Eric Zweig, the hockey author and historian, was 10 years old the Christmas that his parents gave him a miniature replica of the Stanley Cup. The words inscribed on the trophy are tiny, but he was able to read them as a kid.
"That was the first time I'd ever heard of the Kenora Thistles," Zweig said.
The Thistles represented a mining and lumber town of a few thousand people that was an outlier even in its era. With almost no exceptions, every Stanley Cup winner going back to 1893 hails from a current NHL city. Powerhouse lineups from Ottawa and Montreal traded Cup victories, except for when Kenora won it in enthralling matchups that redefined what hockey could look like.
"So much about hockey today, even the up-tempo style of play, can be traced to that (1907) Stanley Cup over a century ago," Ron MacLean wrote in the foreword to "Engraved in History," which was released nationally this week via Rat Portage Press.
MacLean added, "No story is smaller, which of course is what makes it so big."
The Thistles leveraged the sport's bygone quirks to their advantage. They were an amateur team whose top player, Tommy Phillips, lost the ends of three fingers in a lumbering mishap, yet he remained brilliant at stickhandling and shooting. Forward passes were banned, but rather than dump the puck and punt possession under pressure, Kenora's defensemen preferred to hold onto it to orchestrate a rush.
The Thistles faced Manitoba competition because of Kenora's proximity to Winnipeg, a shipping hub that sent Prairie grain eastward at the turn of the century and moved farm equipment in the other direction. Winters were frigid, so the region's many good athletes were always on the ice. Phillips and his teammates rowed in the offseason, enhancing their endurance at a time when substitutions were rare.
"Art Ross would talk about it a lot: Tommy Phillips was the kind of guy who could be just as fresh at the end of 60 minutes as he was when the game started," Zweig said. "Their fitness levels were better, and it was hard for people to keep up. And even if they tired out - by then, you're tired, we're tired, but we've already scored four goals."
The Stanley Cup was awarded in challenge series back then: The holder was compelled to face league champions from elsewhere in Canada both during and at the end of the season. The Thistles got to vie for it in 1903 and 1905, falling to the dynastic Ottawa Silver Seven on both occasions.
Ottawa was a skilled, violent squad led by Frank McGee, the Alex Ovechkin of his era to Phillips' Sidney Crosby. McGee was blind in his left eye and famed for scoring 14 goals in an earlier Cup game. He jabbed and broke Si Griffis' nose in the second Thistles series, then tallied a hat trick and the late winner in the deciding contest.
Knowing they were fast enough to trouble top teams, the Thistles added ringers from a Manitoba rival - Ross and fellow future NHLer "Bad" Joe Hall - to try to dethrone the Montreal Wanderers in January 1907. They missed a connecting train en route to the series that wound up being rear-ended and wrecked.
Spared disaster, Phillips guaranteed victory in the series to a Winnipeg sportswriter, then netted Kenora's four goals in a Game 1 win. One was sensational. Per a newspaper report that Zweig found, Phillips sidestepped most of the Wanderers while crossing the ice with the puck and wired a pinpoint shot from the right wing.
Game 2 was electric. Montreal erased a 6-2 deficit before Griffis, carrying the puck from end to end, forced two saves and passed to Roxy Beaudro for the tap-in that clinched the title for the Thistles.
"I'm sure they just thought: 'Oh, we are the champions.' Maybe they got cocky and sat on (the lead) a little bit," Zweig said. "But it must have been tremendously exciting. I would love to have been at that game."
Kenora's reign as Cup victor lasted nine weeks. Ross and Hall returned to the Brandon Wheat City club, but the Thistles swept Brandon in the Manitoba playoffs in mid-March. Montreal visited the next week and outscored Kenora in a two-game rematch, prevailing on aggregate to head home with the chalice.
"(The Thistles) played four games against the Wanderers and won three of them. But that's only enough to win a series and lose a series," Zweig said. "If that's a best-of-seven series, they're up 3-1 at that point. Which never gets talked about, because it just wasn't a possibility at that time."
The dissolution of the Thistles was imminent. Most guys on the roster quit hockey or left town in the offseason, hoping to make career headway in a bigger city. A scarcely recognizable Kenora lineup lost by double digits in the 1907-08 season opener. The team folded without playing another league game.
More than a century later, Zweig compares the Thistles to the Edmonton Oilers of the 1980s. An unstoppable offense powered that franchise to several championships before it traded Wayne Gretzky for cash.
"Edmonton's not small like Kenora's small, but by NHL standards, it's tiny," Zweig said. "It's a small, sort of underdog town playing a style of hockey that people haven't seen before. And winning. And then going: Well, we can't really afford to keep this team together."
The arc of Kenora's rise and fall raises what-ifs. Had the Thistles matured quickly enough to beat Ottawa in 1905, Zweig said, they might have held onto the Cup for three seasons. Instead, they inspired the concept of a trade deadline: Cup trustees in 1908 banned the last-minute additions of ringers like Ross and Hall.
The Thistles didn't endure, but the prize they won did.
"The Super Bowl trophy is a cool-looking trophy, but it has no real history and they make a new one every year. The World Series trophy is a kind of dopey-looking trophy and they make a new one every year," Zweig said. "But the Stanley Cup, even though it's been remodeled and redone and there are different versions of it, in a sense, it's the very same trophy that goes back to 1893 and 1907."
"The history of this game is something we in Canada still attach ourselves to," he added. "It's all part of the link. And I think the fact that one small town did win is a neat part in that link."
In the back half of 2020, as leagues adapted to the pandemic, they shortened their regular seasons and took radical steps to slash travel. NHL teams started meeting consecutive times in the same city. Baseball's AL East squads only faced divisional opponents and the NL East. The NFL canceled its international games, including four in London.
The point was to minimize player exposure to COVID-19, but Seth Wynes detected a different benefit; sports' cutback on chartered flights was good for the environment.
Wynes, a geographer at Concordia University in Montreal, researches climate change mitigation. In a recent study, he found MLB, NBA, NFL, and NHL teams combined to fly 7.5 million kilometers in 2018, emitting close to 122,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide over the course of a normal sports year.
The 2020 experience was abnormal and revealing. If the Big Four leagues restored the scheduling changes that they introduced on health and safety grounds, Wynes estimates they'd reduce their carbon footprint by 22% - no trivial amount as the world warms and climate disasters threaten to get more extreme.
"Most fans probably wouldn't want to see the MLB 2020 season repeated, where you only got to play teams that are close by," Wynes said. "But if you think about a league during a normal season, they make a lot of trips to (distant) regions that maybe you could do without."
Wynes spoke to theScore about the climate crisis, the opportunity leagues have to help combat it, the upside of an NBA midseason tournament, and the reasons why less flying would benefit players, too. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
theScore: What effect do carbon dioxide emissions from flights have on the environment?
Wynes: Aviation is really important for climate change because each flight makes a lot of emissions. That pollution is released high in the atmosphere. It causes more warming than pollution that is released at ground level. It's also really hard to find alternatives. We have great ideas for electric vehicles and things like that to cut pollution, but not so much for air travel. When we're talking about climate, it's a hard area to tackle.
You researched air travel in the NFL, NBA, NHL, and Major League Baseball. How much carbon dioxide does each league emit in a normal season by flying to games?
The NBA releases the most. The NHL is close behind. Hockey and basketball, they play a lot of games. Baseball also plays a lot of games, but (scheduling series) makes for a lot less traveling. The NFL has fewer emissions because the season is so short.
When did you realize that 2020 scheduling changes might affect the environment?
This was something that I'd been thinking of before the pandemic: What could leagues do to reduce their climate impact? Scheduling is one idea. Climate people think about this sort of thing, so ideas come up. What would happen if the NBA got rid of conferences for the playoffs? There are some good competitive reasons to do that, but if you're a climate person, you start thinking: Oh, that would mean a lot more travel, wouldn't it?
But that's a really minor thing. Then the pandemic comes up and all of these leagues take some strong steps to reduce travel because they're trying to keep their players (and team personnel) from getting infected. As a climate person, that makes you think: I wonder what effect that would have on their carbon footprint every year.
Baseball and hockey regionalized their schedules. In 2020, MLB teams only faced opponents in their division and the corresponding interleague division: the AL East and NL East, for example. The NHL split into four regions for division-only play. What was the climate effect?
MLB went pretty hard on that regionalization. Their emissions went down by about 20% because of that. Other leagues did a little bit less, so that number wouldn't be quite as high. It's an interesting step because it's maybe not quite as sustainable in a normal season. But if you at least do a small amount of it, it's kind of a no-brainer.
MLB is broken down into the National League and the American League, and they're not grouped by region. You could have teams play more games against teams that are close by. You could keep the National League and the American League but improve that efficiency a little bit and cut down on emissions without anyone noticing all that much.
The NHL also took after baseball by staging consecutive matchups in one city a lot more often. One reason not to do this might be to maintain variety in the schedule so that fans get to watch a new opponent each night. That said, do you think the NHL and NBA should schedule more of these miniseries?
I think there's a pretty strong argument to be made for that policy especially. You're saving a lot of travel. When you look at regionalization, that's just making trips shorter. Here, you're cutting trips altogether.
That's more carbon that you're saving, but it also means more rest for your players - fewer trips, fewer red-eye flights, fewer time-zone changes. That would have a bigger impact in terms of player health and performance. When players lose sleep, they don't play as well. They're more likely to get injured. If you do those miniseries, you're cutting back on that. I think that's something that should be investigated a lot more fully.
A lot of players might not have enjoyed (the 2020) experience because they were also stuck in hotel rooms. They're quarantining when they're doing those miniseries, and so that's kind of miserable.
But imagine doing it in 2023. You're not as worried about COVID, hopefully, at that point. Suddenly these players are like: Oh, I have an extended stay in Los Angeles. I can rest up. We can practice between games. I can go out. Maybe enjoy myself rather than: OK, I'm going to be in L.A. and then, the next day, I'm hopping on a flight to Utah, and the night after that I'm over to New York. That's exhausting.
There are financial and marketing arguments to be made for leagues playing international games. The NFL visits London every year, except for 2020, to grow its fan base there. What's the climate argument for abandoning overseas games?
I estimated that the NFL could cut emissions in their season by 8% if it eliminated international games. It's pretty big for a change that fans at home wouldn't really care about. You're trying to make those fans happy, and I don't think those fans would be too harmed by eliminating a game overseas.
There are financial reasons not to do it, and so maybe the leagues won't do it. But I think there's a good argument to be made that the climate emergency is really important. Professional sports leagues act as role models in society. Taking a stand like that would be a visible signal that they actually care.
