ANOTHER REMINDER OF HOCKEY’S BRILLIANCE, EVEN AS MCDAVID CAME UP SHORT
Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals was the event of the sports year, as Florida rallied to win the famed bowl and avoid infamy, while the world’s top star couldn’t score and Canada lost No. 31 in a row
The frenetic rolls of two eyeballs confirmed what we’ve always known. If no sport is better in person than hockey, with rushes and roars, then what possibly beats Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final when Shakespeare assumed lifetimes were at stake? The last few minutes near the Everglades saw Connor McDavid in the Florida goal crease, sliding the puck in temperatures that never allow ice to freeze, trying to tie the game for Edmonton as the world’s greatest player.
And there was America again, shutting down Canada for the 31st straight year, in a definitive finish that nearly compared to the Red Sox overcoming the Yankees and the Falcons blowing a 28-3 lead to New England. The Panthers won, 2-1, and avoided life as only the second team in the NHL, NBA or MLB to blow a 3-0 lead while taking home a 37-pound championship bowl. The Oilers lost in dead mercy, as McDavid became only the sixth losing player to win the Conn Smythe Trophy as postseason MVP.
“It’s not what I thought it would be. It’s so much better,” said Paul Maurice, the winning coach, no longer best known as suffering the most losses in league history.
“This is the best moment of my life so far,” defenseman Aaron Ekblad said.
“It just sucks. It sucks,” McDavid said.
However it ended, this was an event that should remind us of the NHL’s intensity and grandeur, if only we pulled ourselves away from football and basketball. Up north, as we say, they like to think they invented hockey because, well, they did back in 1875. All we did down here was Bettman-ize the game, bringing glory to three places — South Florida, Las Vegas and Tampa Bay — that have won four of the last five Cups. Imagine growing up in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg and an Alberta juncture known as the Northlands, knowing we’ve also had parades in Anaheim, Los Angeles, Dallas and Raleigh, N.C. Why? Canada’s personal tax rates are killers, for one notable reason.
That said, the mad rush of the Oilers created merry hysteria for a competition that once resembled an onslaught. Too bad all finals weren’t filled with steep slopes for both teams, knowing only the 1942 Toronto Maple Leafs returned from an 0-3 deficit against the Detroit Red Wings. Television ratings reversed, reaching a rare number for a deciding game between two sites that many couldn’t pinpoint on a map. With toy rats on the ice — the Panthers once found real rats in their locker room in Miami — the champs celebrated inside a rink in Sunrise, near Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton. You might wonder who wants to play there. Don’t tell Matthew Tkachuk, who won a Cup when father Keith did not, while high-school buddy Jayson Tatum did win an NBA title.
“It’s not a dream anymore. It’s not a dream. It’s reality,” said Tkachuk, traded from Calgary in 2022. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe how good these two years have been. So thankful for this group of guys. It’s the best place, best guys. It’s something really special here with what we have.”
The only better story, in the large picture, would have involved McDavid proving he’s an all-time champion. No one doubts his place among the greats, with his 42 playoff points ranking behind only Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux. He was compared on ESPN’s pregame show — how was Charles Barkley approved to appear? — to Michael Jordan and Michael Phelps. Winning Game 7 could have made him a household name in America, where we knew about him and finally focused on him in June. But he didn’t manage a goal in the final two games.
“He's the greatest player to ever play, in my books," said teammate and friend Leon Draisaitl, who struggled in the series. “Just love sharing the ice with him. He's just a really, really special person. I mean, it speaks to how amazing of a hockey player he is. There's no player in the world that wants to win a Stanley Cup more than him. He does everything right, every single day, just to win it one day. It's really hard with him being sad and being disappointed at the end.”
A pro hockey career is no different than a spin on skates. Goalie Sergei Bobrovsky, who was spectacular, is off to the Hall of Fame after almost screwing up the series in the three losses. “At the end of the day, you don’t do it for the Cups. You do it for the love of the game,” he said. And Maurice? No one knew what general manager Bill Zito was thinking when he hired him two years ago, after Maurice quit the Winnipeg Jets. “I’ve been chasing this for a long time,” he said. "It's got nothing to do with the coach. This group has been special since day one. Everyone in this organization is so supportive of each other.” That goes even when Zito threw a water bottle in a suite after Game 5.
“Bill was with a water bottle? Are the water bottle association people upset?” Maurice said. “Are we going to cancel Bill?”
Zito was too busy crying Monday night and lifting the Cup to the rafters. “They say it's the hardest trophy to win in sports, and you can't imagine how hard it is, until you do it,” Evan Rodrigues said. “Getting to Game 7, we had to do it the hard way. But it was a perfect outcome.”
For Canada, it only reinforced the concept that no trophy is returning. Teams have tried seven times in 31 years and have come up empty. Yet here’s South Florida, where I-95 no longer is known for drug trafficking, winning another sports title after two with the Dolphins, three with the Heat and two with the Marlins.
Sometimes maybe it’s just a simple thought, as captain Aleksander Barkov said after carrying the ornament. “It’s heavy,” he said.
Too heavy for McDavid. Too heavy for Canada.
But light enough to go skinny-dipping in the subtropical wilderness.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.