Is the QMJHL a good league? Q teams have won 4 Memorial Cup tourneys in a row, and 7 out of 11... alors, vous me dites.
Bon lundi matin! Les sujets du jour include the Québec Remparts rolling to the Memorial Cup, a safety suggestion to rile baseball fans, and a desperate attempt to make a new basketball term.
Patrick Roy has always had that dog in him, and now it is like he, and many other influencers, have turned an entire league into a wolfpack.
Each Memorial Cup tournament is its own entity with undercurrents that flow into comparisons about previous years. Macro-theorizing about why teams from one league win — four in a row for teams from the Q! — while teams from another do not — take the L, WHL! — is a fool’s errand. No one at any time in human athletic history has ever known what really goes on in the headspaces of teenage and young-adult athletes. And a rule of thumb in any uniquely Canadian realm of sport is that almost all bets are off when teams venture outside of their region to play a national tournament.
Nevertheless, duty calls when pro-format hockey history is made, eh?
The Roy-coached Québec Remparts won the Memorial Cup by defeating the Seattle Thunderbirds 5-0 on Sunday. It meant that Québec league (QMJHL) teams have won ‘the Memmer’ four times in a row, and seven out of the last 11 times dating to 2011. No league between the Québec, Ontario (OHL) and Western (WHL) circuits had produced more than three consecutive champs in the half-century history of the tournament format, which was created in 1972.1
Seattle came into the tournament with all the hype, as the NHL prospects-laden champion from the host Western league. Some of it came from a widely circulated tweet from a prominent commentator relating that the Thunderbirds seemed almost capable of hanging in against a grown-ass-man minor-pro team.
Across two games against the Remparts, though, Seattle could not produce a single 5v5 goal.2 The Remparts’ lineup has plenty of future-NHLer fodder, with the likes of Anaheim first-rounder Nathan Gaucher and tournament MVP Jordan Malatesta, who now has to contend with being a 20-year-old rookie trying to impress Mike Babcock with the Columbus Blue Jackets. (That is not exactly an “I’m going to Disneyland” payoff.)
It seems like quite a sports conundrum. The QMJHL, in eight of the last 10 NHL drafts, has had fewer players selected than both the OHL and WHL. It never has more draft picks than either of its Canadian counterparts. Yet its teams are the ones lifting the trophy, which can involve winning four playoff series and a short tournament, more often than not recently.
I cannot say why that is. I am more for popping the thought bubbles that appear on Twitter every year at Memorial Cup time. Supposedly, the QMJHL punches above its weight at the Memorial Cup due to a greater willingness among the general managers to let the contenders load up with stars in those deadline deals that go down just after Christmas. But those big deals happen in the other leagues, too. The Winnipeg Ice anted four players and three first-round selections in January to add Zach Ostapchuk, all so they could be the WHL runners-up.
Could it just be that the QMJHL is just as good if not better a league than the other two? No way. Too straightforward. Reductionist, even. Imagine!
It might never have the most NHL draft choices among the three Canadian leagues in any year. But focusing on draft choices ignores that the QMJHL, OHL, and WHL are comprised of actual teams with coaching staffs and organizational cultures that instill the will to win. And they have fans who really care whether the team wins, not just whether the 50-goal scorer fulfills his pro potential. It is not just something that exists in service of the NHL.
There are probably more ingredients in the Q’s secret sauce than posting length limits will allow. The success of the league, with its player pool of Québécois, Maritimers and the occasional OHL castoff, deserves top billing, though.
A few folk theories seem worth highlighting:
Repping your region and a small city probably does matter more in those regions with no major pro teams outside of Montréal. It helps with the buy-in. That extends across the entire QMJHL. People out there care.
In the first 24 years of the tournament era, no Québec-based team won the Memorial Cup. The Cornwall Royals (1972, ’80-81) accounted for the league’s only titles over that span. Expansion into the Maritimes began in 1994. The province’s drought ended in ’96, and by 2011, the Saint John Sea Dogs had brought a title to the Maritimes. Two underdog regions forming some super frenemies. Lovely!We should put to rest any notions about differences in youth hockey across so-called Canada.
It is a business everywhere. It is way too expensive everywhere. Almost any metro area can nurture a Next One who seems fully formed by the age of 16, and any metro area can wonder why fewer boys and girls are playing. And people whose focus is the NHL can wonder why all the goalies are American and European.Again, who gets drafted and who can actually become an NHLer are not one and the same. It will not surprise you to be reminded that one of the mainstays on the Vegas Golden Knights, scoring wing Jonathan Marchessault, made it into the NHL after being signed as an undrafted free agent. Who was his QMJHL coach? Patrick Roy.
In Québec, pro-format hockey is actually recognized as being part of the fabric of smaller population hubs, amid this age of social dissolution. Finances in this league are very murky, and there is an argument that it should be reformatted in order to pay a living wage to the players.