On that note: You acknowledged in your study that Big Four sports travel accounts for less than 1% of private flight emissions and that private flight emissions account for a fraction of the global total. If these leagues cut back on flights, what's the value of that? What could that change in the grand scheme?
The importance there is largely in leading by example; setting an example in the business community; setting an example for your millions of fans. I also think that what elite members of society choose to do really matters. When we're thinking about the climate crisis and trying to solve it, it requires this rapid, large-scale societal change.
If we're going to make that big change, it's hard to imagine us doing that successfully while the wealthiest people, while the most popular and well-known people in our society, continue to act as if there's no problem. Attending international games, flying on these large, luxurious planes, that's acting as if nothing is abnormal. Whereas saying, "OK, we're going to make these big changes," that's something useful.
There's one other, smaller point I would make. There are these alternative, sustainable aviation fuels, and they're pretty expensive. A lot of businesses couldn't afford to upgrade to these fuels or pay for these credits. But we need the sector of aviation to switch over to that. A strong hope for the future is that we develop these fuels, but they're so expensive to try out.
Leagues have a lot of money. If they were really concerned about money, they would already have implemented some of these (travel cutback) policies. It's clear that they have a little bit of extra cash that they could put toward a good cause.
And so when you're saying: League emissions are only a tiny fraction of global emissions, or even aviation emissions, why do they matter? They could be part of catalyzing a bigger change by purchasing credits for these cutting-edge technologies and helping to jump-start that field. That would be another area where the leagues could have an outsize impact.
You brought up how players could benefit from playing more baseball-style series. If you're advocating for climate solutions and trying to get organizations to act with urgency, what's the importance of presenting win-win solutions - ideas that can benefit everyone involved?
Generally, it's a pretty big deal. Outside of the NBA, maybe you're talking to policy-makers about coal power plants. It's important to present the information that shutting down coal power plants would be really good for the health of people in your state or province. We're talking about less cancer, less asthma, less hospital visits.
Sometimes talking about those co-benefits can be more persuasive than talking about climate. It depends on your audience. If I was bringing this to a players' union and trying to get them on board, I'd be focusing on the data for: Look, these are the injuries that are hampering your players. You should think about backing (these scheduling changes) when you get into negotiations with the league; maybe negotiations about how long the season will be.
Going off that, the NBA has considered shortening its regular season by four games, from 82 to 78, and introducing a centralized midseason tournament. From a climate perspective, what do you think of that idea?
It's a great idea. The one thing you do have to be careful about: If you only cut a few games from the entire season, and then introduce a midseason tournament and decide to put it in Seattle, that's on the coast. It's way out of the way. You might have a backfire effect where you increase the amount of emissions. It's a little bit safer if you cut 10 games from the season, rather than, let's say, four. These policies can be tricky, and you have to think them through.
Last month, a United Nations expert panel warned that the climate crisis is intensifying. The New York Times summed up its report like this: Time's running out to avoid "a harrowing future in which floods, fires and famine displace millions, species disappear, and the planet is irreversibly damaged." The panel called on countries to act soon to reduce emissions. Are there actions we haven't covered yet that the sports world could take?
If you look outside of the four major leagues, if you want to look at climate change as being an all-hands-on-deck situation, absolutely.
Every time a tournament is scheduled, you can think about: Where are we placing this tournament so that people have to fly as little as possible to get there? Beyond aviation, you can say: We have fans coming from all over the place (to attend home games). Can we talk to people at the city and find a way to incentivize our fans taking public transit? Or maybe the best (spots) in our parking lot are all EV chargers, and you need to drive an electric vehicle to use them.
There are also ways you can communicate about climate change. You can be more vocal about it. Players, owners, and so on can take a stand, use their social media influence, and promote climate action. You see that a little bit more in Europe. There are some (soccer) teams that are intentional about taking trains instead of flights to games. Winter sports have been strong advocates because they're going to be the first affected. Downhill skiing: It's much harder to imagine a future for that sport in a warming climate.
But I would also say for the leagues we're talking about, climate change has already started to impact them. You have games that officials are considering whether to cancel because of wildfire smoke. LeBron James had to evacuate his home (in 2019) because of a wildfire.
We know these wildfires are supercharged by climate change. We're going to see more and more of that as the planet warms. It's going to become an unavoidable issue for sports.
Finland beat the Russian Olympic Committee 2-1 on Sunday to win gold and cap Olympic men's hockey in Beijing. These five takeaways from the tournament have implications for the NHL.
Fedotov couldn't foil the Finns
Finland's win was historic, but Ivan Fedotov's future is the top NHL story for either finalist. The Russian goalie stopped 29 pucks to keep the gold-medal game close, only for Ville Pokka's prayer from distance and Hannes Bjorninen's netfront tip to beat him and prove the difference.
That two shots eluded Fedotov made Sunday his second-worst game in Beijing. The Czech Republic shelled him for six goals after he'd shut out Switzerland and Denmark back-to-back. Fedotov rebounded in knockout play and held the Danes and Sweden to a goal apiece, stoning Sweden's last five attempts in the shootout that sent the Russians to the final.
Goalies ruled this tournament. Patrik Rybar's heroic .966 save percentage led Slovakia to the bronze medal. Harri Sateri (.962, 16 saves in the final) backstopped the Finns to their first gold medal in 18 Olympic appearances. Fedotov's save percentage wound up at .943.
The Philadelphia Flyers drafted Fedotov in the seventh round in 2015, and they retain his rights as he reportedly eyes a move out of the KHL. The Flyers and Fedotov's agent have initiated contract talks, a source told Philly Hockey Now's Sam Carchidi. If he were to back up Carter Hart next season, he'd become the NHL's tallest goalie ever at 6-foot-8, one inch clear of Mikko Koskinen and Ben Bishop.
Finland staged a masterclass Sunday on how to hold a third-period lead. The Finns generated more solid chances in the frame than the Russians had shots (three). They spoiled Fedotov's marvelous week, and they're the champs because of it.
Slafkovsky boosted his draft stock
Early in the tournament, Slovakia looked doomed to bow out long before the medal games. The Slovaks let in a combined nine goals against Finland and Sweden in the first four periods of the preliminary round. The only player who showed up was younger than everyone: 17-year-old Juraj Slafkovsky scored Slovakia's three goals against those Nordic powers.
Rybar, the third goalie on the Slovak depth chart, drew into action and was close to unbeatable in wins over Latvia, Germany, the United States, and the Swedes. Slafkovsky found the net four times in those games as Slovakia won bronze, the country's first Olympic hockey medal. The kid was the tournament's MVP and its breakout star.
Slafkovsky is fast and deft with the puck at 6-foot-3, and his offensive outburst was no fluke. He scored all seven of his goals at even strength, four of them on pinpoint wristers. One was a snapshot that he roofed. On another, he was the first to pounce on a rebound by the crease.
There's no recent precedent for what he achieved in Beijing. Before the Chicago Blackhawks drafted Ed Olczyk third overall in 1984, he put up eight Olympic points for the U.S. in Yugoslavia. Rasmus Dahlin, the No. 1 pick in 2018, played fewer than eight minutes for Sweden at the PyeongChang Games. The Canadian equivalent of Slafkovsky's star turn would have been Shane Wright, 2022's top draft prospect, lighting up the event as Claude Julien's most reliable forward.
Slafkovsky generally ranks between fourth and eighth in prominent 2022 prospect rankings. Scouts that TSN's Bob McKenzie polled in January slotted him fifth behind Wright, Logan Cooley, Joakim Kemell, and Matthew Savoie. For someone who's barely scored in Finland's top-tier Liiga this season (Slafkovsky has four points in 21 games), producing in Beijing is exactly what he needed to do to maximize his stock.
North American youngsters delivered
None of them took over like Slafkovsky, but Canada and the United States' young guns showed what makes them esteemed prospects: Owen Power's puck poise, Mason McTavish's shot, Matty Beniers' dependability in all zones and situations. Jake Sanderson set up dangerous rush chances in his lone Olympic game before getting hurt. No Canadian forward was as creative and slippery off the cycle as Kent Johnson.
Regrettably, Julien benched Johnson for much of the third period when Canada lost to Sweden. David Quinn never turned to Beniers as Rybar blanked the U.S. in the quarterfinal shootout.
Jack McBain's turnover cost Canada against Sweden, but the prospects generally deserved trust. U.S. forwards Sean Farrell and Brendan Brisson combined to score five goals in Beijing. Brisson and Matt Knies both recorded 13 shots. Defenseman Brock Faber played 24:45 a night. U.S. goalie Drew Commesso, who's eligible to play this summer at the rescheduled world juniors, stopped 53 of the 55 shots he faced against China and Germany.
What's next for this cohort? McTavish has already impressed in a nine-game NHL audition. Power and Sanderson are locks to leave college in the next month or two; Beniers and Johnson might be ready to join them in the NHL next season. One dark horse who could make a pro impact soon is Nick Abruzzese, the 22-year-old Harvard captain and 2019 fourth-round draft pick who distributed three primary assists in Beijing.
Ho-Sang teased his skill
Josh Ho-Sang's career flagged from 2019-21 when he played a mere 31 games between the minors and Sweden. But he found stability with the Toronto Marlies this season, played well enough on an AHL deal to make Canada's Olympic team, and entered the event on the top line.
Did Julien give him a fair shake? Two games in, Ho-Sang's only point was an assist on Mat Robinson's fluke goal, and McBain replaced him on Eric Staal's right wing. Ho-Sang didn't play more than 9:24 the rest of the tournament, even though he recorded a sweet helper against China - his speed on the rush opened a passing lane to Eric O'Dell - and seemed to be the one Canadian in the quarterfinals who could carry the puck into Sweden's zone.
After PyeongChang 2018, Cody Goloubef was the only Canadian Olympian who returned for a time to the NHL. It'd be a stretch to say Ho-Sang was a game away from earning his own contract, but the what-if is tantalizing. In place of breaking out in the medal round, his play for the Marlies is what will prompt any NHL interest he receives.
NHLers were sorely missed
PyeongChang's Olympic tournament had three attributes that this one lacked: memorable knockout matchups, an underdog finalist, and a twist that distinguished it from past Games.
Germany came within an overtime goal of winning gold in 2018. In Beijing, the semis and final were defensive slogs that featured seven goals total. Plus, NHL players staying home wasn't novel anymore.
