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."

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2022 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

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.'"

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2022 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

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.

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2022 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

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."

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2021 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

Throughout December, we’re writing stories about records, spotlighting a fresh or overlooked angle behind sports' biggest milestone chases. Read Part 1 about Steph Curry.

On Jan. 13, 2006, Alex Ovechkin received a pass on the move against the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim. At his opponent's left faceoff dot, he wired a wrister through two sets of legs - those of the backtracking defenseman and goalie J.S. Giguere - to seal a hat trick in style. This was his 30th career NHL goal and first in overtime.

On Jan. 24, 1986, Wayne Gretzky dispossessed a New Jersey Devils winger and skated with speed into the offensive zone. Down 6-4 earlier in the game, the Edmonton Oilers prevailed 7-6 on Gretzky's snipe past Craig Billington. This was his 466th NHL goal - and first in OT.

Ovechkin is 144 goals shy of Gretzky's all-time record haul. By lighting the lamp 20 times this season, the Washington Capitals captain is on track to pass Jaromir Jagr before the February Olympic break. If he continues at this pace, he'll leapfrog Gordie Howe early next season.

Pursuing Gretzky will headline the stretch run of Ovechkin's career. So, here's a subplot to think about in the meantime: when he retires, how many more goals than Gretzky will he have potted in overtime?

The scoreline is 24-2; Ovi's league-record total dwarfs Gretzky's output in the extra frame. The fourth period existed for 16 of Gretzky's 20 NHL seasons, yet OT goals account for a minuscule 0.22% of his hallowed career sum. Ovechkin has scored twice in OT against Frederik Andersen alone.

Gretzky's peers were more productive in overtime. Mario Lemieux racked up 11 career OT goals; Mark Messier notched eight; Jari Kurri scored seven; Paul MacLean recorded six in 768 fewer games.

This aberration doesn't exactly mar the Great One's legacy. But it's shaped the record chase, morphing into a meaningful edge for Ovechkin as he gets closer to 894.

So what's going on here? Why is Ovechkin far more prolific in OT?

"I think there are probably three reasons," said Randy Gregg, a retired Oilers defenseman who played with Gretzky in the 1980s.

The first reason: despite scoring a ton, Gretzky was a pass-first player, as reflected by his record 1,963 assists. The second: Ovechkin's ice time spikes in OT - the Oilers were able to spell Gretzky by playing Messier, history's best No. 2 center. The third: when Gretzky did skate in the clutch, he tended to magnetize the opponent's attention.

"You'd have to key on the best player in the history of the game," Gregg said in a recent interview. "During the really tense times, either overtime or deep in the playoffs, Wayne would have one or two or three players on him."

In 1942, at the outset of the Original Six era, the NHL nixed overtime due to reductions on wartime train travel; to head home postgame, visiting teams had to get to the station pronto. Tie games ended as such for four decades, until the president of the Quebec Nordiques, Marcel Aubut, convinced the league's board of governors in 1983 that reinstating sudden death would excite fans.

OT was back, but other quirks of the era curbed Gretzky's opportunities to score.

One was his squad's firepower, which normalized blowout wins. Between 1983-84 and 1987-88, Gretzky's Oilers won more games by four-plus goals (78) than they settled in OT (65), per Stathead. Edmonton won 17 of those OT games, lost eight, and tied 40. Since Ovechkin's NHL debut, the Capitals have played 314 OT periods, netting a winner in 92 of them.

The OT format differed in Gretzky's day. Extra frames were played at five-on-five and no loser point was awarded. Valuing the point that a deadlock guaranteed, most coaches seemed content to play it safe.

"They were happy with ties after 60 minutes and they were happy with ties after 65 minutes," retired NHL goalie Andy Moog, Gretzky and Gregg's longtime Oilers teammate, told theScore recently.

"There wasn't any change in strategy. You didn't go for it to get the extra point."

OT changed to four-on-four in 1999, when the loser point was introduced. Ovechkin scored 15 goals in this configuration and has tallied nine since 2015, when skaters were capped at three-a-side. OT periods now devolve into a track meet or cat-and-mouse affair, as the team with the puck tries to maintain control until it can create a prime scoring chance.

"If you're going to have one shot on net in overtime, who would you want to have it?" Gregg said. "Alex Ovechkin comes to mind."

Gretzky's overtime heroics were scarce but dramatic.

One night in 1983, Gretzky put up eight points in New Jersey and called the Devils a "Mickey Mouse organization" that was ruining the NHL. He apologized for that jab but salted the wound in the 1986 game, stripping Doug Sulliman of the puck in OT to spring himself for the game-winner.

"In my opinion, it was a hook," Billington said postgame to reporters, including United Press International's Tom Shand. "But we're the New Jersey Devils and they're the Oilers and he's Wayne Gretzky."

Gretzky's other OT goal was poetic. On Oct. 15, 1989, he returned to Edmonton with the Los Angeles Kings and broke Howe's career points record. Gretzky's record-setting 1,851st point was a backhand goal that tied the score in the last minute of the third period. The game paused for him to greet Howe, hug Messier, and deliver a speech. When it resumed, he beat Bill Ranford in OT on a wraparound.

Then there was playoff Gretzky, who scored four overtime goals. His first - against the Kings in 1982 - won Edmonton the game that preceded the Miracle on Manchester. Gretzky's fourth - against the Toronto Maple Leafs in 1993 - capped a power play on which he high-sticked Doug Gilmour and got away with it.

Somehow, Ovechkin has never scored in playoff OT. That blemish aside, his resume is vast and colorful.

His 2006 snipe against the Atlanta Thrashers, which tickled twine six seconds after puck drop in OT, completed a hat trick and tied the NHL mark for fastest OT goal. Against the Detroit Red Wings in 2017, Ovechkin's power-play blast from the left dot raised the OT goals record to 20. His 24th and most recent, a wrister off the rush last January that beat the Boston Bruins, tied him with Mike Gartner for eighth on the career goals list.

The fact Ovechkin's gaining fast on 894 is "almost inconceivable" to Gregg. The record chase is a tribute to his transcendence. At the same time, it jogs Gregg's memory of everything that made Gretzky superb, which includes his playmaking and unselfishness. Credit where it's due: Gretzky only scored twice in regular-season OT, but he doled out 15 assists.

"All you had to do was get into an opening," said Gregg, who scored once in overtime, off a Gretzky assist in 1987.

"Somehow, with his old piece of lumber - the Titan stick that was about 400 pounds, it seemed like - he could get the puck through sticks, through skates, through legs. And not just to you, but right on your tape, flat as anything."

