It is Maple Leafs 1, Canadiens 0 before the kids even get dropped off at the hockey academy
The economics of raising hockey players in Canada play more to the advantage of a Toronto team than a Montréal one, which makes the Canadiens' lack of Québécois players no surprise to anyone.
For the TL;DR crowd: Hockey academies > outdoor rinks. Or, the Leafs’ GTHL/OHL guys are better than the Canadiens’ GTHL/OHL guys.
Please, Canadian hockey media, come sit with us. This is a safe space.
Please know you are valued and loved, or at least grudgingly tolerated due to the realities of CanCon broadcast regulations meaning that we get a choice between two sports-media silos instead of getting ESPN. It is also understandable that any hockey hype person would be thirsty about the Toronto Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadiens squaring off in best-of-seven Stanley Cup playoff series for the first time in 1979, even though the series is an on-paper mismatch. Most people would say, “I get it,” and try to have a life, but that was never much of an option for me even before Big Rona.
There is a deeper issue that has your friends and well-wishers concerned. Your addiction to nostalgia — has any living Leafs or Canadiens alumnus who played in one of those long-ago and irrelevant series not been interviewed? Did you go to a medium to see if you could raise the spirit of Jacques Plante? — has kind of sucked the life out of the series before it has even started. Nostalgia is one of the great human weaknesses. It is also bumf. It does little to increase understanding or stimulate thought about hockey’s place in the Canadian zeitgeist outside the corporate bubble of the Americanized, Bettmanized NHL. You need help, so stop cutting up that grainy footage from 1967. Give me your phones; there, I blocked Dave Bidini’s number.
The ratings for Sportsnet, RDS and CBC should be high after all your hoserified hoopla. But we are not waking up in a version of 1967 with 5G internet, even if you do have your first jab. The real unacknowledged theme of this series might be how minor hockey in Canada, over my lifetime as a Xennial, has become too expensive for many families. That is part of the story of this series, even if pushing the nostalgia blinds one to it.
It is not exactly a newsflash to note that minor hockey has changed for the worse. Even thirty years ago, it was still a mass-participation sport where children (well, almost entirely males, at least there is some gender equity) started out playing on ponds and in local leagues before the best moved up the ranks. Now it is one where “pretty good rich kids” are isolated into ever-concentrated groups at younger and younger ages. It makes for a more skilled game, but a less visceral one. And the climate catastrophe means fewer days of outdoor ice each winter.
Hockey is not the only offender when it comes to parents being wired into getting on the late-capitalism hamster wheel of forking out for more and more extras, such as specialized coaching, to help their child’s prospects. It is only human nature to think that doing more of something is the only way to do it. Hockey is just an obvious offender due to equipment and the cost of ice rental.
But the longer that this goes on, the more it works to the advantage of the Toronto Maple Leafs than the Montréal Canadiens, so yay? Sticking to what gives one an involuntary shudder, Leaf Nation has a beast called the Greater Toronto Hockey League, where a season of hockey can run $20,000 to $25,000 and a U11 team has a paid goaltending coach. (As a Peter Gent character once put it, amateur sports ends when you pay the coach.) Hockey academies and sport schools have popped up everywhere in Canada, of course, but the GTHL was the first to get the hothouse environment for young players.
Every NHL organization, even the Arizona Coyotes and Buffalo Sabres, gets an equal shot at talent intake through the league’s entry draft players of age 18 and older. But it seems obvious that the GTHL, as long as those disparities exist at the youth level, would eventually filter up to the Maple Leafs. For those wondering, six of the nine Ontario-bred Leafs expected to play on Thursday are GTHL alumni: Travis Dermott, Zach Hyman, Mitch Marner, Jason Spezza, Wayne Simmonds and John Tavares. Three of the eight Ontario-bred players in Canadiens’ expected lineup came through the GTHL: Ben Chiarot, Jake Evans and Tyler Toffoli.
There is good and bad with the GTHL, the main feeder up to the Ontario Hockey League. Both are good for a player who was already good, and in the former’s case, come from a family with the means to pay for it. Two good books on this, by the way, are Jim Parcels and Ken Campbell’s Selling The Dream: How Hockey Parents And Their Kids Are Paying The Price For Our National Obsession (Viking, 2013) and Sean Fitz-Gerald’s Before The Lights Go Out: A Season Inside A Game Worth Saving (McClelland and Stewart, 2019).
Hockey academies are popping up everywhere in Canada. But only one native French-speaking Quebecer, Canadiens centre Phillip Danault, will play in the game tonight, compared to nine players from one hockey association in the Greater Toronto Area. It is a small sample, but it is also reflects long-term trends that have led to Ontario producing more players whose ceiling is in the NHL than Québec does.
At least Québec has far lower rates of COVID-19, so there is that. And teams from the Québec Major Junior Hockey League actually win games in the Memorial Cup.
But when the broadcast media ignores where the hockey talent comes from, it creates opportunity for opportunists to make noise. A week or so ago, Danault, who is the Canadiens’ No. 1 centre, half due to his defence and half by default, missed a game due to injury. Stu Cowan of the Gazoo wrote about how it “(was) believed to be the first time in franchise history, there would be no Quebec francophones in the Canadiens lineup.” It became a story for a day or two, and politicians pounced on it the way that you wish that veteran winger who is in the lineup for ‘intangibles’ would pounce on soft rebound from the opposing goalie after the fast skilled young guys in the line dial up some offensive-zone heat.
Calisse de tabernak … la dissonance cognitive est forte ici.
A better question should have been why anyone cares. That era when the Canadiens could make an extra effort to nurture Québec talent and hope to win is long past. Carrying on like this series is a continuation of 1951, or 1963, or 1967, or 1979, is just a mid-May snowjob.