The Europe-based veterans who headlined most rosters put in respectable efforts, but it's the matchup of elite talent that confers magnitude and produces magic. When CNN likened the U.S. beating Canada to the Miracle on Ice, the comparison was silly because the American college kids hadn't toppled any great opponent. Eddie Pasquale has strong KHL stats, but he's not Vladislav Tretiak.
NHLers emphasize that the Olympics matter to them. Come 2026, the NHL shouldn't need to reschedule scores of games to February, which would free these players to compete for the first time: Connor McDavid, Nathan MacKinnon, Auston Matthews, Leon Draisaitl, Andrei Vasilevskiy, Nikita Kucherov, Victor Hedman, Steven Stamkos, Brayden Point, Jonathan Huberdeau, Artemi Panarin, Mikko Rantanen, Sebastian Aho, Juuse Saros, David Pastrnak, Brad Marchand, Cale Makar, Adam Fox, Mitch Marner, Mark Stone, Jack Eichel.
The list goes on. Watch out for Power, Beniers, and Slafkovsky, too: They'll have a shot to become Olympic vets.
When Eric Staal and Josh Ho-Sang left the AHL to play for Canada at these Olympics, people wondered if NHL contracts would await them on their return. Most Olympic teams entered the tournament with a guy or three in this position - the veteran minor leaguer or overseas pro who has the remote chance to impress a GM.
Other Olympians know where their careers are trending. This year, the U.S. and Canada combined to send 18 NHL prospects to Beijing. Eight of them are teenagers.
Both countries lost in the quarterfinals, but these players mostly shone en route. Prospects led the U.S. in scoring (Sean Farrell), shots on net (Brendan Brisson and Matthew Knies), and ice time (Brock Faber among defensemen, Matty Beniers up front). Owen Power logged major minutes for Canada. Kent Johnson racked up five points.
This used to be a hockey tradition: standout college and junior players, plus Europeans of the same age, foreshadowing at the Olympics that they'd produce in the NHL. That stopped when established NHLers overran the tournament, but PyeongChang 2018 revived the trend.
Canada's youngest 2018 Olympian was 25 years old, but college recruits Ryan Donato and Troy Terry brightened the U.S. team's seventh-place performance. Donato scored five goals in as many contests, while Terry dished four assists in two knockout games alone. Donato debuted in the NHL the next month, while Terry's torrid offensive start to this season earned him an All-Star nod.
The European Olympians who leaped to the NHL range from Miro Heiskanen and Rasmus Dahlin (All-Star defensemen) to Eeli Tolvanen and Dominik Kubalik (complementary forwards) to the young core of the 2018 gold-medal Russian team. Vladislav Gavrikov played 23:17 in the final; Artem Zub assisted on the last-minute, game-tying marker; Kirill Kaprizov's fifth goal in PyeongChang clinched gold in overtime, and now he's top 10 in NHL scoring.
Their rise to prominence mirrored what happened in 1994, back when the NHL had never gone to the Games.
Slovakian prospect Zigmund Palffy led all scorers at those Olympics with 10 points, while his 19-year-old teammate, Miroslav Satan, bagged nine goals. Finland's great young trio - Jere Lehtinen, Saku Koivu, and Sami Kapanen - left for the NHL in 1995. Peter Forsberg was 20 when he popularized his namesake shootout move in the Olympic final. Soon-to-be NHL goalie Tommy Salo stoned Paul Kariya's next attempt to win Sweden the gold.
Kariya, a college superstar and Canada's top Olympic scorer at 19 years old, shook off the loss and, like Forsberg, eclipsed 100 points as an NHL sophomore in 1995-96. Some of his '94 teammates and American opponents, including Adrian Aucoin, Todd Marchant, and Brian Rolston, stuck in the NHL for almost 20 seasons.
1992's precocious Olympians hailed from all over. Finland's Teemu Selanne sniped 76 goals as a rookie in '93. Canada's Eric Lindros won the Hart Trophy in '95. The U.S.' Keith Tkachuk became a 500-goal scorer. Czech forward Robert Lang and Poland's Mariusz Czerkawski became NHL All-Stars. The Unified Team won gold, then sent to the NHL a slew of under-22 standouts: Alexei Kovalev, Alexei Zhamnov, Alexei Zhitnik, Sergei Zubov, Dmitri Yushkevich, and Darius Kasparaitis.
The 1988 Olympics teed up the NHL debuts of Brian Leetch, Kevin Stevens, Mike Richter, Dominik Hasek, Alex Mogilny, Teppo Numminen, and Jyrki Lumme. Budding stars in 1984 included Pat Lafontaine (the U.S.' top scorer as an 18-year-old), Chris Chelios, Russ Courtnall, Kevin Dineen, and Tomas Sandstrom. Three Canadian or U.S. Olympians - Kirk Muller, Ed Olczyk, and Al Iafrate - were drafted at Nos. 2-4 in '84 behind Mario Lemieux.
1980 is remembered for the Miracle on Ice, but Lake Placid's Olympics doubled as a stepping stone to the NHL for:
Canada's Glenn Anderson and Finland's Jari Kurri, who potted two Olympic goals apiece as 19-year-olds and joined Wayne Gretzky on the Edmonton Oilers the following season.
Brothers Peter and Anton Stastny, who combined for 22 points in six games, then defected that summer from Czechoslovakia to the Quebec Nordiques.
Paul MacLean, the future 40-goal scorer and NHL coach.
Pelle Lindbergh, Europe's first great NHL goalie. The Swede with the white mask who won the Vezina Trophy in 1985 died in a car crash that fall at 26.
As for the Miracle team: U.S. captain Mike Eruzione quit hockey after 1980, but Neal Broten, Dave Christian, and Mike Ramsey embarked on 1,000-game NHL careers. Ken Morrow joined the New York Islanders as soon as the Olympics ended and won the next four Stanley Cups. Decent run for him.
Last week, when the U.S. beat Canada in the Beijing preliminary round, CNN's recap story likened the triumph to the Miracle on Ice. The framing raised eyebrows: Why was anyone surprised the U.S. won? This Canadian roster was no Soviet Red Machine, and to doubt players such as Beniers and Faber because they're teens is to underrate their maturity and nerve.
Losing to Slovakia was the real stunner, but bright pro futures await, as they did for Kaprizov and Forsberg once upon a time.
Women's hockey will be in great shape when the Olympic final, for the first time ever, excludes both Canada and the United States. Until then, they'll keep playing instant classics.
Canada withstood the U.S.'s furious third-period charge to win the gold medal in Beijing on Thursday, the country's fifth in seven tries. Marie-Philip Poulin scored twice in the 3-2 victory to prolong an immaculate streak: The Canadian captain has sniped the golden goal in every Olympic title game she's won. Ann-Renee Desbiens stopped 38 American shots, and Canada mobbed her when the buzzer sounded at 1:23 a.m. ET.
Amanda Kessel's power-play goal with 12.5 seconds left almost sparked an epic American comeback, but the U.S. couldn't surmount the three-goal lead that Poulin's line built early. Sarah Nurse opened the scoring and, on a second-period rush, assisted Poulin's dexterous finish from a sharp angle. That was Nurse's 18th point of the tournament, eclipsing Hayley Wickenheiser's Olympic record (17) that Poulin matched on the same play.
This Canadian team scored at will in China. It might be the best that's ever graced Olympic ice, avenging the U.S.'s golden shootout win from 2018 at the end of a chaotic quadrennial.
During the four-year cycle that led into Beijing, Canada's women's pro league folded, and members of both national teams left the top U.S. league in response. They formed the traveling Professional Women's Hockey Players Association, which holds weekend showcase tournaments when COVID-19 permits. They want to see a new league created that, most crucially, would pay players a living wage.
As the national teams geared up for Beijing, they kept playing barn burners. Canada beat the U.S. 3-2 in overtime in the 2021 world championship final, and at the end of six Olympic tuneup games this past fall, Canada led by a combined score of 13-11. Desbiens made 51 saves in their first Olympic encounter last week, a 4-2 Canadian win.
That was either squad's only close game until Thursday. Between Group A play and the knockout stage, Canada outshot opponents that weren't the U.S. 284-80 and outscored them 50-6. The Americans outscored non-Canadian teams 26-4. Programs that used to challenge them couldn't keep up.
One culprit was Finland, which suffered worse defeats than expected en route to winning the bronze medal. Canada thumped the Finns 11-1 after star goalie Noora Raty was omitted from the roster, reportedly because Finland's coaches thought she shouldn't start and wouldn't be a suitable backup. That decision wrongfooted Finland, while Sweden, the Olympic silver medallist in 2006, slumped to an all-time worst eighth-place finish.
That neck of the standings produced some happier stories. China entered the Olympics ranked 20th in the world but stunned Denmark and Japan on home ice. In Czechia's Olympic debut, it beat China and Sweden and held the U.S. to four quarterfinal goals, riding Klara Peslarova and her sublime .945 save percentage. Almost every game in Group B, the tournament's second tier, was decided by one or two goals.
Dismayed by Group A's imbalance, Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiManno wrote that the Olympics should drop women's hockey. People around the sport mounted a counterargument: To make the sport more competitive, invest in it, don't kneecap it. Responding to DiManno in the Star, PWHPA consultant Jayna Hefford and women's hockey builder Allyson Fox called for more national federations to fund their teams adequately, like Canada and the U.S. do.
The conversation calls for historical context. The 2022 Olympics were the seventh Games to feature women's hockey. Back in 1952, the seventh Olympic men's tournament featured these lopsided scores:
Canada 15-1 Germany Canada 13-3 Finland Canada 11-2 Switzerland Canada 11-2 Norway Canada 11-0 Poland U.S. 8-2 Germany U.S. 8-2 Finland U.S. 8-2 Switzerland Sweden 17-1 Poland Sweden 9-2 Finland Switzerland 12-0 Finland Czechoslovakia 11-2 Finland
Today, Finland is second in the IIHF men's rankings, Germany is fifth, Switzerland is eighth, and Norway is eleventh. They regularly beat or threaten to upset the U.S. and Canada. The Olympics didn't scrap men's hockey at a precarious point, and following decades of investment and development, the world got deeper.
Men's pro hockey is a century older than the women's pro game - plenty of time to iron out kinks. After the NHL launched in 1917, franchise instability and contraction afflicted the league for 25 years, at which point the Original Six teams remained.
Abandoned by the PWHPA players, the Premier Hockey Federation is in its seventh season, and it maintains that it's the sustainable women's league that the PWHPA desires. PHF teams play in Toronto, Minnesota, and throughout the American Northeast. The league announced plans in January to expand to Montreal and increase its salary cap to $750,000. Next month's PHF championship game will air live on ESPN2.