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2021 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

The people of Saint-Narcisse, Quebec, Yanni Gourde's hometown, packed 10 buses when they flocked an hour south to Victoriaville to watch the last regular-season game he played in junior.

He treated them to a show. Gourde's team, the Victoriaville Tigres, handed out thousands of yellow T-shirts to salute his 2011-12 QMJHL scoring title. Coach Yanick Jean wore one to spice up his pregame speech. Then Gourde met the convoy's expectations, eviscerating the Shawinigan Cataractes for a goal and four assists in a 7-5 win.

"Racking up points," Jean said. "That's what he was doing that year."

Offensive punch was Gourde's calling card a decade ago, when he bagged close to two points nightly as a 5-foot-9 overager who'd gone undrafted to the NHL. Gourde was used to the snub; no QMJHL club drafted him, either. From humble origins, he became a Stanley Cup champion twice over, pestering puckhandlers and scoring in the clutch as the Tampa Bay Lightning surged to back-to-back titles.

It was no surprise when Macklemore called Gourde's name in the Seattle Kraken expansion draft. Two months into the Kraken's NHL debut, they're several points out of the Western Conference playoff picture, but Gourde's fit in fine. Coming off summer shoulder surgery, he's put up 16 points in 22 games while matching up against elite opposition, rising to fulfill his city's standards as he did in Victoriaville.

"I think he's become a fan favorite already because of his passion and his tenacity," Kraken assistant general manager Jason Botterill told theScore recently.

Plenty of Kraken veterans have interesting backstories. Jaden Schwartz and Vince Dunn won the Cup with the St. Louis Blues in 2019. Jordan Eberle came close but never made the final with the Edmonton Oilers and New York Islanders. Once traded for Taylor Hall, former Oilers defenseman Adam Larsson signed in Seattle for a fresh start. Mark Giordano, the 38-year-old captain, just exited COVID-19 protocol and is 31 appearances away from playing his 1,000th NHL game.

Then there's Gourde, the Kraken archetype. His scrappy, underdog journey to the hockey mountaintop aligns with the identity the league's 32nd club is trying to establish. Namely: Be miserable to play against for 60 minutes, and don't let up.

"Nothing's going to come easy for us. We're not the most talented group. But we do have something in common. We work hard," Gourde said in a phone interview this week.

"It's been like that for my whole career: trying to be relentless on the puck, stay on the puck, do the right thing every time I'm on the ice," he added. "Little details of the game. Not forcing plays. Wait for your chances. You don't have to make the hero play every shift. Just being smart and competitive and trying to win every battle I'm in."

Seattle is 9-15-2 so far this season, and goaltending is largely to blame.

A low-event team that doesn't concede many dangerous chances, the Kraken have generated 49.18% of expected goals at five-on-five, according to Natural Stat Trick. But their goalies grade out as the NHL's worst - by save percentage (.875), by high-danger save percentage (.766), and by Philipp Grubauer's goals saved above expected mark (minus-16.87) as measured by Evolving-Hockey.

Gourde's fared better in the role of jack-of-all-trades center. He plays 18:51 a night, second among Kraken forwards to Alex Wennberg. Like Joonas Donskoi, Gourde logs minutes on the power play and penalty kill. Like Morgan Geekie, he wins 54% of his faceoffs. Like Schwartz, he's among the team leaders in primary assists. He's drawn 10 penalties and taken three, one of the league's best differentials.

Twice this season, Gourde's scored in the first minute of regulation, both times by speeding into open space and teeing off from the top of the faceoff circle. When Seattle visited the Buffalo Sabres recently, Gourde's merciless stick-lift of Rasmus Dahlin cued up Carson Soucy's shorthanded opening goal. Later, his quickness and vision on the rush led to Schwartz scoring in close.

"What we've talked a lot about is being competitive in every game and bringing a work ethic and a pace of play. That's where Yanni fits our identity to a tee," Botterill said.

"He plays fast and he plays hard. He exemplifies what we're trying to build as an organization."

He checks stars, too. Kirill Kaprizov is the opposing forward that Gourde's faced most frequently this season, per Natural Stat Trick. Not far down the list: Kyle Connor, Leon Draisaitl, Alex Ovechkin, and Artemi Panarin.

Jon Cooper entrusted Gourde with heavy assignments when he centered Tampa Bay's third line, the turbocharger that helped spur two Cup runs. Last postseason, Jonathan Huberdeau burned the Lightning for 10 first-round points, but the Florida Panthers didn't score in the 41 minutes during which Gourde shadowed him at five-on-five. In Game 7 of Round 3, Gourde snuck into the slot and sniped shorthanded to key a 1-0 win over Eberle's Islanders.

Cooper was the coach who likened Gourde and his old linemates, Blake Coleman and Barclay Goodrow, to gnats, so irritating were they to play against. Back in 2017, when Gourde stuck with Tampa Bay out of training camp as a 25-year-old rookie, Cooper's comparison of choice was the Energizer Bunny, since he never stopped moving.

Botterill endorses both analogies: "I can't trump those," he said. They reflect the fact that effort is still Gourde's secret sauce.

"It's a message that we've (emphasized) to our younger players that we draft at age 18," Botterill said. "You look at Yanni: undrafted, but continued to develop, continued to work at his game to eventually get to where he is in the National Hockey League.

"It's a great story. So many kids who get drafted at 18, 19, they think it's done. No, it's still a long process. And, hey, we talk about Yanni's story so much to other players - young prospects in our organization."

When Gourde led the QMJHL in scoring in 2011-12, his 124 points were 23 better than the next guy's tally. He had a lot going for him when he left Victoriaville, Jean said: high-end skill, expert hockey sense, physical maturity, and the nerve to produce in big moments.

What Gourde's game lacked was more dimension. He played with an edge but rarely threw the body, Jean said. His interest in defense was negligible. In 2012, Gourde parlayed an AHL tryout into his first pro contract, but was sent down to the ECHL and skated in 336 games across both leagues before the Lightning called him up permanently.

"At the junior level, when you're dominant, you don't have to take care of those details. There are some guys who get to the pro level and they cannot make the adjustment. If you don't do it, someone else will do it, and he's going to get your spot," Jean said.

"The way (Gourde) plays now, such a complete game, it's really that he worked at it at the next level."

Early in Gourde's odyssey through the minors, he signed with the ECHL's Kalamazoo Wings, whose head coach Nick Bootland saw him tease his NHL potential.

