Missed Opportunities: The Stanley Cup Story (Part I)

 "What a horrible day for Canada and, therefore, the rest of the world."--South Park, Royal Pudding

Wednesday night's Game 7 Stanley Cup blowout might go down in history as the most disappointing Game 7 in recent memory.

It wasn't a terrible game, really.  Boston played magnificently, and they thorougly deserved the Cup, and the glory that came with their come-from-behind Series win.  Roberto Luongo's heroic effort to keep his team from getting completely wiped off the table was memorable.  It was a good game.  But hockey needed it to be great, and it just wasn't.

Have there been worse Game 7s?  Absolutely.  I can't remember any specifically--but that's kind of the point.  Five years from now, will anyone outside of Boston or Vancouver remember this game?  I doubt it, I really do.  Which is a shame, because this was hockey's chance to make a comeback in the public eye.

We now know that the late '90s was more of an error than an era for the NHL.  We now know that the league probably shouldn't have followed the tech company model of the era and overexpanded to the brink of collapse.  We now know that New Jersey's awful neutral-zone trap, while successful at the time, made one of the most compelling, beautiful games we have into an unwatchable pile of slop.  We now know that, given two players who are identical, American and Canadian fans would rather root for the guy named Steve or Paul than the one named Nikolai or Sergei.

The league bottomed out with the lockout and the cancelled season.  Since then, it has done a fantastic job of staging a comeback.  In fact, one of my all-time favorite sports memories came in the spring of 2008--as a giddy 19-year-old, I was already giddy enough at the thought of my first chance since my dad was in my life to watch a game in a bar (I happened to know one of the bartenders at a place in the area that night).  The game that night was Game 5 of the '08 Stanley Cup Final--and the Pittsburgh Penguins (my favorite team as a child) pulled out a three-overtime epic over the Detroit Red Wings, thanks in large part to a spectacular 50-save performance by Marc-Andre Fleury.  I was back at that point.  But the rest of the country has not followed.

(Side note: you're probably wondering to yourself right now "self, why the hell did he become a Penguins fan living in Wisconsin?  Well, as a child I played a lot of NHL '94 on the Sega Genesis.  In that game, Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr were a tour de force.  But the real secret to my love for the Pens was a goonish defenseman named Ulf Samuelsson, best known for crippling Cam Neely.  In that game, Ulf was a wrecking ball.  Me and him as a team were good for at least one injured opponent a game.  I fell for the Penguins and never looked back.  My preference for European soccer was decided similarly--Didier Drogba was a goal-scoring machine for me in Winning Eleven 9, so my first foray into the sport was as a Chelsea fan.  In a related story, my girlfriend is convinced I'm a nerd.  I'm not entirely sure she's that far off.  But at any rate, the captain has turned on the "No Babbling" sign, so back to the topic at hand.)

Much of the blame for the lethargic pace of the comeback can be placed squarely with ESPN and, more specifically, SportsCenter.  You see, ESPN does not have a TV contract with the NHL.  Therefore, SportsCenter spent countless hours this week dissecting LeBron James after the fact, and dedicated maybe five minutes a night to Stanly Cup coverage.  Not that SportsCenter has had any integrity to speak of for years, but it's still a shameful freeze-out.

The game of hockey still has potential for a comeback.  A new generation of stars has the league deeper in talent than it has been since the heyday of the Gretzky-Lemieux-Messier era.  The dawn of HDTV benefits hockey to a greater extent than any other sport--now, you can watch games on TV and be aware of what's going on at all times, as opposed to squinting at the fuzzy black puck that will occasionally disappear from view completely.  The neutral zone trap has been neutered, the comically oversized goalie pads have been ix-nayed, and ties have been taken out of the equation.  All of these changes point to a far more entertaining product.  And the game still has its ace up the sleeve--namely, that there is no event in all of sports more exciting than playoff overtime hockey.

An exciting Game 7, with the nation's eyes focused in, would have been a crucial win for the game.  Hell, we didn't even need overtime--though it would've been fantastic.  A finish like the clinching Game 6 of the 2008 Cup final would've been more than sufficient to win the hearts and minds of America.

(Three years later, and this clip STILL kills me.  If Marian Hossa manages to knock in the tying rebound with .01 seconds left, I will bet my life that Pittsburgh comes back to win that series.  Game 5 went to overtime with Max Talbot scoring the GTG with 35 seconds left in regulation as his teams net sat empty at the other end of the ice.  Three overtimes and a Fleury of saves later , Petr Sykora banged home the walk-off goal--that he had called in an in-game interview, no less.  After that, to piss away a 2-goal lead in 1:30, then blow the game in OT again?  There's no way Detroit bounces back for Game 7.  NO WAY.  That would've gone down as a textbook Dead Man Walking game.  That it didn't remains one of my greatest regrets as a sports fan.  I'm getting queasy.  Let's move on.)

But we didn't get that.  Instead, we got a fired-up Bruins team laying the smackdown on a set of overmatched Canadians.  We got a game that was over by the second intermission.  And we got the most memorable part of the series, which I wish could be the most forgettable.  The scenes of Vancouver fans rioting in the streets, as the rest of hockey fandom collectively facepalmed.  Thanks, assholes.  You just set the game back at least 5 years.  The rest of us deal with losing like adults--we go home and get even drunker.  We don't go out and burn the city.  That shit went out of style decades ago.

Will hockey bounce back to it's pre-expansion levels of popularity?  Time will tell.  I'd like to think it will.  But the one thing we do know is that it had a golden opportunity Wednesday night, and just couldn't solve the goalie.

Part II coming later today.