Questions about the future abound. Does women's hockey need the NHL to fund a pro league, or can the PHF keep growing incrementally? How much longer can the sport's stars sit out of league play? What opportunities are lost when they don't play many games throughout the season? Could the league that sticks around long term attract top talent from Europe and elsewhere, maximizing the level of competition?
Maybe the next quadrennial will bring clarity. This moment belongs to Canada, quite the bounce back for the program that lost to Raty's Finns in the semifinals of the 2019 worlds. Head coach Troy Ryan changed the team approach, empowering the Canadians to play loose and chase offense. The U.S. on Thursday couldn't match Canada's breakout speed, depth, or star power, especially with top center Brianna Decker out injured since the tournament opener.
If healthy, Decker would have buzzed around the Canadian zone in that frantic third period. Instead, she watched from ice level as the U.S. hit posts and flipped breakaway attempts into Desbiens' gear. Hilary Knight fired six shots at the Canadian netminder and scored shorthanded, yet fell to 1-3 in Olympic finals compared to Poulin's 3-1 record.
This one was tense until the last horn. The result will be celebrated and rued for four years.
When Power debuted at the world championships last spring, he appeared destined to ride pine. Coach Gerard Gallant played him for less than eight minutes in a dismal shutout loss to host Latvia. But by the medal games, Power was on the top defensive pair, checking top American and Finnish pros as Canada surged to gold.
Canada's Olympic staff didn't wait to trust Power in Beijing. The Buffalo Sabres star prospect and University of Michigan sophomore played 19:33, a team-high, as Canada routed Germany 5-1 to open the tournament on Thursday. Claude Julien - his broken rib and punctured lung sufficiently healed - ran the Canadian bench on Friday and sent out Power for 22:13 in the 4-2 loss to the United States.
Power's composure at 19 years old is preternatural. His fluid skating at 6-foot-6 has inspired comparisons to Victor Hedman. Defensemen Alex Grant and Maxim Noreau scored on point blasts in the win over Germany, but Power looked like the blue line's top creator, joining the rush and wheeling in the offensive zone to generate chances.
Canada plays China at 8:10 a.m. ET on Sunday to end the preliminary round. The real tests resume afterward. Depending on who makes the knockout round, Power might have to match up with David Krejci, shadow Russian star playmaker Vadim Shipachyov, or try to shut down Finland or Sweden's top line. No assignment has fazed him yet, which should delight the Sabres.
Hilary Knight, hockey 🇺🇸
The U.S. and Canada are close to meeting for gold at a fourth straight Olympics. Canada peppered Sweden with 56 shots to Sweden's 11 and sauntered to an 11-0 win in the quarters on Friday. The U.S. outshot the Czech Republic 59-6 and won 4-1.
The Americans have had problems finishing in Beijing. They outshot Canada 53-27 to end the preliminary round but lost 4-2. On 292 shots, they've potted 24 goals in five games - an 8.2% shooting percentage that pales to Canada's 17.6%. The event's top seven scorers are Canadian, led by Natalie Spooner's 13 points and eight goals apiece from Sarah Fillier and Brianne Jenner.
Knight has paced the U.S. with four goals and three assists, stepping up after Brianna Decker was injured against Finland. The United States' lone four-time Olympian, Knight's been a recurrent hero in international play. She scored the golden goal in overtime at the 2011 and 2017 world championships, but Canada held her pointless in 20:58 of ice time when they met this week.
Between goalies Ann-Marie Desbiens and Emerance Maschmeyer, Canada's save percentage for the tournament is .957. Eight Canadian forwards and three defenders have put up at least a point per game. The U.S. is capable of troubling them if the likes of Knight and Kendall Coyne Schofield capitalize on chances in the final. (And assuming both teams cruise through the semis.)
Jennifer Jones, curling 🇨🇦
When Jones plays against the world's best, she sometimes tears through tournaments undefeated. She didn't lose in 11 matches at the 2014 Olympics - the only time that's happened in the women's event - and reeled off 14 straight wins at the 2018 world championships, Canada's most recent gold-medal showing there. No wonder an expert panel TSN assembled in 2019 deemed her the country's greatest-ever female skip.
Jones won't run the table in Beijing. She started the round robin 1-2 against Sweden, South Korea, and Japan - the teams that medalled at PyeongChang 2018 - and next faces several more podium threats.
Switzerland's Silvana Tirinzoni has won back-to-back world titles. Alina Kovaleva's Russian rink took silver at worlds in 2021. Of Beijing's 10 Olympic teams, Eve Muirhead's British quartet ranks third-highest in the world right now, trailing Jones and Sweden's Anna Hasselborg. Tabitha Peterson, the U.S. skip out of Minnesota, beat Hasselborg for the bronze medal at worlds last year.
The field is prolific and no game is a gimme, though the last opponents on Canada's schedule, China and Denmark, aren't as decorated. Round-robin play wraps up next Thursday ahead of Friday's semifinals. Make it that far and Jones will outdo Rachel Homan's team's performance in PyeongChang.
Kaillie Humphries, bobsleigh 🇺🇸
Humphries was sworn in as an American citizen in December, ensuring she'd be able to race for the U.S. in Beijing. Interviewed by the Washington Post right after the ceremony ended, Humphries said she felt as if she'd won Olympic gold.
She knows the sensation. Born and raised in Calgary, Humphries piloted Canadian sleds to victory at Vancouver's and Sochi's Winter Games and won a bronze medal for Canada in PyeongChang. But she sued to be released from Bobsleigh Canada in 2019, alleging verbal and mental harassment from her coach, and has competed for the U.S. on the World Cup circuit ever since. (Humphries' husband is American and they live in California.)
Humphries is a podium favorite in monobob, the solo event that debuts at the Olympics on Saturday night ET. She's No. 2 in the world in that event and ranks fifth internationally in two-woman, which she'll contest in Beijing next weekend alongside brakewoman Sylvia Hoffman. U.S. pilot Elana Meyers Taylor ranks first in monobob and two-woman and exited COVID-19 protocol in time to compete in both.
In Humphries' stead, Canada turns to Cynthia Appiah and Christine de Bruin, the world's No. 3 and No. 4 monobob racers, respectively. Appiah used to push for De Bruin and Humphries and started piloting her own sled during the Beijing Olympic cycle.
Mark McMorris, snowboarding 🇨🇦
McMorris has nothing left to prove on the world stage. The 28-year-old from Saskatchewan is the Winter X Games' winningest athlete - his 21 medals eclipse Shaun White's 18 - and his consistency at the Olympics is laudable. McMorris has won bronze in slopestyle at three straight Games, including last weekend in China.
No Canadian snowboarder has ascended as many Olympic podiums, but teammates have overshadowed McMorris at different points of his career.
At PyeongChang, Sebastien Toutant overcame a back injury to win the big air event; Canada's first gold medal at these Games went to Max Parrot, who scored 90.96 in the slopestyle final. Su Yiming of China scored 88.70 to edge McMorris by 0.17 points. However, McMorris disputed that Parrot deserved the gold, telling CBC "I kind of had the run of the day" and noting his teammate missed a grab the judges overlooked.
Big air goes down in Beijing on Monday and Tuesday and presents McMorris with another chance to command the spotlight. He placed fourth in the event at January's X Games in Aspen but won the world title there in 2021, stomping a switch backside trick that elevated him above Parrot and Norwegian star Marcus Kleveland.
Like Parrot, who survived cancer in 2019, McMorris has authored his own compelling comeback story. Airlifted to hospital five years ago after he crashed in the British Columbia backcountry, McMorris recovered from fractures and internal injuries to dominate his sport again. Nabbing gold would be a storybook moment.
Eileen Gu, freestyle skiing 🇨🇳
Big air is supposed to be Gu's weakest event, but that's relative. Seeded fifth in the discipline ahead of the action in Beijing, Gu outshone the French favorite Tess Ledeux to win gold this week.
No freestyle skier has won three career gold medals before, much less three at one Games. Gu achieving this ought to be expected entering Sunday's slopestyle final and the halfpipe competition next Thursday. The prodigious 18-year-old won both of those events at the 2021 worlds - and settled for third in big air.
Gu's skiing for the home team after deciding a few years ago to represent China - not the U.S. - internationally. She's from San Francisco but her mother is Chinese, and Gu has declined to answer repeated questions about whether she's still an American citizen. When she nailed her first career 1620 to win big air, the outpouring of domestic fan adulation crashed Weibo, the Chinese social media platform.
Could any skier spoil Gu's dream Games? She's unbeaten in halfpipe on the 2021-22 World Cup circuit, but Estonia's Kelly Sildaru beat her in slopestyle and finished second to Gu in halfpipe at a recent stop in California. Canadian halfpipe specialist Rachael Karker has appeared next to Gu on three podiums this season.
Ester Ledecka, Alpine skiing 🇨🇿
The unexpected can happen on Olympic slopes, as Mikaela Shiffrin showed this week. The American superstar missed early gates and failed to finish the giant slalom and the slalom, her signature races. Shiffrin did complete the super-G, placing ninth, and remains a medal threat in downhill and combined.
She'll be out to salvage her Games next week. Meanwhile, Ledecka has an outside chance to make history.
The Czech athlete is the only woman who's won gold in two sports at the same Games. In 2018, Ledecka took snowboarding's parallel giant slalom crown and also won the alpine super-G by 0.01 seconds, an inconceivable result considering her best World Cup result to date was 19th. She looked dumbfounded at the finish line.
Ledecka defended her snowboarding title in China but settled for fifth in the super-G, skiing 0.36 seconds faster than Shiffrin and 0.13 seconds off the podium. She has two more shots to double up on gold, via downhill or combined. Ledecka won downhill bronze at a recent World Cup stop and is 13th-best in the event this season, suggesting she’s capable of surprising the favorites again.
Madeline Schizas, figure skating 🇨🇦
As Canada rebuilds following a slew of high-profile retirements, 18-year-old Schizas laid down the signature skates of her young career in the team event. Personal bests in the short program (69.60) and free skate (132.04) last weekend placed her third in both categories and helped power Canada to fourth overall.
Kamila Valieva landed historic quad jumps to dominate the women's skates. But it remains unclear if Valieva will be disqualified from the Games for testing positive for a banned heart medication at the Russian championships in December. If the Russian team's gold-medal performance is negated, the U.S. would be awarded gold, Japan silver, and Canada bronze.
Regardless of what happens, Schizas' Games continue this week in women's singles. The short program takes place Tuesday and free skates follow on Thursday.