Then a second-year pro, Gourde told his wife, Marie-Andrée, that the Kalamazoo stint was his last shot to carve out a living in hockey. He never had to activate Plan B. Bootland recalls Gourde arriving in tiptop shape, munching minutes on special teams, sticking up for teammates in scrums, and voicing his opinion on the Wings' breakout patterns and other Xs and Os configurations.

To Bootland, competitiveness became Gourde's "biggest separator" once he figured out how to channel his pugnacious streak. Jawing at every opponent who hits or bugs a teammate is admirable, the coach said, but it can distract a player. When that realization clicked, Gourde's relentlessness was a net positive on more shifts.

"If you find a player who's gone down to a four-letter league and then worked his way up to the best league in the world, he's really had to battle for that. He's not going to take anything for granted," Bootland said.

"That's the guy I would have selected (in the expansion draft), knowing who he is and knowing the passion he has for the game and wanting to get better on a daily basis. Who (else) would you want to lead your team?"

Kraken management agreed. Exposed in the draft because Tampa Bay protected four defensemen, Gourde was already gone from the Lightning in August, when he and Marie-Andrée ate maple taffy from the Stanley Cup in Saint-Narcisse. In October, Seattle tapped him, Eberle, Larsson, and Schwartz as alternate captains to Giordano.

Kraken coach Dave Hakstol has shuffled his forward lines this season, testing how new combinations jell. When Gourde centers Brandon Tanev and Calle Jarnkrok, Hakstol has praised the trio's diligence and pace. Gourde said he's enjoyed lining up with Schwartz and Eberle, whose compasses are oriented in the same direction.

"They want to go north. They want to make the right plays," Gourde said. "That's right into my game and right into my identity."

In November, when Gourde returned to Tampa to receive his second Cup ring, Seattle lost 3-0 in a reflection of the NHL's pecking order. The Kraken managed a season-low 17 shots against that lockdown Lightning defense. The literal silver lining: Gourde is a product of that winning environment. Down the line, Botterill said, he pictures Gourde passing on his workhorse habits and playoff wisdom to Seattle draft picks.

His no-quit approach, too. A few weeks ago, Seattle was shorthanded and trailing the Chicago Blackhawks at home when Gourde outmuscled Seth Jones in a puck battle. Gourde shoved Alex DeBrincat behind the Chicago net, drew a penalty when Jones roughed him, and dropped the gloves when DeBrincat sought retaliation himself.

TNT's cameras captured Gourde smiling as they punched each other.

"You can see he's enjoying being in the game. Enjoying being in the atmosphere in our building right now. Enjoying being a Kraken," Botterill said. "It's a pretty cool thing to watch."

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2021 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

These days, any number of deterrents could explain why a fan would decline to buy sports tickets. Having to sit in a crowd for three hours; potentially exposing their kids to COVID-19; paying top dollar to incur the risk while watching a bad team, a buzzkill in plenty of pro markets.

Everyone has their reasons to stay home, and those decisions add up. NBA and NHL attendance are way down from 2018-19, the last season in either league that COVID-19 didn't shorten. Through Thursday, 23 NBA and 23 NHL franchises were experiencing spectatorship decreases. Of those 46 teams, 27 have seen attendance dip by more than 10%. Eight clubs are down more than 20%.

These teams are spread across the United States and Canada, but all are playing indoors during a pandemic that won't relent.

The proportion of U.S. sports fans who said they'd be comfortable going to games indoors doubled between March and July to peak at 53%, according to survey data from intelligence company Morning Consult. But the trend cooled and that figure has stalled below 50% throughout the fall.

Outdoor attendance didn't boom in 2021; MLB's full-season total slumped to a 37-year low, partly because of capacity restrictions. Yet people seem warier about congregating under one arena roof.

"I watch NHL games every night," said Rodney Paul, a Syracuse University sports economist. "When they put the wide, pan-out camera on, it's like: Wow. There's a lot of empty seats. It's something that you don't remember seeing (before)."

What other variables are curbing crowd size? What can the leagues do to try to reverse the drop? To assess, theScore spoke to three authorities on the subject: Paul; Victor Matheson, a sports economist at Holy Cross; and Alex Silverman, who analyzes Morning Consult's sports survey data.

Their thoughts, which they shared in separate interviews this week, have been condensed and edited for clarity.

theScore: In your opinion, to what degree is indoor hesitancy - people not wanting to be in crowds inside - depressing NBA and NHL attendance?

Matheson: It certainly has to be a factor. The (infection) numbers are not great in the U.S. As much as the vaccines are extremely useful, they still don't completely prevent people from getting COVID. In a world where there are lots of unvaccinated people and lots of COVID out there in the general public, it's not a completely safe bet going to a (crowded setting).

A bunch of places have vax mandates to be able to go inside buildings. If you don't have a vax mandate, people are going to be more reluctant to go. If you do have a vax mandate, you're cutting out about 30% of the potential clientele at this point.

Silverman: Our surveys show that there's significantly less comfort attending indoor sporting events right now than outdoor sporting events. The share of sports fans that said they'd be comfortable attending an indoor sporting event is below 50%. That's a number that you can look at for perspective on how many people this might be impacting.

Paul: I've traveled a bit since (the U.S.) opened up and I've gone to different sporting events. I think there are areas of the country where you can still see hesitancy. Even if it's not mandated, you see people in masks at different events. Whereas other areas of the country, it looks like it did years ago.

According to Morning Consult's survey data, more and more Americans said they'd be comfortable attending games as spring turned to summer, but that trend has plateaued since July. Why do you think that's the case?

Silverman: Ever since the Delta variant came into the picture, that put a damper on people's initial hope that things were going to go back to normal.

Matheson: Here in the United States, we got down to about 10,000 cases per day on average by late June. That was all driven by huge increases in vaccination between December and June. I live in a county with about a million people, and we were down to less than 10 new cases a day. What's the chance you're going to run into one of those 10 people out of a million out in public when you go to a movie or concert or sporting event?

But thanks to anti-vaxxers who held out, as well as the surge in Delta, by today, we've got roughly eight times the number of cases a day. I went to my first movie in 15 months in June. I have not been back since because what was looking pretty safe in June is looking much less safe here in November.

How do you think the pandemic has changed people's habits and the way fans consume sports?

Matheson: The pandemic probably accelerated the long-run trend of people improving the ability to watch at home. I'm old, right? I remember my family getting its first color TV. You couldn't even see a puck on the ice. But nowadays, everyone has a 60-inch flat screen that's high-def and you can get every possible game from every possible league around the world live with a touch of a button - while being able to sit on your couch and not have to drink $13.75 beer, pay $25 for parking, and share a bathroom with 1,000 other people.

