Wayne Gretzky's Ghost

by Roy MacGregor

  He bends a long finger up toward the line from John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” that graces the Canadiens’ dressing room wall (“To you from failing hands we throw the torch; be yours to hold it high”) and runs it across faces once distributed across the country by BeeHive Corn Syrup—the Rocket, the Pocket Rocket, Boom Boom Geoffrion, Plante—until he stops at one that it seems no twenty-year-old Aboriginal kid from the isolated northern B.C. community of Anahim Lake could possibly know.

  “There’s George Hainsworth,” he says. George Hainsworth?

  And yet—it is somehow perfect. Hainsworth, who died in 1950, is rarely remembered by those who live in the “new” NHL, yet he was the original winner of the Vezina as the league’s top goaltender. He won it three years running and, along the way, established a National Hockey League record—22 shutouts in 44 games—that will never, ever be equalled. He once went for more than 4½ hours of playoff hockey without allowing a goal. He won two Stanley Cups in Montreal and lives on in the Hockey Hall of Fame.

  Hainsworth is dark, calm and serious in his photograph, much as Carey Price is in real life, though the lanky Price is far taller. Hainsworth was renowned for his calm under pressure, seeming almost bored as he turned aside shots and his frantic teammates attempted to clear threatening pucks from around him. The two Montreal goaltenders are—more than eighty years apart—eerily similar.

  “I’m sorry I can’t put on a show like some of the other goaltenders,” Hainsworth said in 1931, when he was at the peak of his game. “I can’t look excited because I’m not. I can’t shout at other players because that’s not my style. I can’t dive on easy shots and make them look hard. I guess all I can do is stop pucks.”

  And so it is with Carey Price. All he does is stop pucks when it seems to count most. Nothing fancy, but everything smooth and relaxed and effective, even when it sometimes appears to others that things are going terribly wrong. Thursday night he fell behind 2–0 when Philadelphia scored on one shot that Price’s own defenceman tipped in and another shot where a Canadiens forward missed his check, but there was no panic. It was almost as if he knew his team would come back, and they did, winning 4–3 less than a minute into overtime on a goal by Tom Kostopoulos.

  He will admit, though, to a slight case of nerves in his very first playoff game, two weeks ago against the Boston Bruins. He was, after all, the untried rookie, just as Ken Dryden was back in 1971, just as George Hainsworth was in 1926. “The first game of the playoffs is the worst,” Price says. “After that, you kind of settle down.”

  How much he settles down and how effective his calm, positional, puck-controlling style is will largely determine how far the last-standing Canadian team goes in the 2008 Stanley Cup playoffs. As former Philadelphia Flyers coach Terry Murray once put it, “As far as you go, they’re taking you.” Murray found out just what that meant a decade ago when his two goaltenders, Ron Hextall and Garth Snow, came up short in the playoffs and, shortly after, Murray lost his job.

  “What pitching is in a short series in baseball,” Detroit general manager Jack Adams said more than a half century ago, “goaltending is in the Stanley Cup playoffs.”

  It is, some will even say to the detriment of the game, a position so dominant that comparing it to pitching does not always do goaltending justice. And yet, almost perversely, its value is not reflected in salary. Of the top ten salaries in the game, not one goes to a goaltender. The highest on the list, Nikolai Khabibulin, who makes $6.75 million a year with the Chicago Blackhawks, is a surprising sixteenth on the list. Price, who may one day live up to his name, makes $850,000 as a rookie.

  Goaltending in today’s NHL often seems even more critical to success than it was in the 1950s when Adams, and everyone else, was in awe of Terry Sawchuk leading the Red Wings to an eight-game sweep of the 1952 playoffs, four of the victories coming from Sawchuk shutouts. Since the Conn Smythe Trophy was introduced in 1965 to honour the best playoff performer, goaltenders have taken the MVP honours fourteen times. Since Patrick Roy led the Canadiens to Canada’s last Stanley Cup in 1993, goalies have taken the prize five times, the most recent being Cam Ward of the Carolina Hurricanes.

  Ward, in fact, is the perfect example of the surprisingly hot goaltender who, in other times, turns to ordinary, but who in one astonishing spring can decide a Cup. The story of the Stanley Cup finalists for a decade or more has, by and large, been the tale of two hot goaltenders finally meeting to decide matters.