Schizas only had to face one Russian in the team event, but the Associated Press predicted ahead of Beijing that Valieva, Anna Shcherbakova, and Alexandra Trusova would sweep the women's medals. Including them, 15 Olympians have posted better scores this season than Schizas did last weekend. The U.S.'s Alysa Liu, Japan's Kaori Sakamoto, and Belgium's Loena Hendrickx headline the next tier of medal hopefuls.
Canada's done well in the women's event at recent Olympics. Kaetlyn Osmond won bronze in 2018 right before she retired and Joannie Rochette managed the same result in 2010. Rochette and Osmond were second-time Olympians who finished fifth and 13th, respectively, in their Games debuts. If Schizas' trajectory mirrors theirs, pencil her in as a name to watch this week and in 2026.
Dave King, the retired NHL and Team Canada coach, is from the Prairies and has seen the world. When the Calgary Flames fired him in 1995, Japan offered him work. The Nagano Olympics were approaching and the home team was keen to contract his expertise.
King signed on as general manager, taking over a national program that was versed in the merits of possession hockey. Japan was skilled with the puck and made smart cuts without it into open space. King pinpointed two team weaknesses: defense and aggression. Politeness and conflict avoidance are cultural norms there, but he felt the players were respectful to a fault: "They just don't hit anybody."
The summer before the '98 Olympics, King asked a Canadian university football coach, Tony Fasano, to teach his players how to hit. Donning football pads on turf, they squared off in contact drills to fine-tune their technique and allay the fear of injury. Battle on the field, King reasoned, and they'd be ready to battle in the corners on home ice.
"We did things like that," King said in a recent interview, "to try to get them to understand that we're going to play above our head."
Japan didn't finish last at Nagano 1998, earning a moral victory as it avoided the host country's nightmare outcome. Olympic hosts qualify automatically for all events, an afterthought when the Games are in Canada or the United States and cause for concern when the host is a hockey minnow. Foreseeing double-digit blowouts, the IIHF almost booted China's nascent program from this month's tournament in Beijing.
"Watching a team being beaten 15-0 is not good for anyone," IIHF president Luc Tardif told Agence France-Presse this past fall.
Green-lit to play, the burden is on the Chinese team to prove it belongs. Recent Olympic underdogs have achieved this. At Turin in 2006, Italy scored twice on Martin Brodeur and tied multiple teams that had NHL goaltenders. South Korea lost every game in PyeongChang four years ago, but threatened to upset Czech Republic and Finland.
Nontraditional hockey hosts aren't created equal. Turin was Italy's ninth Olympic hockey berth. The South Korean team was ranked 21st in the world in 2018. Flanked by Spain and Australia, China is 32nd in the current world rankings, illustrating that it's hard to build a program from scratch.
China's first Olympic game is against the U.S. on Thursday; Germany and Canada await this weekend. Group A is loaded even without NHLers present.
That Auston Matthews and Connor McDavid aren't in Beijing is a source of faint hope, though. Also: There are lessons from past Games that China's already heeded and could follow this week. History supplies the roadmap to Olympic respectability.
"The main thing was: Can we be competitive and not be embarrassed?" King said, describing Japan's priority in Nagano.
"We knew we weren't going to win a medal. But we wanted to surprise some teams," said John Parco, who played forward for Italy in 2006.
"Someone said in Canada that we'd get beat 120-something to nothing," said Jim Paek, South Korea's head coach in 2018. "That type of disrespect. For us to compete - and not be embarrassed as people thought we would - was a great accomplishment."
Recruit North Americans
China's 25 Olympic players all play for Kunlun Red Star, the KHL's last-place club this season.
Six are homegrown, one is from Russia, and the rest hail from the U.S. or Canada. Vancouver-born winger Brandon Yip was in the NHL for five seasons. Defenseman Jake Chelios is Chris Chelios' son. Jeremy Smith, the starting goalie from Michigan, spent a couple of months with the Colorado Avalanche in 2017. Each foreign-born player has Chinese heritage or was with Kunlun for a few seasons, which makes them eligible to compete in Beijing.
Importing floor-raising talent from hockey countries is an Olympic tradition.
In 1998, Japan's Olympic goalie was Dusty Imoo, the British Columbia product whose objectionable social media activity cost him a coaching job with the Toronto Marlies last year. Imoo's save percentage in Nagano was .925. Five fellow heritage players had starred in junior in Canada, and King appreciated their feistiness.
"They gave us a nucleus," King said. "Because of their Japanese parentage, the Japanese player from Japan could see that this was all possible."
Some of Italy's Turin Olympians shared a backstory: they were late-round NHL draft picks, like Parco and Tony Iob, whose parents were Italian and who signed in the domestic Serie A as young pros. Early in the 1990s, when Parco and Iob headed over from Ontario, Serie A teams played in packed arenas and handed out some of Europe's richest contracts. The arrangements beat AHL bus rides, Iob said: "We got treated like soccer players."
The money that coursed through the league diminished over time, and Italian members of the national team came to work day jobs, Iob recalled - in construction, as bakers, as electricians. They were solid players but needed support. At Turin, nine of Italy's top 11 scorers were from Canada or the U.S, and a former NHLer, Jason Muzzatti, started in net.
"We were always one of those teams that was in your face," Iob said. "We still had that Canadian strength in an Italian jersey."
In 2018, seven South Korean Olympians were naturalized citizens from North America. Defensemen Bryan Young and Alex Plante peaked in the NHL as Edmonton Oilers call-ups. Michael Swift played in the AHL before he followed Young, his second cousin, to the Asia League. Goalie Matt Dalton, who's from the same Ontario town as Ryan O'Reilly, made 45 saves against Canada when his countries faced off in PyeongChang.
When Brock Radunske joined Anyang Halla, Korea's top pro team, in 2008, a translator coined him a nickname: Canadian Big Beauty.
"It was more of a literal translation," said Radunske, who's 6-foot-5 and blue-eyed. "He may have even added it to Wikipedia himself at the time. Just trying to promote the sport over there and get some interest."
Radunske was an Oilers draft pick, and he signed in Germany when his entry-level contract ended, which opened his eyes to jobs further afield. Playing in South Korea enabled his wife to teach English there. To attain citizenship, Radunske and his Olympic teammates took language classes and learned to sing the Korean anthem, establishing their immersion in the culture.
Speed and skill abound in Korean pro hockey, and the North Americans weren't relied on to be saviors. But they'd played in top leagues and were assertive on the ice, spurring deferential teammates to ask questions in practice that helped them develop, Paek said. Early in the 2018 Olympic opener, Radunske fed Minho Cho in the slot and his snapper evaded Czech goalie Pavel Francouz, putting Korea up 1-0 as the crowd roared.
"The combination of the imports, if you want to say, and the Korean players working together as a family and teammates allowed us to be one cohesive team," Paek said.
"In our dressing room, we needed to be, as our president says, one body. They had to understand the Korean culture, and vice versa."
Play to your strengths
Seoul-born and Toronto-raised, Paek won two Stanley Cups as a Pittsburgh Penguins defenseman in the early '90s. In 2014, he left the AHL coaching ranks to run South Korea's undermanned national program. When he came on as coach, the team hired equipment and video staff and bought a skate sharpener.
Paek and his assistant coach, fellow ex-NHLer Richard Park, optimized how Korea prepared and played. They introduced video review and the use of analytics. They landed an invite to the 2017 Channel One Cup, securing Olympic tune-up games against Canada, Finland, and Sweden. They preached defensive attentiveness, figuring bigger teams that dominated the puck had to be repelled with structure and great goaltending.
"After that, we just had to play to our advantages," Radunske said. "If our guys kept their legs moving and used their speed, some of the European countries struggled with that, because our guys were so quick. They would take some penalties against us. Then the scales would tilt in our direction for moments in the game."
Outshot 159-81 over four games in PyeongChang, the Koreans managed to rack up small wins. They gave up power-play and shorthanded goals to the Czechs but outscored them at even strength. They held Canada to one goal for more than half of that matchup. Down 3-0 to Miro Heiskanen's Finns, goals from Radunske and Jin Hui Ahn forced a tense third period, at the end of which the losing team saluted the exuberant home fans.
The Italians fared better in 2006. Italy ranked top 10 in the world throughout the 1990s, cultivating a no-quit attitude in pressurized games. At the Turin Olympics, Germany and Switzerland iced eight NHL players between them, including goalies Olaf Kolzig and David Aebischer, yet the hosts led both games 3-2 before conceding late equalizers.
Six Hockey Hall of Famers (and counting) suited up for Canada at those Olympics, but in the first game of the tournament, Italy capitalized on a couple of openings. With Dany Heatley in the box for charging, Toronto native Jason Cirone tipped a shot past Brodeur to tie the score at 1-1. Down 6-1 later, Parco countered the onslaught with a slapper off the rush from the faceoff dot, impressing CBC broadcasters Bob Cole and Harry Neale.
"The famous Marty Brodeur," Parco said. "(Scoring that goal was) a high point of my career. It was a lot of years of hard work."
At Nagano in 1998, top teams got byes past the preliminary round robin, which pitted Japan against Germany, France, and Belgium. The Japanese still got to face some NHLers, including Jochen Hecht and the late Ruslan Salei, and they broke through in the 13th-place game. Shin Yahata, Akihito Sugisawa, and Tsutsumi Otomo scored on Austria and the host nation prevailed in the eighth round of a shootout.
King coached Canada at three previous Olympics, winning silver in France in 1992. His Japanese team was mobile, and King wanted it to forecheck hard and backtrack with speed, not content with hunkering in the neutral and defensive zones for 60 minutes. The year before the '98 Games, Japan faced the Canadian national team in a dozen exhibitions. Like Fasano's gridiron teachings, they were tests that pushed the players to be physical.
"They didn't get, to any great extent, to that level," King said. "But they got better. And we actually became a team that was pretty hard to play against."
Compete with pride
Italy's Turin Olympic opener reunited Iob with familiar faces. Canadian defenseman Adam Foote was his teammate in the Ontario Hockey League. Vincent Lecavalier and Martin St. Louis, the retired Tampa Bay Lightning forwards, remembered Iob from a distant training camp he attended. When Italy goalie coach Jim Corsi suggested he test Brodeur by shooting low, Iob beat Brodeur but hit the post on his first shift.
Parco, the guy who solved Brodeur, today directs hockey development for the Italian federation.
"We have, basically, about the same amount of youth players as Sault Ste. Marie does," Parco said, referring to his Ontario hometown. "Just to make people understand: It's still a very small hockey country. I'm sure the (Italian) people were really excited about the way we played (in 2006)."
