed perhaps a hundred years or more ago on frozen lakes on the other side. Canada. The soul of hockey is not based on geography, its soul is deeply embedded in its inherent chaos, the fundamental foundation unpredictability that still lives on in the game today.
Take the Oilers, for example. A year after Gretzky’s departure, the Oilers started the 1989-90 season in the doldrums. Last place in the Smythe division at the end of October. Only 16 points in the first month. And without their starting Cup goaltender, Grant Fuhr, they relied on “promising but unproven” (as one preseason scouting report put it), Bill Ranford. Oilers coach John Muckler was not optimistic. “The Oiler dynasty ended a year ago,” Muckler said after an early-season game in Buffalo. “We’re in a big rebuilding stage right now.” Later that week, the Oilers went on what would be 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 placed second to last in the Pacific division. Their power play was terrible, their goalie defense was worse. And McDavid scored just two goals in the entire month of October. “This was not at all what we expected,” McDavid told reporters in early November about the start. But, he added, the team was capable of great things. “It may not seem that way now, but we are. Everyone has more to give. Me included.” Three days later, the Oilers began what would be a 27-game winning streak in 33 games. Now, here they are, in the final. If they don’t win, what does that mean? It means nothing about Canada, but a lot about hockey.
“Hockey is tough,” said Dallas forward Tyler Seguin said last week, after the Oilers eliminated the Stars in the Western Conference finals. “You need a lot of things to work out. ….We had something special [and] we lost to a team we thought we could beat. Sometimes it’s playoffs. Sometimes it’s that jump, a goal, a save. That’s why we all love it. This is the hardest trophy to win in the world.”
This is hockey. You never know what will happen.