  The hope in Montreal, obviously, is that young Carey Price can be as hot as young Ken Dryden was in 1971, as hot as young Patrick Roy was in 1986. If he’s not, they will not move on.

  It is a remarkable pressure situation for such a young man. “The only job worse,” a great Canadiens goaltender, Gump Worsley, once said, “is a javelin catcher at a track-and-field meet.”

  “How would you like it,” Montreal’s great Jacques Plante once asked, “if you were sitting in your office and you made one little mistake—suddenly, a big red light went on and eighteen thousand people jumped up and started screaming at you, calling you a bum and an imbecile and throwing garbage at you?”

  Bill Durnan, yet another Montreal great in the nets, once claimed he lost seventeen pounds in a playoff game—and took early retirement from the profession just to escape the annual crush of expectation.

  And yet, Carey Price hardly seems to have broken a sweat this first night of Round 2. He has showered and dressed and seems perfectly content to sit here in the dressing room until it is again time to strap on the thick white pads at his stall and head out, once again, into the pressure cooker that is the Bell Centre and the demanding Montreal fans.

  Ken Dryden has a different outlook on playoff pressure. And Dryden’s credentials—six Stanley Cups, two Vezina trophies, the Calder Trophy as top rookie and the Conn Smythe—are impeccable. “It’s the ideal time,” Dryden told me several years ago. The Stanley Cup playoffs, he felt, were “the only time when you’ve got absolutely everything going for you.”

  Dryden’s well-considered theory is that a shift takes place between the regular season and the playoffs, a psychological shift among the other players on the team that gives a physical advantage to their goaltender. “In a long season,” he reasoned, “what do you give up first? You’re tired, you’re hurt, so you give up defence—it’s the first to go. In the playoffs, everyone has that extra energy. The players are all coming back. The pucks are cleared. The goalie’s in the best shape of the year as far as getting help. And it affects the goalie, too. You start to take the goals very personally. Every one of them.”

  “That’s definitely true,” says Price. “The players ramp it up. They play harder in front of you, for sure. But you can look at it both ways, as other guys are going to be crashing the net and doing other things to get at you.”

  CBC hockey analyst Greg Millen, himself a former NHL goaltender through fourteen seasons, says Dryden and Price have a point, that “the awareness is so high for everybody” during the playoffs that it can sometimes work to the advantage of the goaltender. “There’s a lot of predictability that might not be there otherwise,” he says.

  Even so, Millen marvels at Price’s calmness under pressure, the sense that if the twenty-year-old’s blood pressure were kept on the Bell Centre scoreboard, it wouldn’t even measure. “He has such a huge maturity on and off the ice,” Millen says. “Way, way beyond his years. Technically, he’s just so good. He has learned at a very young age that ‘less is better.’ It took me eight to ten years to find that out—and by then my career was almost over.”

  Millen’s fascination with Price’s technical wizardry—always in position, superb at clearing rebounds and, when necessary, handling the puck—is shared by all who watch the young phenomenon. Price, however, says he has changed his game dramatically in the past couple of years. “I was pretty wild when they drafted me,” he says. “I was more of a flop-around, stop-it-any-way-you-can kind of goaltender.”

  He learned
the position from his father, Jerry, who, rather coincidentally, was a draft pick thirty years ago of the Philadelphia Flyers his son is up against in Round 2. Father and son would often fly in Jerry’s Piper Cherokee from Anahim Lake—where mother Lynda is chief of the Ulkatcho Band of the Carrier Nation—to Williams Lake so that the youngster could make practices and games in the larger centre. His father’s teaching and natural ability brought early success, taking the younger Price to junior with the Tri-City Americans and then, at eighteen, he was drafted fifth overall by the Montreal Canadiens.

  There were, initially, some doubts raised in Montreal about spending such a high draft pick on a goaltender when many thought the position well covered in Montreal. But soon Price was leading Canada to the world junior championship, where he was named tournament MVP, and last year he won the Calder Cup with the Hamilton Bulldogs. After some back and forth this year, he was handed the No. 1 position with the Canadiens and told to make of it what he can.