People had a whole year to sit at home and upgrade their experience. They needed to upgrade their internet anyway so they could work from home. We've just accelerated that natural trend to watch sports at home rather than live.

Paul: You get into these habits of being able to watch sports. You follow the home team, you look at their schedule, and that tends to set how you spend your Tuesday night at 7 p.m. But now, you might start to look (elsewhere) because there (were) no games on and realize, 'I like this action-adventure. I like this comedy show.'

There are so many entertainment options to choose from now. The world changed and the game was not going on, so (fans) looked for something different. Maybe they settle into that habit. The younger group, they might enjoy playing video games more than they enjoy watching the games. How do you deal with that as those fans get older?

The Carolina Hurricanes are a rare NHL team that's experiencing major attendance growth from 2018-19. The same goes for the Brooklyn Nets in the NBA. Both franchises drew small crowds a few years ago and now are at the top of the standings. Is that the most sensible explanation for why they're outliers?

Matheson: The Brooklyn Nets have added several of the best players, maybe in the history of the game. A team that improves itself on the ice or on the court may do enough to overcome the natural headwinds that all the teams in the league are going through.

That's obviously the Nets' explanation. It also could be that in some places, people are more comfortable going to games because of high vaccination rates or vaccine mandates at the stadium. A place like New York, where you've got a lot of excess demand usually, that's the sort of thing that you might benefit from. Even if you lose 20% or 30% of the population because they refuse to go get vaccinated, the remaining 70% of the New York City population is still plenty to be able to fill up that arena.

The biggest attendance losers aren't exclusively teams that are having poor seasons, but many of them are. In the COVID-19 era, how does seeing your team lose games reduce the incentive to go watch live?

Silverman: Elliotte Friedman, from Sportsnet in Canada, said something to the effect of: "This is a really bad year to be bad." Attendance is soft generally. The potential for a bad team to have attendance drop off is more significant. It'll be really interesting to see, in terms of renewals, how much season tickets are impacted heading into next season for some of those teams that are struggling.

Matheson: Maybe in the COVID world, having a bad team is even worse than in a non-COVID world. You might say, 'Well, look. I'm willing to put up with the risk of COVID to see LeBron James or Kevin Durant. But I'm not willing to do that to see a lineup of NBA second-stringers.' In a pre-COVID world, you'd be like, 'Ehh. It's a fun night out on the town regardless.'

Paul: The economics play a role there, too. The cost to be able to take your family to a game, or for two people to be able to go to a game, is pretty expensive. When you're having to cut back elsewhere, you may not go to as many games. If people don't have as much money and they're more hesitant to go out, (plus) the team's not very good, why would you risk it?

What could the NBA and NHL and their teams do to draw fans back?

Matheson: Support widespread vaccination. Spectator sports were among the industries that were most hard-hit by COVID. It's definitely in their best interest to make sure everyone gets vaccinated. Because that's how we all get back. I think vaccine mandates are probably a very positive thing for them. It makes people more confident to go to the games. It gives one more carrot to anti-vaxxers to go out and get that shot.

The more people who get the shot, the more COVID gets beaten back, and as soon as COVID is a minor annoyance in the background, the more people are going to be willing to go to these games.

Silverman: In baseball, you've seen things in recent years like subscription-style ticketing, where you can sign up (for a fixed fee) and go to however many games you want to on a monthly basis.

Some of these things aren't as easy as flipping a switch. But (teams are) trying to make the in-person experience more compelling when they build these new facilities. I was just at UBS Arena, the (New York) Islanders' new building. They're trying to incorporate more social spaces into the buildings to make it a more social experience; give you something that you can't get watching the game at home.

Paul: If you go out, you really want to be entertained. (The Nashville Predators have) musical acts in between periods. The first (NHL) game I went to in Vegas, it blew me away. It's that and focusing on having the proper customer service. Some minor-league stadiums that I went to right after they started letting people in misjudged numbers, so they ran out of different beverages and food items. I think that turns people away.

If many people drive to your games, you could potentially reduce parking prices in response to higher gas prices. It's different ways to get some attention and bring people back in.

I think it also is a feedback loop. If you go to a game and there aren't that many fans there and your team is losing and the atmosphere is not very fun, you're unlikely to go back.

Why should leagues be concerned if this trend persists? What's the significance of such a big, comprehensive downswing in attendance?

Matheson: Even in a world where we all have these giant TVs in our living rooms, even in a world that's dominated by television and media rights, teams in a league like the NBA and NHL still make around half, or maybe a little less, of their money from people going into the arena. A 10% or 20% drop in attendance means a 10% or 20% drop in that portion of their revenue stream. That basically means a 5% or 10% drop in (net) revenue. That's a big deal.

Silverman: The NHL is the big one in that regard. Maybe not quite as much now that they have these new television rights deals in the U.S. But it's definitely important for these leagues to have consistent, stable revenue from attendance.

We saw last year that people aren't as inclined to watch at home when there aren't people in the stands. You don't want to have a half-empty building on TV, either. I'd say those are the reasons it's important for them to right the ship.

Paul: With smaller sports and minor-league sports, it would kill that. You have to have people come into the arena to have minor-league sports be viable. Whether it's something like minor-league baseball spread across the U.S. or junior hockey in places across Canada, those are some of the most fun experiences I've had (at) games. But being able to get the junior hockey (TV) package, I watch those games, as well. It's the same thing: Tons of empty seats.

Beyond sports, spending in general, especially on travel and entertainment outside the home, remains down in the U.S. from before the pandemic. So sports aren't unique - they aren't the only thing people are spending less on. Should sports businesspeople be encouraged or discouraged by that?

Matheson: One of the real hard things in economics is that you can have an economy that's just as big as before, but if what we're spending on is different, this can cause massive disruption and dislocation and hardship for some people.

That all the ports are backed up and there are all these container ships waiting, that's actually a good thing because people are buying so much stuff. (But) we're buying different things. That's a hard world for people who run movie theatres and run live concert venues and run live spectator sports. Those certainly haven't recovered, and, in the case of movie theatres, for example, may never recover.

Silverman: There are some things that are unique to sports that the industry was grappling with even before the pandemic. This next generation expresses their fandom differently. (Gen Z watches) less sports in general than other generations. I would also say that the industry has never been more lucrative in terms of the amount of the money that the leagues are getting for media rights.