That's not to say the Italian players, nor other past hosts, were happy just to be there. One of Paek's first games as South Korean coach, he recalls, was a narrow loss that would have devolved into a blowout in earlier seasons. Keeping Olympic games close was a feat that he celebrates, but in that moment, he told his players they shouldn't feel satisfied.
"We have to believe that we're able to win," Paek said. "Every game we played, we had that belief."
Long after he guided Japan to Nagano, King was an assistant coach for Canada in PyeongChang. He confirms that Paek's squad impressed people, and he thinks Olympic participation fosters respect for hockey in the host country. After Beijing was awarded the Olympics in 2015, the NHL staged preseason games and opened an office there, eager to grow fan and player interest.
China was the world's 34th-best national team when Kunlun Red Star, the country's only pro franchise, debuted in the KHL in 2016. Kunlun hired Mike Keenan and other prominent coaches to man the bench - the current coach, Ivano Zanatta, was an Italian Olympian in 1992 - and China funded a youth academy system to bolster the national talent pipeline.
This was before the pandemic. COVID-19 curbed academy attendance, nixed training opportunities abroad, and prompted the cancelation of last year's fourth-tier world championships in Beijing. Kunlun relocated to Moscow temporarily and, in Zanatta's first season as coach, is 9-32-7 in KHL play, suggesting the home fans should brace for big Olympic losses.
"If they get beat badly but they go down fighting, I think Chinese people can appreciate that," said Susan Brownell, a University of Missouri-St. Louis anthropology professor who's an expert on Chinese sports. As a reference point, she brought up 2008's Beijing Summer Olympics, where China went winless in men's soccer and the team captain was red carded for dirty play.
"(That) performance was considered a national embarrassment," Brownell said. "The main reason wasn't that they lost, but that they seemed to be playing like they didn't want to win - or that they didn't care, or that they had given up."
Before the NHL dropped out of these Games, Chinese hockey stakeholders shared how they'd define Olympic success. Speaking in the fall to the Associated Press, Longmou Li, Kunlun's vice president of communications, said the goal should be to score on Germany and avert "disaster" against the U.S. and Canada. Yip thought long term, voicing his hope that some future Chinese NHL draft pick will say the 2022 team inspired him.
Yip is the Chinese team's elder statesman at 36, about Iob's age when his career crescendoed in Turin. The '06 Olympics was "my NHL," Iob told reporters at the time. Recently, he reminisced about the opening ceremony, where Luciano Pavarotti sang opera and Iob marched in step with the world's best athletes. He has a tattoo that calls this to mind.
"I got the rings on my arm," Iob said. "No one can ever take that away from me."
Seventy years ago in Norway, Czechoslovakia's Olympic hockey captain carried an olive branch past center ice. He was about to face Canada and wanted to hand the opponent his national delegation's flag.
His sportsmanship surprised the Canadian players. They didn't have a gift for him.
"Already sadly deficient in (medals) in the 1952 Winter Olympics," The Canadian Press reported at the time, "Canada now has been caught with its courtesies down."
In 1952, Canada and the United States combined to alienate foreign teams, fans, and sportswriters, spurring some to suggest that the Olympics should drop hockey. Onlookers in Oslo objected to their physical play. The Soviet press accused both teams of fixing the tournament finale. Processing the criticism, the head of Canada's hockey association said the country should sit out future Games.
No boycott materialized, and the 1952 tournament entered Canada's lore. Only one other Canadian, speed skater Gordon Audley, medalled at the '52 Games, but the men's hockey team went undefeated. It was Canada's last Olympic championship in the sport for half a century, the wait ending once NHL stars started to play in the event.
Some Olympic tournaments are remembered for an indelible sight: 1980's Miracle on Ice, Wayne Gretzky's benching in a '98 shootout, Sidney Crosby's golden goal in 2010. One theme defined what went down in '52.
"Europeans regard the North American type of game as 'too rough,'" Robert Ridder, the manager of the American team, wrote in his post-Games report to the U.S. Olympic Committee.
That hockey was played in 1952 was a small miracle. Two rival American teams boated to 1948's Winter Games in Switzerland, inciting an eligibility dispute. The IOC sidelined the squad it preferred but, seemingly out of spite, disqualified the participating U.S. team from medal contention. Canada won gold but called the referees incompetent, bashed the quality of the Swiss ice, and contemplated skipping the next Olympics.
Instead, the Edmonton Mercurys were sent abroad in '52 to defend the title. The Mercurys were a senior amateur team bankrolled by Jim Christiansen, a local car salesman who employed several players at his Ford dealership. One veteran forward, originally from Saskatchewan, was nicknamed "Mr. Hockey." This wasn't Gordie Howe, but George Abel, an expert puck handler whose brother Sid won the Stanley Cup with Howe on the Detroit Red Wings.
The Mercurys outscored opponents 88-5 and cruised to gold when they represented Canada at the 1950 world championships. That earned them the trip to the Olympics, and they toured Europe to play dozens of exhibition tuneups ahead of the Games. On a Swedish highway, the team bus slid into a ditch and hit a tree, according to journalist Tom Hawthorn. Injuries were limited to cuts and sore backs, and the Mercurys won that night's game 7-2.
The Olympic contests were played outdoors at Jordal Amfi, a 9,000-seat rink built on time because Norwegian players volunteered to lay the piping. The Mercurys thumped Germany 15-1 in their tournament opener while wearing black armbands to mourn King George VI, whose state funeral was held in London the same day. Canada's next opponent, punchless Finland, lost 13-3 despite deploying up to four defensemen at once.
The U.S. sent a plucky, all-star collective of recent college players to Oslo. (Winger Ken Yackel, representing the U.S., was the only American in the NHL when he debuted with the Boston Bruins in 1958.) The Americans started slowly, opening the tournament with a narrow victory over a Norway team that finished winless. Up 3-2 late, the U.S. goalie was caught out of his net, but Norway's shooter fired wide from close range.
"It was at this point that coach (Connie) Pleban almost blacked out!" Ridder wrote after the tournament.
The U.S. rebounded to beat Finland 8-2 during a snowstorm - the puck came close to disappearing at points - and then blew out Switzerland by the same score. However, trouble brewed in the Swiss game. American defenseman Joseph Czarnota jumped on an unsuspecting opponent during a third-period scrum. Referees escorted Czarnota to the penalty box while the Oslo fans, some yelling "Chicago gangsters," threw orange peels on the ice.
"The 'sins' attributed to this minor American ice hockey player," The New York Times reported later, "so thoroughly disturbed (one Oslo) newspaper that it proposed the introduction into the Norwegian language of a word 'czarnota' as a synonym for cheat and ruffian generally."
Canada annoyed the locals, too. On the day of the Czarnota fracas, the Mercurys beat Czechoslovakia 4-1 in the tournament's rowdiest and most physical game. The Canadians snubbed the opposing captain in the gift exchange, then slashed, hooked, held, and hammered his teammates all over the rink.
The Mercurys took 17 penalties, and the crowd booed their barrage of body checks, "not understanding that this is all part of hockey," The Canadian Press noted. Fed up, a Swiss newspaper wrote that "overseas teams" were polluting European hockey and urged the IOC to consider dropping the sport.
"If there is no hockey in the next Olympics, they may as well cancel the Games," Doug Grimston, the president of Canadian amateur hockey, said in response, per CP.
"Hockey is the big drawing card, and no one is kidding anybody about that."
Canada's Olympic finale proved him right. Unbeaten through seven games with a plus-57 goal differential, the Mercurys had already secured gold entering their last clash with the U.S. The Americans owned a 6-1 record - Sweden beat them - and needed a point from the game to finish on the podium. A loss would relegate them to fourth.
An Olympic classic transpired. Canada outshot the U.S. 58-13 but nursed a 3-2 lead in the waning minutes when American defenseman James Sedin converted a give-and-go play. Pleban and a few players huddled at the U.S. bench and decided to sit back to protect the tie.
"The Canadians had come to the same conclusion themselves and literally froze the puck for the remaining three minutes," Ridder wrote afterward.
"At the final whistle, both teams poured over the boards in sheer delight - the Canadians because they had won the championship, the Americans because they had tied the invincible Canadians and won what seemed an impossible silver medal."
United Press International reported that "stony silence" greeted the Americans at the closing ceremony, though the Mercurys sparked laughs by showing up in cowboy hats. All the while, anger over the standings festered behind the Iron Curtain. The Soviet Union didn't play in Oslo, but the Moscow newspaper Trud claimed Canada and the U.S. conspired to tie so communist Czechoslovakia wouldn't medal.
"We expected something of that kind from Russians," Ridder told reporters, per The Associated Press. "I suppose the Reds cannot lose without throwing dirt on victors."
Eager to chime in, Grimston called the accusation "about the stupidest thing I've ever heard" and later grumbled the Mercurys weren't reimbursed for their expenses while touring Europe. He told reporters that Canada ought to pull out of future Olympic tournaments.
Grimston was blustering - Canada went to the next Games and placed third - but it took time to resolve the transatlantic schism. At the Summer Olympics in Finland later in 1952, the great Czech distance runner Emil Zatopek set records in the 5,000 meters, 10,000 meters, and marathon, which he entered on a whim. His motivation to dominate was unusual.
"It was the brutal and harsh play of the United States ice hockey team in the Winter Olympics which drove me to my most recent performances," Zatopek said, per The Associated Press. "I made a pledge to win at least two gold medals for my country."
By then, the Mercurys had secured their place in history. Edmonton held a victory parade in the city center when the team returned, with players riding in Ford convertibles down Jasper Avenue as 70,000 people cheered. Christiansen, the team owner, died of pneumonia not long after the Olympics, and a group of players, including captain Bill Dawe, took over his car dealership.
While Sid Abel's Red Wings won the Stanley Cup in 1952, George Abel headed home to Saskatchewan, where he kept playing senior hockey and helped run his family's hauling business. He died in 1996, six years before Canada's next Olympic hockey triumph.
The Toronto Maple Leafs invited Dawe to a tryout when he returned from Oslo, making it possible the Mercurys would graduate a player to the NHL. Dawe, who wasn't a bruiser at 165 pounds, accepted the offer but didn't last long with the Leafs.
"He probably would have made the team," Dawe's son told the Toronto Star many years later. "But he said, 'I'm too small, and those guys hit too hard.'"
The Winter Olympics have opened in Beijing. Keep an eye on these five Canadian storylines as the Games progress.
Who will step up for men's hockey?