  Price credits Montreal goaltending coach Rollie Melanson with turning him into a “hybrid” of two styles, the stand-up and the butterfly. “He really evolved my game into what it is now,” Price says.

  What it is now is impressive, though there were two third periods in the Boston series—a 5–1 loss followed by a 5–4 loss—when doubts were flying as high as the twenty-four Stanley Cup banners in the Bell Centre. He answered that with a most impressive 5–0 shutout to win the seventh game and take Montreal’s hopes to the second round, where he fell behind 2–0 early but soon had them chanting “Car-ey! Car-ey! Car-ey!” as the plucky Canadiens came back for the overtime win.

  This is the age of parity in the NHL, not the age of dynasties, and Carey Price’s life will never be as Dryden described his old job on the January night when they raised his No. 29 to the rafters. “Watching, waiting, not doing much of anything,” Dryden joked about his lonely life in the Montreal net. “That is pretty much what the 1970s were all about—that, and a whole lot of Stanley Cups.”

  That situation will likely never come again, in any hockey city. Right now, Montreal would be grateful merely for a chance at a twenty-fifth Cup. And any hopes it might have rests largely on jersey No. 31, which still has a long, long way to go before it reaches any rafters anywhere.

  “Every round it gets worse,” Price said Wednesday of the mounting pressure on the ice, let alone what that history provides off the ice. “It doesn’t bother me one bit.”

  The Montreal Canadiens mounted an exceptional playoff run two years later, when they defeated Alexander Ovechkin and the Washington Capitals and then Sidney Crosby and the Cup-defending Pittsburgh Penguins. They managed this with truly remarkable goaltending—but not from Carey Price. The darling of the nets now was Jaroslav Halak, who put on one of the greatest playoff performances in recent memory before the outmanned Canadiens fell to the Philadelphia Flyers in the conference final. In the summer of 2010, to great controversy, the Canadiens elected to stick with Price and traded Halak to the St. Louis Blues. Price responded with the best year of his young career, appearing in more games than any goaltender in Montreal’s long history and winning more games in 2010–11 than any Canadiens goaltender since Ken Dryden.

  KESLER’S THE TOTAL PACKAGE

  (The Globe and Mail, May 5, 2011)

  NASHVILLE, TENNESEE

  If the Vancouver Canucks are now Canada’s Team—no matter whether by choice or by default—then the main flag bearer is an American. All Ryan Kesler did to win Game 3 on Tuesday night was score the goal that put the Canucks back into the match at 1–1, set up the goal that put them ahead 2–1 and then, after the Nashville Predators had tied matters late in the third period, draw the dubious penalty in overtime that gave Vancouver a power play and score the winning goal that gave the Canucks a two-games-to-one lead in this series, which continues Thursday at Bridgestone Arena. Not a bad night’s work for someone who hadn’t scored at all in these Stanley Cup playoffs.

  Kesler is, by his own admission, a “streaky” player. He had 41 goals in the regular season, none in the opening series against the Chicago Blackhawks, none against Nashville until he rather dramatically broke out on Tuesday. A red-hot Kesler—despite an ice-cold Henrik and a cooled-off Daniel Sedin—is a significant factor in a hockey series where the goaltending has been so sharp and the defence so suffocating that goals are as rare as Canadian teams winning Canada’s most-revered trophy.

  Kesler’s best play Tuesday probably had nothing whatsoever to do with his own hockey stick—but rather the stick of Nashville captain Shea Weber, who was sent to the penalty box in overtime for hooking Kesler. “I’ve got one hand on my stick and he grabs my stick,” said a bewildered Weber. “And I get a penalty?”

  Wednesday afternoon, Kesler was sticking to the story: “He was hooking me.” At least that’s what his mouth said. Kesler’s mouth is easily the least interesting part of his personality. If you wish to know what he really said, you have to listen to his eyes and that small twitch that sometimes turns up the edge of his mouth. What the eyes said was this: “Damn right I suckered him. I had my arm and elbow clamped down on his stick like a big turkey wing and the referee fell for it—Shea Weber can go cry to his Mawwwmmmie for all I care …”

  Kesler is twenty-six years old and, while long a known force in Vancouver, is only now getting the widespread appreciation his play deserves—and as much for what he has accomplished in international play as in NHL play. He is, for the third year in a row, a finalist for the Selke Trophy as the league’s top defensive forward, though there are many in Vancouver who believe he also could have been a candidate for the Hart Trophy as the most valuable player, a nomination that went to teammate Daniel Sedin, an obviously worthy candidate given that Sedin won the NHL scoring championship.