Overall, I think the sports industry is healthy. But I don't think you can write off everything to a general downturn in consumer spending.

Paul: Sports had a huge opportunity (when spectators returned) because it's something that came out of this that people were able to latch onto. We haven't necessarily seen that as a complete driving force.

Maybe it's not as bad as we think it is because (the problems exist) across the board. But there's probably still concern because you want to be back at where you were before, in terms of the number of people coming out to watch your games, if not more than before. You've lost that upward momentum.

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2021 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

Early in his NHL career, Mark Messier hatched an offseason ritual with his brother and a couple of friends: Spin a globe and fly to where his finger landed. Messier's crew rode motorbikes in Thailand, drank psychedelic tea at a Barbados hostel, and left a German nightclub as the sun rose to jet straight to Ibiza. The summer getaways rejuvenated him - how else could he have played 25 seasons? - and taught him things about the world.

"I was interested in the way people live. I was interested in different cultures and different ways of life and different practices and different spiritualities," Messier said. "I loved the adventure of the travel, but I also loved the education."

Messier reminisces about these trips in his new memoir, "No One Wins Alone," published Tuesday, which he wrote with sportscaster Jimmy Roberts. Elected to the Hall of Fame as soon as he became eligible in 2007, Messier remains hockey's consummate leader and power center. Few players scored and won so often. Between 1984 and 1990, he helped deliver five Stanley Cups to the Edmonton Oilers, the last of them after Wayne Gretzky was traded. In 1994, Messier captained the New York Rangers to their first title in 54 years.

His No. 11 is retired in Edmonton and Manhattan. Only Gretzky and Jaromir Jagr tallied more career points than his 1,887. He ranks third in games played (1,756) behind Patrick Marleau and Gordie Howe, the latter of whom Messier faced in the World Hockey Association when he was 17 and Howe was 51. Howe wheeling around the ice pregame, Messier wrote in his memoir, was the only sight in hockey that made him gulp.

Messier turned 60 last winter, and be it in print or on TV, he has memories, opinions, and wisdom to share. The book comes out two weeks into Messier's debut as a studio analyst at ESPN, the NHL's new lead U.S. broadcast partner. He's in the legend's chair that Gretzky similarly occupies at TNT, breaking down the game they used to dominate together.

Messier's travels, for business and for pleasure, have shaped his outlook on how to live and lead. He thinks that curiosity is powerful, that new and varied experiences enrich how people understand themselves. Within a team, Messier wrote, continuity and connectivity make winning possible. So does having leaders who inspire - players who preach selflessness to the rest of the group and then walk the talk.

"The overall purpose of writing the book was to give some insight into how powerful of an experience I had playing on a team," Messier said.

Messier spoke to theScore about a range of topics, including his TV job; the value of emotion, glue guys, and fall costume parties; and what he regrets about his late-career stint with the Vancouver Canucks. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

theScore: Broadly speaking, this book is about your career, about teamwork, and about your perspective on leadership. How would you define leadership in the NHL? In a dressing room, within a team, what is it that the best leaders do?

Messier: Leadership is so multifaceted. There are so many levels of leadership. Dealing with people. Getting people to believe in themselves. Setting an example. Being able to give correction without resentment. Establishing relationships.

It's one thing to go out on the ice and be a good hockey player and lead by example. There are just so many different elements of leadership that are important at the professional level because we're talking about livelihoods. We're talking about security for families. We're talking about the upheaval of families being traded if things don't go well. There's a huge responsibility. I don't think it should be heaped on some young player just because they're a good hockey player.

You won six Stanley Cups as a player.

I like to say we won six Stanley Cups. (Laughs)

Absolutely. One of your insights about winning struck me. A lot of players talk about the importance of staying even-keeled, of avoiding highs and lows. You believe the opposite: that you should feel high when you win and low when you lose. Why do you think that?

Hockey, and I think most sports, or anything you do with passion, is about emotion. You have to play the game with intensity. With that, there's going to be a fluctuation of state of mind. You're disappointed that you didn't play well. You're disappointed that you lost. You're disappointed that you made a mistake. You're disappointed that you made a decision off the ice that affected the team. And you're absolutely fired up and elated when you win - or when you played a great game, you scored a big goal, you made a great decision, you helped a teammate.

The ups and downs of a professional hockey player, it's not a flat-line sport. To try to quell that (emotion) is counterproductive, in my opinion.

Which of your championship journeys do you think about the most?

Now that I've been retired 17 years - 60 years old and thinking back on my career - it's all about the great and fun moments that we had in the dressing room. Those pressure-packed situations: We're in a 20-by-20 foot dressing room staring at each other before we take the ice. Getting dressed at the hotel in New York City and getting on a bus, walking out onto Park Avenue with our equipment on to go to practice.

The journey is the magic ingredient. Of course, you remember the seminal moment of the whistle blowing and hoisting the Stanley Cup and the banner being raised the next year. But it's all the special moments along the way, and the heartache and the heartbreak, and the great, uplifting moments.

After our first Stanley Cup, I'm not going to say there was an emptiness to it, but there was a little bit of a pause (where I thought), a week later, 'Geez, we're not going to the rink. That's where all the fun was.' You know what I mean? Not basking in the fact that we won. Of course, here we are years later and we can really relish the fact we won the Stanley Cup. But it's a whole year. How difficult it is, and how much you have to rely on each other, gave (the journey) such a big impact.

The book is called "No One Wins Alone." To make that point, you note that on your star-studded teams, a lot of guys contributed to the team effort - to winning - from the shadows. Who was an unsung hero of one of your Cup teams that people should know about?

It's always the role players - the players that you think are expendable at the end of the year, that you think you can replace easily - who are sorely missed. Not only because of what they're able to do as a role player, but what they brought off the ice into the dressing room, on the buses, when you traveled.

Those are the galvanizers. The glue guys on the team. They're not easy to replace. We're going to see that in Tampa Bay this year with the six players they lost because of the salary cap. (Blake Coleman, Barclay Goodrow, Yanni Gourde, Tyler Johnson, David Savard, and Luke Schenn all left the champion Lightning in the offseason.)

In the book, I talk about Mark Lamb, a guy who struggled to make it. Here he is (in 1990) playing between Esa Tikkanen and Jari Kurri. A journeyman who could barely stay in the league and here he is replacing Wayne Gretzky. You can't make that stuff up. He was such a great character guy and played such amazing hockey and was such a huge part of our championship team. Loads of character and grittiness and toughness.

Dave Brown - another guy who was an enforcer but was a huge part of our team (that post-Gretzky title season). I could list 50 guys right now who were important but never got the recognition they deserved.