Either way, in 2020, the Québec government stepped up with C$20 million in pandemic relief to help keep 12 QMJHL teams operational. Contrast that to Ontario. Its dollar-store government for the property developers could find only $3M in aid for Ontario-based OHL teams in 2022, conveniently timed just before setting an election date, to help teams fund players’ scholarship packages. And people still complained.
But yeah, you can read that as an inference that Doug Ford is costing Ontario the Memorial Cup. Hey, the next one is in Michigan, so it’s possible the Memorial Cup will never be played in Ontario during Ford’s term as premier.
In any event, the best team won on Sunday. May it be a tipping point for giving the QMJHL a bit more credit.
Hey, MLB. There is this innovation called the double base.
Baseball has collisions, but it cannot be a collision sport since the athletes strap it on nearly every day across a six-month, 162-game regular season. That leads to being open to the possibility of another health- and safety-focused change, following the near miss that Minnesota Twins infielder Royce Lewis had in a collision at first base last weekend.
Straining to beat a throw to first base, Lewis tried to slow down, flipped over the Cleveland first baseman Gabriel Arias, and bent very awkwardly on the landing. He left the game with what was called a “sore shoulder.” Some sequenced screenshots, via Codify Baseball, show that this was wild.
That is not a frequently occurring play. It is, however, one that could be curbed with a fairly simple modification: adding the double base with an orange ‘safety bag.’ It is common in softball (aka fastpitch), although it is not used in the NCAA. On a batted ball that stays within the infield, the batter-runner has to touch the orange base that is in foul territory. The infielder or pitcher who is covering first base can put their foot on the white base without having their Achilles tendon stomped.
So while it promotes good Achilles tendon and anterior cruciate ligament health, you can already hear the knees jerking. Here we go, another new rule that contributes to the softening of North America, says the Reply Guy who didn’t even see the play in real time because he was getting a beer and snacks, and you have to line up twice for that. The double base, in fact, has yet to come to the NCAA, whose Women’s College World Series provides the best exposure in North America for fastpitch, even though it is, “probably $300 for a safety bag vs. an ACL injury or $300 vs. a season-ending injury,” as one coach at a Power 5 school put it in 2022. It is used in the Olympics and international play.
Saying, ‘This is how we have always done it,’ is not an answer. And with how much money MLB teams have invested in each player, more health-and-safety-focused rules are inevitable. That can be read into the rules that curb home plate collisions, takeout slides at second base (hey there, Chase Utley), and the bigger bases.
But you are not watching baseball for the violent collisions, other than when two fielders on the Yankees smack into each other chasing a little looper behind second base.3 We have the NFL and motorsports to watch people smack into each other for our vicarious enjoyment without considering long-term consequences, anyway.
So, yeah, if the double base appears in MLB at some point in the future, it will not come as a shock.
The greasy three: the new basketball term that no one is actually using
The late great Mordecai Richler once said he wanted to write one book people would read after he was dead. In that vein, a life goal is to invent a sports terms that sticks in the long run. Every attempt has fizzled like a speed-dating match.
There has been another Eureka moment while watching the NBA playoffs, where the Denver Nuggets and Kitchener, Ont.’s Jamal Murray are even at 1-1 with the Miami Heat in the best-of-7 final. The conventional terms for when a player scores a basket while being fouled, then makes the subsequent free throw, the “and-one” or the “old-fashioned three-point play,” have had their moments. Not that anyone asked, but it needs to go to another place that better acknowledges the skill of the scorer.
“And one” has had its moment; it even got corporatized. And “old-fashioned three-point play” is too polysyllabic. Also, the three-point shot has been part of the NBA since 1979. Live in the now, right?
Without further ado, I give you: the greasy three.
The term honours that basketball is a contact sport without pads. Margins between winning and losing often come down to willingness to attack the basket and get buckets while being hard-fouled by defenders. It also, without being too obvious, borrows from hockey to put in terms that the puckheads can understand. It’s all about — take it away, Ray Ferraro — willingness to go to the dirty areas, or greasy areas, to score goals. The principle is the same in both sports. And the baller is doing it while leaving their feet and not knowing where they will land.
The best instance of a greasy three is finishing a contested drive to the hoop. Murray had one on Sunday. He deflected a pass and made a steal for a transition basket, and the extra split-second to launch into a dunk instead of laying the ball in off the backboard drew contact from Miami’s Max Strus. It got the people going.
So yeah, greasy three. Make it catch on at school and work.
That is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind.
The Saint John Sea Dogs (host team) won in 2022. There was no Memorial Cup in either ’20 or ’21 due to COVID-19 health protections. The Rouyn-Noranda Huskies won in 2019 in Halifax, and the Acadie-Bathurst Titan won the 2018 tournament in Regina.
Previously, the WHL had a three-season run from 1987-89 (Medicine Hat back-to-back, and Swift Current in ’89). The OHL also had a recent three-season run from 2015-17 (Oshawa, London, and Windsor).
Québec defeated Seattle 3-1 in the tournament round-robin. The Thunderbirds scored their only goal in the antepenultimate minute of the third period while playing 6-on-5 with the goalie removed for an extra skater.
Love is love, and sports hate is sports hate.