Canada dry: Country in danger of having no teams in NHL playoffs
Oh, no, Canada.
The country that prides itself on being the birthplace of hockey is facing the real possibility of a national embarrassment: If the season ended today – and less than two months remain – none of its NHL teams would qualify for the playoffs.
The last time that happened? Forty-six years ago.
In 1970, the last time the stars aligned in such a way, the 12-team NHL had only two franchises north of the border: the Montreal Canadiens and Toronto Maple Leafs, a pair of Original Sixers. Now there are seven Canadian franchises in a 30-team league that sends 16 to the playoffs each year.
What’s more, no Stanley Cup champion has hailed from Canada since the Canadiens in 1993. That 21-season drought – a lockout canceled the 2004-05 season – is the longest in NHL history.
Oh, there have been close calls: Four teams since then have come within one victory of winning a title, the Vancouver Canucks being the last in 2011. But considering Canadian teams own the four worst point totals in the Western Conference and three of the five worst in the East right now and, well, it doesn’t look like this is the year that drought will end with a sip from the Cup.
“For the psyche of people north of the border here it would be a kick in the derriere,” said Mike Zeisberger, a columnist for the Toronto Sun. “There is still this air or provincialism up here that it’s still our game.”
Not at the moment. A brief rundown:
How did it get so bad?
“They all arrived here by separate means,” said Bruce Arthur, a columnist for the Toronto Star. “Someone’s taking a bike. Someone’s taking a car and someone’s taking a streetcar. It is remarkable because they’re really bad. This is a lot of really bad teams at one time.”
American teams – albeit with plenty of Canadians – are taking advantage. Not having a Canadian presence in the playoffs could represent a problem for the league, which has a $5.232 billion deal – in Canadian dollars – over 12 years with Rogers Communications to broadcast games in Canada. That’s compared with a 10-year, $2 billion deal the league has with NBC.
“If you run a sports league that has 30 clubs, the situation in which seven specific clubs don’t make the playoffs is always a possibility,” NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly said. “Is it ideal that we won’t have representation in a Canadian market place? No. But I’m very comfortable letting the season play out and wherever the chips fall, they fall.”
Given how ardent Canadian fans can be, the potential loss of viewership could be a hard hit to the boards for the league. And it could be a check on pride for Canadians, though it depends on your perspective.
Some Canadian players said when they were young, if their team was eliminated or didn’t qualify for the postseason, they would root for other Canadian teams in the playoffs. Wild goaltender Devan Dubnyk remembered people cheering for the Flames when they advanced to the 2004 Stanley Cup Final before losing to the Lightning.
“You always had to swallow a pill for a little bit if it wasn’t your team and you didn’t want to admit it,” Dubnyk said. “But if you look at the runs that (the Flames, Canucks and Oilers) went on, you see everybody start to band together and root them on and it was a lot of fun being a part of it. It would be disappointing for Canadians if that didn’t happen, but it’s a tough league now.”
Avalanche center Matt Duchene recalled fans cheering for the Flames in 2004 but said it is not as if the country gets in a fervor for the last Canadian teams in the playoffs.
“If it was all Canadian players (on Canadian teams), it’d be different,” Duchene said. “But there’s so many American teams that have more Canadian players than some of the Canadian teams.”
Arthur said there isn’t much loyalty when it comes to other Canadian NHL teams. Fans in Canada, he said, are made up of “seven separate tribes – and they hate each other.”
“There’s probably some Canadians who will cheer for a Canadian NHL team, but I just feel that’s not how it’s built,” Arthur said. “It’s built to have rivalries. It’s built to hate the other guys.”
For proof of Canadian’s ambivalence, Arthur points to television ratings. When Canadians really care about a team – their Olympic team, for instance – the TV ratings skyrocket, as they did in 2010 when at least 80 percent of the country watched a portion of the gold-medal hockey game against the United States. The ratings for NHL playoff series just don’t add up.
“That is what it looks like when we rally around, we care and it matters,” Arthur said. “That’ll never happen with an NHL team. Not within a million miles.”
But ratings for the NHL will likely suffer without any Canadian presence in the playoffs. In last season’s first round, when five Canadian teams were participating, the ratings spiked. Sportsnet, which broadcasts NHL games in Canada, said first-round games last season were up 36 percent compared with 2014, when just one Canadian team – the Canadiens – was in the playoffs.
In other words, Canadians care about their favorite team, not necessarily their neighbors’.
“If they don’t make the playoffs, they don’t make the playoffs,” Dubnyk said. “You can’t just insert a Canadian team in there because you might want somebody to cheer for. If there’s seven teams in a 30-team league, I’d say it’s probably more surprising it hasn’t happened before. Odds are that it might happen once in a while.”
But it hasn’t in quite a while.