I'm glad you mentioned Tampa Bay. To write about Edmonton's 1984 title, you brought up the experience and pride of the four-time champion Islanders and how hard it was to finally beat them. What do Tampa's opponents have to do this season to topple the champs?

(Tampa's) got the distinct advantage of having swum in the deep end now for a couple of seasons. When you win the Stanley Cup, it changes you. When you go back to back, it changes your knowledge of the game and how to win and how to prepare and what it takes.

Staying healthy will be a challenge for them. They're replacing guys that they lost who were great players, instrumental to their victories. Who's going to replace them? How are they going to bring (the new players) into the culture? How are they going to bring them up to speed, and (instill) the understanding and experience of what it takes to play in the playoffs?

It's not going to be easy. But it's not easy unseating anybody who's won a Stanley Cup.

It's remarkable what Tampa's done. Pittsburgh won back to back. A three-peat, history tells us it's not easy. There's been three organizations and five teams to ever do it. (The Toronto Maple Leafs in the 1940s and '60s, the Montreal Canadiens in the '50s and '70s, and the '80s Islanders.) It'll be interesting to see how that story unfolds.

Another belief you share in the book: The key to leading a successful hockey team is to throw a good Halloween party. Why is that?

When you come to training camp, you're super focused on getting acclimated to your team - even old players coming back again. Getting yourself ready for the season. It's a really intense, focused time for a team. You start the season with new players. You get through the first month of the season. (Halloween) always fell at a perfect time to let your guard down a little bit. Get away from the rink. Get the wives and girlfriends and the entire team together in an environment that's really fun and playful.

It brings out people's personalities. It's one of those things that you can all go back to the dressing room for the next couple of weeks and talk about. It's a team-galvanizing experience. Those shared experiences are critical to a team's success, in my opinion.

I want to ask about your arrival in Vancouver in 1997. You were named captain, replacing Trevor Linden, and you wrote that the way you handled the division in the locker room at the time was among your biggest mistakes in hockey. What do you wish you'd done differently?

Once you have a captain, you can't unseat a captain. It just doesn't work. I thought I was trying to do what was right by being a moderator (between cliques within the team). But in the end, it just wasn't the right thing to do. It didn't sit well with the fan base. It wasn't fair to Trevor. It just was a mistake. It was an honest mistake. It was something that I didn't do with any bad intentions. I was trying to help, but I was trying to help in the wrong way.

If I had to do it again, I would have tried to be in more of a support role for the players there and unify things from the rear. Leadership from the back is not a bad thing. It's very important. I had great leaders around me throughout my career. That's something I would have thought about doing differently.

You and Wayne Gretzky were born 10 days apart in 1961. You started in the NHL with the Oilers together. You wrote in the book that you're effectively family. Now he's analyzing games on TNT and you're working for ESPN. To what extent does that stoke your competitiveness?

I don't look at us as competitors so much. I look at us as a whole part of the ecosystem of the NHL. I think back to Saturday night at 6 o'clock, Hockey Night in Canada with Danny Gallivan and Dick Irvin and the great Foster Hewitt. Those people bringing the game right into our living rooms. I look at it as a chance to do what's been done so brilliantly for the last 60 years - of my life, anyway.

Hopefully, I'll be able to articulate some of the experiences that I had, some of the knowledge that I had, as a player. Articulate some of the challenges that the players face at different times. Hopefully, bring a perspective to the game that resonates with people.

What does it mean to get to do that at the same time as Wayne?

Our lives have revolved around the game of hockey. To have Wayne back in the game is great for everybody. To hear his perspective on the game, we're talking about the greatest, maybe, athlete of the century. The greatest hockey player of all time. To be hearing his insights, for me, as a fan, would be exciting.

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2021 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

A few weeks ago, Tera Black, the chief operating officer of the Charlotte Checkers, received a phone call from American Hockey League headquarters in Massachusetts. League brass had a question about the Calder Cup, which Charlotte won in 2019: "Are you guys planning on sending that back ever?"

The AHL championship trophy is 84 years old, and winners have repeated before, from the powerful World War II-era Buffalo Bisons to the Hershey Bears in 2009 and 2010. But no title reign has resembled Charlotte's.

The Checkers claimed the Calder Cup as the Carolina Hurricanes' farm team, and they now represent the Florida Panthers. They haven't played a game since March 11, 2020 after opting out of last season for health and safety reasons. Two-thirds of the team's staff were laid off, and COVID-19 stopped the AHL from awarding the Cup for a second year.

In a pandemic fluke, the silver bowl remained the Checkers' property - and they could call themselves reigning champions, give or take an asterisk.

Before COVID-19 and later when precautions allowed, the Cup was on display at fan events and backyard parties in Charlotte. The team's top hockey executive brought it to his beer league title game. During the season off, the Checkers printed T-shirts to celebrate their "three-peat," monetizing the irony.

The Cup was in Black's office recently, lying in a trunk within eyeshot as she contemplated everything that's changed about the franchise.

A roster that differs entirely from 2019 returns to play this weekend after 584 idle days. That amalgam of Panthers and Seattle Kraken prospects - the expansion club won't ice its own AHL affiliate for another year - visits Hershey on Saturday to open the Checkers' 72-game schedule. Finally, the champs are back, raring to defend a prize that none of them won.

"It's neat to be in a situation that will be reflected upon in the future as something that's historical. That will likely - and I'm knocking on every piece of wood around here - never happen again," Black told theScore.

"The Cup has such a storied history," she continued. "It's been really unique and nice to have it here in Charlotte for so long. It lets us continue the celebration into what seems like eternity."

The Checkers have played in Charlotte since 2010, when Michael Kahn, a wine and spirits wholesaler, relocated the Albany River Rats from upstate New York.

Before their Calder Cup season, fans elsewhere might have known them for losing the AHL's longest playoff game. Six hours and six minutes after puck drop on May 9, 2018, the Lehigh Valley Phantoms beat the Checkers 2-1 following five overtimes and Alex Lyon's 94-save masterclass in the Phantoms' net. Alex Nedeljkovic's 51 stops paled in comparison, and Charlotte bowed out of the second round a few nights later.

Backstopped by Nedeljkovic, the AHL's goaltender of the year in 2018-19, the Checkers bounced back to finish atop the league standings and reeled off 15 wins in 19 playoff games, coasting to the title. Morgan Geekie's double-OT heroics bounced the defending champion Toronto Marlies in Game 6 of the conference finals. It then took five games to finish off the Chicago Wolves in the title series.