The Flying Frenchmen ethos went into the mist around the early 1980s, at the time when the NHL shifted from a game to becoming a more corporate entity. That did not affect the demographics of Canadiens rosters initially. In the ’80s and early ’90s, Serge Savard was the Canadiens general manager and instructed his amateur scouts to make sure they did not miss out on a potential player whom the intraprovincial rival Québec Nordiques might select. Iron sharpened iron. The economics of promoting NHL hockey and the Canadian tendency toward monoculture forced the sale of the Nordiques and relocation to Colorado in 1995. Around that time, somewhere between trading Patrick Roy to the Colorado Avalanche and closing the old Forum, the Canadiens lost the allure that made them such a competitive and cultural success story across the second half of the 20th century.
They came down to the level of the Leafs, with flashier jerseys and two official languages: culturally ubiquitous thanks to a monopoly on their market, but competitively middling. In a way, the Maple Leafs are luckier. They are not as encumbered by memories of what they used to be, since they shed their lustre so much earlier, when Harold Ballard traded it for a new outboard motor and original prints of two Christina Lindberg exploitation films.
The excessive focus on the past is cover for one inescapable conclusion. Canadiens-Leafs will always have the hockey hoopla. But the rivalry has been overpromising and underdelivering for about five decades. It might not even be the best current Montréal-Toronto sports rivalry. The Canadian Classique between Montréal SC and Toronto FC of Major League Soccer has a case for that. Those clubs actually meet regularly in competitions where there are tangible stakes on top of the imagined and vague bragging rights, thanks to the structure of soccer. The contribution of fan-led supporters’ groups and the price-point of tickets (when fans are allowed in) charges the atmosphere more than many NHL games, where piped-in music keeps the crowd from creating the energy. Just calling it as one sees it, although Leafs crowds were starting to get louder right up until March 2020.
The forever rivalry, for starters, was a creation of a pre-draft era where both teams had the right of first refusal on any player in their home region, since the early NHL probably took some cues from English soccer. The Canadiens did not let too many good Québec players go in an era when hockey was so accessible and the province had famously high birth rates. The Maple Leafs also had a fecund player pool to pick from, although they somehow missed signing Bobby Orr. The rivalry might have been fierce, but it was also something of a rigged game until the NHL became the last of the major ball-and/or-stick leagues to adopt a draft.
The last time before 2021 that Toronto finished the regular season in first place and faced Montréal in the first round of the playoffs was 1963. The Canadiens had the home-ice advantage for affrays in 1964, ’65, ’66, ’67, ’78 and ’79. Toronto won only two of those series, but fortunately for the mythmakers, one of them was the last final of the six-team era during Canada’s centennial year of 1967.
By the late 1970s, as Ken Dryden wrote in The Game, the rivalry was dead because “the Leafs killed it.” More to the point; Ballard did it as the franchise’s chief executive. Those series at the end of the ’70s bear more resemblance to when LeBron James was making the Toronto Raptors his little brother a few years ago. That time, Larry Robinson closed out the series with an overtime goal and then had to intervene to keep Tiger Williams from attacking the referee.
Is that really a glorious history?
Continuing the tangent before we get back to staging this mock intervention, the NHL had the Forever Rivals in separate conferences for almost two decades. They played only three times per non-lockout season from 1981 to 1998. Since the Leafs and Canadiens were reunited in the Eastern Conference and the jerry-rigged North Division, there have only been two seasons when both teams advanced deeper than the first round. The great rivalries in any big-time sport usually involve both teams winning something of consequence ever so often.
To close out stereotypical Canadian fashion, sor-ree for not feeling this series as much as one is supposed to, and not even because it will start with empty-arena games. For starters, it is a first-round series between teams that were separated by 18 points in a 56-game regular season. But ultimately, hockey at the grassroots has changed too much over the last two generations to ever hit on the gut level. How is the sport that we’re told is intertwined with our national identity truly that when swaths of the population are priced out?
Any way this could be talked about during the first intermission? In the immortal words of Daniel Alfredsson, “Probably not.” But even if this intervention doesn’t take, the next one will.
At least that big shift to making minor hockey for the rich kids is working in the Leafs’ favour. So there is that, too.
The real reason for the ranting
Truthfully, the trigger for being annoyed about tired narratives that involve Montréal actually had more to do with baseball than hockey.
The Oakland Athletics are threatening to threaten to move for about the 159th time since 1998. Or 1978. As soon as Jeff Passan’s ESPN story went online, the baseless throwaway speculation began in certain corners of Canadian sports Twitter. Sure, it generates cheap heat and indulges a flight of fancy, but it also clouds the understanding that MLB relocation or expansion requires about US$3.5 billion in capital.
The responsible thing for a sports-yakking show to do on its social media channels is to try to play that up. Do you see that distinction there?
Like anyone else who is still a baseball fan in Canada, I would like to see the Montréal Expos return. It will not come from a west coast team moving, though. Baseball desires the geographical balance, so the A’s are not going anywhere that takes them out of the American League West division. Granted, as one wag put it, they have failed on the east coast in Philadelphia, failed in the midwest in Kansas City, and are failing on the west coast. Either they leave the contiguous United States and move to Anchorage or Honululu, or go back to squre one in Philadelphia.
It probably is a little rich to call that out. I use this space to indulge in speculative fantasy about sports (no drafts! All 32 NHL teams in the playoffs! Vanier Cup in Hawaii!). I just do that to open some minds, and because I take sports too seriously. And it’s never presented as something that has any chance of actually happening.
That is more than enough for today. Please stay safe, and be kind.