NHLers are absent again, so Canada's Olympic players hail from six pro leagues and the college and junior ranks. They range in age from 19 to 37 and their career stages vary accordingly.
Captain Eric Staal, the 1,000-point NHL scorer and 2010 Olympic champion, skated in last summer's Stanley Cup Final and played four tune-up games in the AHL last month. His fresh-faced teammates include Owen Power, the University of Michigan defenseman drafted first overall last year, and potent OHL scorer Mason McTavish, the No. 3 pick in 2021.
Like defenseman Jason Demers, forwards David Desharnais and Daniel Winnik were decent NHLers for many seasons - Winnik played 798 games for eight teams - before they signed in Europe. Corban Knight left for Beijing as the KHL's third-leading scorer. Toronto Marlies winger Josh Ho-Sang, once a first-round pick of the New York Islanders, never stuck in the NHL but has game-breaking skill that's rare on the roster.
The goalies are a mishmash. Devon Levi backstopped Canada to world junior silver in 2021 and owns a .948 save percentage as an NCAA rookie at Northeastern. Edward Pasquale is an 11-year pro who played three NHL games in 2018-19. Head coach Jeremy Colliton could prioritize upside or experience in net, or he could start the third option, five-year pro Matt Tomkins, who is playing this season in Sweden.
Fifteen members of the 25-man team are in their 30s - so is Colliton, incidentally - and three of them won bronze for Canada at PyeongChang in 2018. In lieu of Connor McDavid and Nathan MacKinnon debuting as Olympians, Maxim Noreau, Eric O'Dell, and Mat Robinson are off to their second Games.
Noreau, a nine-year veteran of Switzerland's National League, tallied two goals and seven points in six games in PyeongChang to lead Canada in scoring. He'll wear an "A" for Canada, which starts next week's tournament with round-robin matchups against Germany, the U.S., and host China.
"I played six (NHL) games, I came to Europe pretty early in my career, and a lot of people questioned if that was the right move or not," Noreau told theScore in 2020, reflecting on how he made the most of his first Olympic opportunity.
"I have no regrets. I'm very happy here. My family's very happy. We've been in Switzerland forever. But I think playing in a tournament like (the Olympics) - I wanted to show people that, hey, I'm a good player."
Can the curling teams bounce back?
Olympic men's and women's bonspiels have been played since 1998, and Canada has medaled in 10 of them. Mixed doubles gold in 2018 augmented the national edge: no country has finished on or atop more curling podiums.
Brad Gushue and Jennifer Jones, the men's and women's skips in Beijing, are former Olympic champions who waited a while to return to the stage. They'll be out to avenge Kevin Koe's fourth-place finish in PyeongChang and Rachel Homan's slip to sixth.
Between them, Gushue and Jones own nine Canadian championships and three world titles, plus Olympic gold from Turin in 2006 (Gushue) and Sochi in 2014 (Jones). The Jones rink went undefeated in 11 matches at Sochi. Her longtime third, Kaitlyn Lawes, paired with John Morris to achieve mixed doubles glory four years ago. Jones and Gushue's seconds, Jocelyn Peterman and Brett Gallant, happen to be engaged.
World curling is deeper now than it was in Canada's heyday. The eventual champion U.S. upset Koe's team at PyeongChang, while South Korea and Japan won their first Olympic medals at Homan's expense. Those letdowns inspired some introspection about how Canada picks its Olympic rinks. Men's and women's national trials go down about two months before the Games, which tests but risks exhausting the winners.
Speaking to theScore before he left for Beijing, Gushue shared his preferred solution: hold Canadian trials about 10 months ahead of the Olympics, at the end of the previous season. At that point, the losing men's and women's skips could shift their focus to mixed doubles. Homan and Morris were handpicked to pair up in Beijing after COVID-19 nixed those national trials around New Year's.
"If we give ourselves that little bit more cushion by pushing (each event's trials) back," Gushue said, "there's a lot of things that are corrected from the format we have right now."
In any case, that's a dilemma to resolve after Beijing. Homan and Morris are already in the midst of contesting the mixed doubles round robin, while Gushue and Jones open play next week.
Is Kingsbury inevitable in moguls?
Mikael Kingsbury is favored to dominate Saturday's men's moguls final, which begins at 6:30 a.m. ET. Winning would crown him the event's back-to-back champion - his decisive run in PyeongChang was four points better than the silver medalist - and give him three Olympic medals. (He placed second in Sochi.)
Kingsbury's World Cup feats are untouchable. For nine straight years from 2012 to 2020, he was named the top overall skier on the men's freestyle circuit, his excellence perched upon the 62 moguls races he won in this span.
Fractured vertebrae that Kingsbury suffered in a training fall sidelined him early in 2021, but he's long since returned to peak form and leads the 2021-22 World Cup standings. He's won four of seven events to date this season, while Japan's Ikuma Horishima, Kingsbury's lone serious challenger, has won the other three.
"I feel I’m in a better position than I was in 2018. I’m a better skier," Kingsbury told The Canadian Press recently. “I’ll be the only skier (in Beijing who's won gold), so that plays into my advantage. I still like my odds better than my competitors, so I’ll always bet on myself first.”
In Beijing, Kingsbury and Justine Dufour-Lapointe could become the first Canadian skiers to medal at three straight Games. (Mark McMorris has the same opportunity in snowboarding.)
Dufour-Lapointe won moguls gold at Sochi and came second at PyeongChang, 0.09 points behind France's Perrine Laffont. She finished 10th in qualifying Thursday to advance to Sunday's women's final. Naturally, Kingsbury qualified first on the men's side.
Constrained by the nature of his specialty - moguls Olympians have only one event to contest - Kingsbury would need to shine in Beijing and again in 2026 to break into the ranks of Canada's top medal earners. For context: If Charles Hamelin, the 37-year-old short track speedskater, manages to medal this month, he'll equal Cindy Klassen's record six at a Winter Games.
Will the figure skaters expedite the rebuild?
As in curling, Canada's figure skaters usually deliver a couple of podium performances. They won two gold and two bronze medals in PyeongChang, outshining the powerhouse Russian and American programs to top the field.
Seven skaters helped elevate Canada to the podium in the team, women's, pairs, and ice dance events. Five of them have retired: singles skaters Patrick Chan and Kaetlyn Osmond, pairs skater Meagan Duhamel, and the ice dance legends Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir. Gabrielle Daleman didn't qualify for Beijing after enduring a hellacious spate of injuries this quadrennial.
The seventh skater, Eric Radford, took a few seasons off but returns to the Games with new pairs partner Vanessa James, who placed fifth in PyeongChang competing for France alongside Morgan Cipres. Partners since last spring, James and Radford both tested positive for COVID-19 in December, then withdrew from last month's national championships before the free skate. They made the Olympic team anyway.
"If you look at the international season, Vanessa and Eric out of all our pairs teams had the strongest scores," Mike Slipchuk, Skate Canada's high-performance director, told The Canadian Press after nationals.
"We look at the body of work of all athletes, and we want to make the best assessment for the strongest team we feel has the best ability for us at the Games."
Five peripheral members of the 2018 Olympic team have risen to leading roles.
Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier nabbed bronze in ice dance at last year's world championships, excelling outside of Virtue and Moir's shadow. Kirsten Moore-Towers and Michael Marinaro, Canada's top pairs duo, placed sixth at those worlds; so did men's skater Keegan Messing. Meanwhile, national women's champ Madeline Schizas is one of Canada's youngest Olympians at age 18.
The team competition in Beijing wraps up late Sunday night Eastern time, followed in order by the men's event, ice dance, the women's event, and pairs.
How many medals will Canada win?
This week, the data analytics firm Gracenote predicted Canada will bring home six gold medals and 22 in total. In Gracenote's forecast, that performance equated to fifth in the overall table behind Norway, Germany, Russian athletes, and the United States.
Six victories would be Canada's fewest at a Winter Games since Nagano in 1998. Seventeen medals at Salt Lake City in 2002 is the national low this century. Canada set national records in both categories at recent Olympics, bagging 14 gold medals at home in Vancouver in 2010 and ascending 29 podiums in PyeongChang in 2018.
Expectations are lower in Beijing for a range of athletes, including the figure skaters and Canadian lugers.
Three-time bobsleigh medalist Kaillie Humphries competes for the U.S. now, but Christine de Bruin ranks fourth internationally in the two-woman discipline. (Elana Meyers Taylor, the American world No. 1, is in COVID-19 protocol.) De Bruin and Cynthia Appiah are contenders in monobob, a new Olympic event, while Justin Kripps - who piloted Canada to two-man gold in 2018 - ranks second in the world in two-man and four-man.
Medals in other sports seem like safe bets.
Canada's women's hockey team has appeared in every Olympic final and eclipsed the U.S. at the world championships last summer.
Including Kingsbury and Dufour-Lapointe, seven freestyle skiers have won Olympic gold before and/or rank top five in the world this season. The others are the halfpipe riders Rachael Karker and Cassie Sharpe and the ski cross racers Brady Leman, Brittany Phelan, and Marielle Thompson.
Four snowboarders who medaled in slopestyle or big air in PyeongChang - McMorris, Sebastien Toutant, Max Parrot, and Laurie Blouin - helm Canada's deep roster.
In long track speedskating, Canadians lead the World Cup standings in the men's 500m (Laurent Dubreuil), the women's long distances (Isabelle Weidemann), the women's mass start (Ivanie Blondin), and the women's team pursuit (Blondin, Weidemann, and Valerie Maltais). PyeongChang two-time medalist Ted-Jan Bloemen is the world No. 2 men's long-distance skater.
Kim Boutin, the short track star, could match Hamelin's career podium count by repeating as Olympic medalist in her best events, the 500m and 1,000m. Courtney Sarault is a medal threat at 1,000m and 1,500m and Pascal Dion is the world's top men's skater at 1,000m.
Due to COVID-19, Olympic results have never been harder to predict. Omicron's emergence upended training schedules, while the mixed doubles trials, Canada's final long track qualifier, and women's hockey exhibition games all were canceled ahead of Beijing. Testing positive there could foil a contender's coronation, or sideline any Olympian from their event. Keep healthy and their turn in the spotlight awaits.
Romano is the Toronto Blue Jays' homegrown closer. He recorded saves in three home venues in as many months last season, the club's travels mirroring his ascent through the minors. Playing in Florida and Buffalo at Toronto's Single-A and Triple-A fields, respectively, the Blue Jays scratched out a combined home record of 22-22, achieving adequacy while in limbo.