Checkers captain Patrick Brown raised the Calder Cup first, and Black became the first woman whose name is inscribed on the trophy.

Like the NHL, the AHL paused its 2019-20 season when the pandemic started, but it didn't return in a protective bubble to crown a champ. To limit travel in 2020-21, 28 of the 31 AHL clubs played short schedules against divisional opponents. No league-wide playoff was held.

Charlotte retained the Cup without stepping on the ice. COVID-19 cases were peaking nationwide last January when the Checkers, Milwaukee Admirals, and Springfield Thunderbirds decided to sit out the season.

Charlotte's nearest AHL opponent plays eight hours away by bus, meaning the Checkers would have had to hit the road for weeks at a time. Rather than take on that health risk and play at home in front of zero spectators - a state pandemic mandate - the Checkers loaned players who weren't on Florida's taxi squad to the Syracuse Crunch, the Tampa Bay Lightning's AHL affiliate.

Layoffs thinned the Checkers' staff from about 25 employees to eight, and those left faced challenges, like keeping the ice frozen in Bojangles Coliseum, a southern home venue that opened in 1955.

With no games to prep for or attend, Derek Wilkinson, Charlotte's senior vice president of hockey operations, immersed himself in video scouting and studying analytics. The transition was jarring, just like when he retired as a pro goalie 20 years ago.

"Not going to lie: That first week after we decided not to play was well needed for a mental break," Wilkinson said. "But, boy, the days got long after that."

This all happened in the first months of the club's partnership with the Panthers - the teams aligned last September after the Checkers and Hurricanes cut ties - and as Black's business department tried to stanch the loss of incoming revenue. Instead of asking for refunds, most season-seat holders rolled their 2020-21 payments over to this campaign.

Indoor capacity isn't capped in North Carolina anymore, and with the caveat that COVID-19 is unpredictable, the Checkers expect attendance to rebound to past standards. In recent seasons, that's meant upward of 6,000 fans for each game.

"I think absence makes the heart grow fonder," Black said.

Just like in 2019, the Checkers plan to sell beers for a buck during Wednesday home games, but the on-ice product won't resemble the title team.

Andrew Poturalski, Charlotte's top scorer in 2018-19, now plays for the Wolves, Carolina's new AHL affiliate. Martin Necas has graduated to the Hurricanes, Nedeljkovic tends goal for the Detroit Red Wings, Geekie scored a goal during Seattle's inaugural regular-season game, and former head coach Mike Vellucci is a Pittsburgh Penguins assistant.

When the Checkers affiliated with Florida, Geordie Kinnear became the team's new head coach, completing the former River Rats defenseman's full-circle journey back to the franchise. Kinnear was an assistant coach in Albany, then in Charlotte from 2001 to 2016. He shuttled between Syracuse and Sunrise last season, working with some of the Panthers' developmental projects - young guys like Grigori Denisenko, Aleksi Heponiemi, and Serron Noel - who play for the Checkers now.

In Syracuse, Kinnear watched Crunch coach Benoit Groulx foster cohesiveness between Lightning and Panthers prospects, as he'll need to do for the Panthers and Kraken this season.

When Seattle general manager Ron Francis was the GM of the Hurricanes, he helped build the Checkers' Calder Cup lineup, fortifying his relationship with Black, Wilkinson, and Kahn. Construction continues on Seattle's AHL rink in Palm Springs, California, so netminder Joey Daccord is in Charlotte on assignment from the Kraken. So are Luke Henman, the first player Seattle signed; Cale Fleury, the brother of former Checkers blue-liner Haydn Fleury; and Kinnear's assistant coach Dan Bylsma, who won the Stanley Cup and Jack Adams Award once upon a time as Pittsburgh's bench boss.

"We're all very eager to help each other out, where maybe before (the pandemic) we were very competitive," Wilkinson said. "I think we're all a little more appreciative of at least being able to play."

Understandably so. On March 11, 2020, Charlotte erased a third-period deficit to beat the Cleveland Monsters 3-2 in overtime, the squad's last win for 19 months. To come back from that repose, the Checkers have needed to restaff their front office, restock the inventory required to run T-shirt tosses and on-ice intermission contests, and implement COVID-19 safety measures - from cashless sales to player testing - that are already in place league-wide. When the puck drops against Hershey, Wilkinson expects he'll feel relief "to see it again, to feel it again, to be part of it again."

Two weeks ago, the Checkers took care of other pressing business, shipping the Calder Cup to the league's office in Massachusetts.

During the Cup's extended stay in town, the team's doctors got to bring it to their houses. It traveled all over Charlotte and to parts unknown, Black said.

"I won't mention the name of the shipping company that lost it for four days," she added.

Possession restored, the trophy sat in her office ahead of the team's final shindig as champs. Season-ticket holders were invited to skate at Bojangles Coliseum on the last Saturday in September. Some snapped photos of the Cup before it was returned to the AHL.

"We've had a lot of fun with it. But at the same time, it will be nice, I'm sure, for the league to award it to somebody in June of 2022," Wilkinson said. "Hopefully it's us again."

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2021 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

In the surest sign that this NHL season matters across Canada, Pierre Dorion waxed optimistic. The general manager of the Ottawa Senators recently signed a contract extension, and when he spoke about the news, he asserted that his club has turned a corner: "The rebuild is done."

Even the Senators have playoff expectations in 2021-22.

Training camps are underway around the league, kicking off a pivotal year for the teams that briefly comprised the North Division. All seven have doubts to overcome or weighty objectives to fulfill. Ottawa bottomed out early in Dorion's GM tenure and fancies itself respectable again. The Montreal Canadiens just won three more playoff series than the Toronto Maple Leafs have in the salary-cap era. But Montreal's offseason was chaotic, and Stanley Cup finalists rarely repeat the feat.

On Friday, we'll cover why this season promises to be consequential for the Canadian franchises west of Ontario: the Winnipeg Jets, Edmonton Oilers, Calgary Flames, and Vancouver Canucks. For now, let's break down what Montreal, Toronto, and Ottawa are setting out to prove.

Can Montreal stay afloat in the Atlantic?

The North Division has disbanded and the Canadiens, fresh off charging as far as Game 5 of the Cup Final, must acclimate anew to life in the Atlantic. That would be the division that features the Tampa Bay Lightning, the NHL's back-to-back champions; the perennially good Boston Bruins and newly dangerous Florida Panthers; and the Leafs, playoff washouts who nonetheless played at a 100-point pace in three of the past four seasons.