  The Michigan-born Kesler may well be the best U.S.-born player in the world at the moment, given that Chicago’s little Patrick Kane was a bit off this year.

  It is a remarkable rise for a player who, little more than a decade ago, was cut from several elite teams he tried out for and wondered if hockey was really for him. His father, Mike, who drove eight hours from Livonia, Michigan, to watch Tuesday’s game, took him on the bantam team he was coaching and kept the kid in the game.

  Rather than the major-junior route chosen by most Canadian youngsters, he is a product of the U.S. National Team Development Program and Ohio State University. At eighteen, he went twenty-third overall in the NHL entry draft, far behind such today stars as Pittsburgh’s Marc-André Fleury, Carolina’s Eric Staal and Boston’s Nathan Horton (first, second and third overall). He was not even the top American taken, chosen after Ryan Suter had gone seventh to Nashville, Zach Parise seventeenth to New Jersey and Dustin Brown thirteenth to Los Angeles.

  But very quickly his career began to shine. Vancouver lent him to the U.S. team entering the 2004 world junior championship, where he scored the third-period goal against Canada that tied the gold-medal game 3–3 and led to the stunning 4–3 U.S. victory when Canada later scored on itself. It was the U.S. team’s first win in the tournament. He was, as well, a key player for the Americans in the Vancouver Winter Games, scoring the first goal as the United States came back to tie the Canadians 2–2 and force overtime in the gold-medal game, a game won by Canada when Sidney Crosby scored.

  He has become a major force, now widely considered one of the game’s best two-way players alongside the likes of Detroit’s brilliant Pavel Datsyuk. A year ago it paid off when the Canucks signed him to a six-year $30-million (U.S.) extension. No one doubts any longer whether he belongs on elite teams.

  “He’s a big body, works hard, good hands,” says Nashville goaltender Pekka Rinne, who will have seen enough of Kesler no matter how this series ends. “Somebody you have to be aware of all the time.”

  “He plays at both ends of the ice,” says Suter, a Nashville defenceman who is also one of Kesler’s closest friends. “He’s just the total package—I don’t know what else to say.”


  Say nothing, Ryan Kesler would suggest. And let the actions speak for themselves.

  In the 2011 Stanley Cup playoffs, Ryan Kesler emerged as a dominant force in post-season play. He, along with the Sedin twins, led the Canucks all the way to the Stanley Cup final, where they lost to the Boston Bruins in seven games.

  FIVE

  THE CHARACTERS

  THE PRIME MINISTER OF SATURDAY NIGHT: DON CHERRY

  (Ottawa Citizen, March 14, 1992)

  It is—at least on Saturday nights throughout the winter and every night for most of each spring—the most recognizable, popular, controversial, beloved and, yes, often despised political voice in the country. It has come to Ottawa in the midst of a snowstorm, come to Ottawa to speak out and to speak loudly.

  “Just shut your goddamn mouth for a minute!” Don Cherry barks from the far side of the toilet stall. “Shut up and let me talk—okay?”

  “Okay,” the young man by the urinals says. The young man surely never meant it to go this far. He came in to Don Cherry’s brand-new Nepean bar, had a couple, saw Cherry heading off to the washroom and figured it was as good a chance as he’d ever have to tell his buddies he’d spent the afternoon raising a few glasses with Cherry and talking about hockey—more specifically about Eric Lindros and his refusal to play for the team that drafted him, the Quebec Nordiques.

  Cherry, after all, was talking hockey with everyone. For nearly three hours he had been sitting in a far corner of the restaurant and it was clear to anyone who wandered in that the last thing the host of Hockey Night in Canada’s Coach’s Corner wished to be was inconspicuous. He had on one of those suits Nathan Detroit last wore in Guys and Dolls. He had his Wilfrid Laurier collars done up tight enough to choke and yet nothing, not the collar, food, autograph seekers or even the endless cups of coffee could stop the endless flow of opinion that erupts from the active volcano of Don Cherry’s mouth.