Romano likes Buffalo. He knows the restaurants and was already familiar with Sahlen Field, the single-deck park downtown. But he wanted what he couldn't have. The Canadian border was nearby - 10 minutes from the field by car - but impassable.
"It's a great city," Romano said of Buffalo. "But it's not home."
Home as they know it eluded Toronto's teams for much of 2021. COVID-19 vaccination took time to become ubiquitous, so the NHL's North Division teams played in empty rinks from January to May, welcoming fans back only as the Montreal Canadiens bounced the Maple Leafs from the playoffs. Denied government permission to play at Scotiabank Arena, the Raptors decamped to Tampa for a season. They weren't far from the Blue Jays' Dunedin base.
Toronto's experience was unique even as the pandemic nixed sports spectatorship everywhere. In 2020, most of the fans at baseball games were cardboard cutouts. Floating heads were beamed electronically into the NBA bubble. Normalcy was promised when the calendar turned - and it happened for most people. But Canadians had to be patient for longer.
Players compete at a remove from their adoring onlookers. Walls, plexiglass, and sidelines uphold this divide. But what happens when the distance between a team and its fans becomes much greater? What does it feel like to play a season on shaky footing - living out of suitcases, having no one there to cheer you on - and then go home?
"It's been a blessing for us, man, to get that love back in the arena," Raptors guard Fred VanVleet said last week - before COVID-19 cases surged and Ontario halved venue capacity.
"It's light-years better than playing in front of nobody on the road," Raptors head coach Nick Nurse said recently. "Playing in Tampa in front of nobody or playing in front of 3,000. Going to San Francisco last year, there was nobody in the streets at all. It's so far away from all that stuff."
When the pandemic struck in 2020, the Raptors trained in Orlando for the month preceding the bubbled postseason. They returned to Florida last December - the first NBA team displaced from its market since Hurricane Katrina forced the then-New Orleans Hornets to relocate to Oklahoma City from 2005-07. The Raptors took over the fourth floor of the JW Marriott hotel next to Amalie Arena. They practiced in a ballroom with chandeliers overhead.
At the arena, the locals admitted under strict attendance limits tended to root for the opposition. A midseason COVID-19 outbreak sidelined VanVleet, Pascal Siakam, and the coaching staff. The Raptors went 1-13 in March, presaging a final record 18 games below .500 and their first losing season in eight years. Kyle Lowry barely took the court from that point forward.
Up north, the Maple Leafs holed up for consecutive days in Montreal, Vancouver, and Canada's NHL cities in between, playing baseball-style series to minimize travel. They won 18 of 28 home games and 17 of 28 on the road. Barren and sanitized, no rink conferred much of a home advantage. Scotiabank Arena was eerie, not electric.
"It kind of sucked," said Maple Leafs forward Wayne Simmonds, the 14-year NHL veteran from the suburb of Scarborough, who signed with Toronto in the fall of 2020.
"Toronto being my hometown, I wanted to play for the Leafs. Part of that was the experience of having fans in the stands. Having my friends and family be able to come watch me. My wife and my daughter. Unfortunately, last year, it just wasn't reality."
This season began differently. Before the Omicron variant prompted 50% capacity, the Maple Leafs and Raptors had returned to filling almost every seat.
"I felt like my first real game was when we stepped on the ice this year," Simmonds said last week. "The building was buzzing. I've played in Toronto before, obviously, on the visiting side. I didn't think the fans were that loud, particularly. But when we stepped out on the ice, and we did those (player) introductions, it sent chills down my spine."
Romano grew up in Markham, Ontario, close enough to run the bases on kids' days at what was then the SkyDome. Drafted out of college in 2014, he stuck with the big club in 2020 for the 60-game season the Blue Jays spent based at Sahlen Field. Players were grateful Buffalo accommodated them. Blue Jays fandom is common there, though New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox fans - just as they did in Dunedin in April and May - swarmed Sahlen on some nights in June and July.
Nothing excuses Toronto's middling start to 2021, Romano said. Once the team received approval to return home, though, "everyone got rejuvenated." Allowed to host 15,000 fans starting on July 30, the Blue Jays reeled off 25 wins in 37 games at the Rogers Centre. They finished with 91 wins and stayed in the American League wild-card chase until the season's last at-bat.
"We are human. You try to tune (the noise) out as much as you can when you're on the field," Romano said. "But it does make a difference having your hometown crowd really cheering for you. As opposed to when you're going on the road and everyone wants to see you do bad."
Before Toronto's teams could return home, silver linings became discernible as each squad's season went on. Simmonds enjoyed the extended stopovers in opponents' cities, a novelty in the NHL. Facing the same six Canadian clubs also fanned the flames of new and dormant rivalries.
"Winnipeg, we wouldn't have maybe as much animosity between the two of us if we hadn't played 10 times last year," Simmonds said. "We got the opportunity to play teams from the west that we don't usually play and reignite some of the passion - some of the fire - that the guys have."
At the end of the Raptors' Tampa sojourn, VanVleet told reporters that the city was great. The residents and arena staff were welcoming. He'd spotted an alligator from his rented house's back porch. It didn't snow. But he described the season as inconsistent - logistically, medically, emotionally. He spent weeks in the spring wishing it was over, pining for familiar routines and for "where we're supposed to be."
A couple of weeks ago, Nurse shared his perspective on the homecoming.
"This is the first time in ages that I feel like I'm back in a rhythm. I come to practice, go to work, go home, play with the kids, put them to bed, and then get in front of my TV and start locking in on watching games," he said.
"I was just enjoying game-surfing last night. I haven't had much of a chance to do that, for whatever reason, in the environment that I'm used to."
Beyond Toronto, one lamentable trend emerged when fans returned to games: Fewer of them could control their impulses to misbehave.
A pattern emerged during the opening week of the NBA playoffs. In Utah, three people in the stands made racist remarks to Ja Morant's parents. In Philadelphia, a season-ticket holder poured popcorn on Russell Westbrook's head. One Madison Square Garden patron spat on Trae Young as he waited to inbound the ball. At TD Garden, one spectator hurled a water bottle at Kyrie Irving, triggering assault and battery charges.
Then someone ran onto the court midgame in Washington to slap the backboard. He came up short, and security tackled him.
Less serious misadventures included the New York Mets' tiff with boobirds. Emboldened by a couple of wins that snapped a 2-12 skid, some players aimed thumbs-down gestures at the Citi Field crowd. Second baseman Javier Baez outlined his logic: "When we don't get success, we're going to get booed, so they're going to get booed when we're a success."
That same Sunday in August, Bryson DeChambeau walked uphill to the clubhouse at the PGA TOUR's BMW Championship, sour after missing birdie putts on three straight playoff holes. "Great job, Brooksie!" one heckler yelled, staking out a side in DeChambeau's feud with Brooks Koepka. DeChambeau spun and shouted at the fan to "get the f--- out!"
These scenes coalesce and present a dilemma to Daniel Wann, a Murray State psychology professor who studies sports fandom. Scientists don't draw definitive conclusions from small samples. But it sure seems clear this friction was a product of the times.
"Look at it this way: These fans, for the previous 12 months or so, all of their interactions were via online communities and social media. It's pretty easy to be, let's say, less than civil in those scenarios," Wann said.
He added: "Maybe some of them got used to the freedom that you have and the anonymity that you have when you're online. ... But now we see (this misconduct) dying down. Maybe people realized, 'Oh, yeah, I should behave myself. I can't just hide behind my computer screen.'"
At many more games and tournaments, good manners have prevailed. The same goes for the thrill of having fans back in the action.
Simmonds feels this in warmup when his wife and daughter tap on the glass. In October in Chicago, during the Maple Leafs' first U.S. trip since March 2020, he bounced on his skates as fans cheered Jim Cornelison's operatic national anthems. Games crackle because people watch them live, he said. They add oomph.
Romano agreed.
"The fans definitely mean more," he said. Before the first pitch on July 30, avid Blue Jays supporters welcomed players back in a video that aired on the Rogers Centre jumbotron. They thanked the ballclub for enlivening the city, diverting their attention, and giving them cause to jump off the couch.
"You don't think of that sometimes when you're playing," Romano said. "Some people use sports as their outlet to escape."
Some fans haven't raced back to the stands. Piped-in crowd noise is a 2020 relic, and Wann said arenas have looked and felt as they're supposed to. But they are a little emptier than usual. As of last week, attendance in nine NBA markets and 13 NHL cities was down by more than 10% compared to 2018-19 - the last uninterrupted season. There are other factors, but not everyone is comfortable thronging indoors as the pandemic continues.
Wann shared a rosier counterpoint: All things considered, 10% isn't much of a drop.
"If I was in charge of putting rear ends in those seats, I might be concerned," Wann said. "(But) to say that your attendance is 90% of what it was before a global pandemic - I mean, doesn't that tell you just how important fandom is to people?"
Last week, COVID-19 outbreaks upended the NBA and NHL seasons. Health protocols sidelined dozens of players in each league, including Siakam, Simmonds, and other members of their respective teams. Some NBA games and cross-border NHL matchups were postponed, and the NHL is pausing early for the holidays. The end of the year feels like the beginning.
The Maple Leafs blew Game 7 against Montreal last spring, but as their season pauses, they again rank high in the NHL in points, goal differential, and home wins. Lowry's departure has forced the Raptors to retool. Half the team didn't experience the Tampa season. Half the team is under 24. To try to climb the standings is to weather growing pains - pains like starting this season 2-8 at home before improving to 7-9.
"These young guys are understanding what it takes to use the crowd and get the crowd into it," VanVleet said last week.
"When we're at our best, this is probably the best home court you can find in the NBA. I just want these guys to be able to experience that. We've got to be a good team to experience it at its best. I think we're getting there."
With baseball on hold, the Blue Jays wait. Before the lockout, the 91-win team that missed the playoffs moved on from Robbie Ray, the departed AL Cy Young winner, by extending Jose Berrios and agreeing to pay Kevin Gausman $110 million over the next five years. The front office has signaled, as Romano puts it, that 2022 is "go time."
As he made the point, his mind wandered to 2016. Romano's minor-league season was over that October when he took in the Blue Jays' ALDS finale against the Texas Rangers. Capitalizing on an errant double-play throw in the 10th inning, Josh Donaldson scampered home to secure Toronto's series victory. The crowd erupted, and Romano saw the rubber beads dance on the Rogers Centre turf.
He wants to witness that in uniform. He got a glimpse in September when the playoff chase crescendoed and capacity for Toronto's last homestand doubled to 30,000 people.
"It felt like 50," Romano said. "But I can only imagine what 50,000 will feel like again."