The Detroit Red Wings and Buffalo Sabres figure to challenge for top odds in the draft lottery, so even if each of these heavyweights overtakes the Habs, they'd only need to beat Ottawa in the standings to contend for a wild-card berth against the middleweights in the Metro Division. Eke into the playoffs with a goaltender capable of greatness and victory is attainable in any matchup, as Carey Price proved in the spring against the Leafs, Jets, and Vegas Golden Knights.

Plenty has happened in Montreal since then. The Canadiens lost Phillip Danault to the Los Angeles Kings in free agency, Jesperi Kotkaniemi to the Carolina Hurricanes' cheeky offer sheet, and Shea Weber to a range of lower-body ailments that'll sideline the captain all season (and might force him to retire). Presented the chance to nab Price in the expansion draft, the Seattle Kraken instead selected AHL defenseman Cale Fleury.

When the dust settled, GM Marc Bergevin moved to acquire Christian Dvorak from the Arizona Coyotes, effectively offloading the draft-pick compensation he got from Carolina to plug a gap at center. Bergevin added Mike Hoffman and Mathieu Perreault up front and brokered a four-year deal with defenseman David Savard, Tampa Bay's main deadline addition in 2021. Price is expected to recover from knee surgery soon and Jonathan Drouin will return after missing the playoffs on personal leave.

Also back: Nick Suzuki and Cole Caufield, two of Montreal's three leading scorers in the postseason. They're the forwards who ought to anchor Les Glorieux for the next decade (barring any shenanigans when Suzuki hits restricted free agency next summer). But prolonging Montreal's contention window now is the priority, considering how many key players - Price, Savard, Jeff Petry, Ben Chiarot, Jake Allen - are into their 30s.

History suggests the Canadiens will struggle to mount another deep playoff run. No team that lost in the final has played for the Cup the following season since the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2009. The last runner-up even to reach the conference finals the next year was Tampa Bay in 2016.

More recently, the Habs went 17-11-8 last season against Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, and Winnipeg, the Canadian teams they no longer face frequently. That's a .583 points percentage. Can they come close to matching that standard against Tampa Bay, Boston, and Florida?

Was Dubas right to keep Toronto's core intact?

Six players who dressed for Toronto's Game 7 defeat to Montreal in May went on to leave the team in free agency, charting new courses with the likes of Edmonton (Zach Hyman), Boston (Nick Foligno), Florida (Joe Thornton), and Tampa Bay (Zach Bogosian). Alex Galchenyuk signed a PTO with Arizona, and when Frederik Andersen joined Carolina, Maple Leafs GM Kyle Dubas signed Petr Mrazek in what amounted to a straight goalie swap.

Some of these departures were significant, but they don't represent the reset some corners of the fan base craved after the Leafs bungled yet another first-round playoff series. Dubas stood pat despite this fresh low, declining to explore trade packages for, say, Mitch Marner or William Nylander as they and Auston Matthews prepare to enter a sixth season together.

Nick Ritchie and Ondrej Kase were brought aboard to provide scoring punch, but it's this simple: Winning in the playoffs comes down to how the core performs.

Dubas deciding not to blow it up reflected his faith in Matthews, Marner, Nylander, and John Tavares, and the reality that Toronto needs them to deliver. Marner has to wait until next May for the chance to snap his infamous 18-game playoff goal drought. The Leafs might have ousted Montreal before Game 7 had Tavares not been concussed and suffered a knee injury in the series opener. But what-ifs are cheap when players of their collective caliber command 49.7% of the salary cap.

Is any Cup contender under comparable pressure? Maybe the Colorado Avalanche, who've yet to reach the conference finals with Nathan MacKinnon. Maybe the Vegas Golden Knights, who were massive favorites to beat Montreal. Maybe the Hurricanes, who've knocked on the door for a few years now. Maybe Pittsburgh and the Washington Capitals, whose superstar leaders are squarely in their mid-30s.

Those answers are all stretches, though; Toronto is uniquely stressed. The Leafs know well that this doesn't guarantee victory, but the path to a playoff run starts with winning the Atlantic, which should lock in a favorable matchup in Round 1. Matthews' comeback from wrist surgery and the reliability of the Mrazek-Jack Campbell netminding tandem are storylines to track in the meantime.

Is Ottawa ready to keep rising?

When Dorion succeeded the late Bryan Murray as Ottawa GM in 2016, he inherited a team that came one goal short of winning the following year's Eastern Conference title. Then the franchise's fortunes tanked. The Senators dealt Erik Karlsson and Mark Stone in a fire sale and went on to compile the second-worst record in the NHL between 2017-18 and 2019-20. (The Red Wings earned seven fewer points in that span.)

Finally, the Senators are out of the abyss. They got hot in 2021 amid Vancouver's late-season COVID-19 outbreak and overtook the Canucks by one point, finishing out of the North basement. The Sens flushed their 2-12-1 start and made genuine strides as the season continued. Ottawa played .561 hockey over the remaining 41 games - a league-average mark - and ended the year on a 10-3-1 roll. Progress!

The Senators were free of expectations last season; crowds were barred from Canadian arenas and the team's standings deficit was insurmountable by February. Spectators are about to return, and if they were inclined to generously spot the Sens another season to grow before demanding results, Dorion pre-empted this by declaring the rebuild complete.

The implication: Ottawa doesn't need more high-end prospects to complement the established core of Brady Tkachuk, Tim Stutzle, Josh Norris, Drake Batherson, and Thomas Chabot. Tkachuk, whose RFA contract negotiations continue, led Ottawa with 36 points last season, which tied him for 85th in NHL scoring. The sooner these players boost their production a couple of notches, the smarter Dorion will look.

Improvement on defense needs to be coach D.J. Smith's priority. Ottawa ranked 27th in goals against last season, only slightly better than the prior three years. It's hard to see the Sens contending in the Atlantic until the blue line is equipped to trouble Tampa Bay and Toronto. Michael Del Zotto and Nick Holden were acquired as stopgaps, there to eat minutes until Jacob Bernard-Docker and Jake Sanderson make the leap from the AHL and the University of North Dakota, respectively.

Ottawa's best goaltenders last season were Anton Forsberg, Matt Murray's likely backup; Filip Gustavsson, who'll start for AHL Belleville; and Joey Daccord, whose play and expansion-draft exposure persuaded the Kraken to pick him. Murray ranked bottom five in the league in goals saved above expected, per Evolving-Hockey. If any Senator is embarking on a make-or-break year, it's him.

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

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