Wayne Gretzky's Ghost

by Roy MacGregor

  Out of the Olympics came a refreshing confidence in Canadian hockey and a new, and deep, appreciation for the way other countries have taken to the national sport. “Canada gave the world this wonderful game,” says Art Berglund, Team USA’s director of player personnel, “but the rest of the world now plays it, too.”

  They do indeed. The Russians won because they had the necessary skill and size, but they did not win by much. The Canadian juniors, also highly skilled and swift, put up a wonderful battle. The Canadians, like the Russians, went five games straight without a loss in this extraordinary tournament, and they went into the third period of the gold medal final with a 2–1 lead, only to lose 3–2 in a game that could easily have gone either way but for a goalpost, a missed check, a lost opportunity. The two teams that fought for the bronze medal—Finland winning by the same tight 3–2 score over the United States—might have reached the final as well but for some other momentary tick of a puck. The six other teams in the tournament all showed, at times, remarkable skill.

  The fans obviously adored it. The combined attendance totals for Halifax and Sydney set a new world junior championship record of 242,173—breaking previous records that had also been set here in Canada (173,453 in Winnipeg in 1999 and 148,632 in Hamilton back in 1986). Obviously, Canadian fans like their junior hockey. Such an undeniable national embrace of the junior international game cannot help, at this particular time, to contrast with what is obviously less enthusiasm shown for the overpriced professional product.

  “It’s the purity of the game,” says former Canadian Hockey Association president Murray Costello. “These kids aren’t yet spoiled.”

  International Ice Hockey Federation president René Fasel thinks the fan interest has risen as the junior competition changed over the years and, increasingly, became impossible to predict. This 2003 version stressed skill above all else. Skill and speed, and aggressive but clean play. “In the end,” said Fasel, “sportsmanship is so much more important than bad feelings. It wasn’t always this way in the past.”

  Such positive feelings may also have something to do with the possibility that, ever so slowly, Canadians have been shifting their allegiances away from the Stanley Cup toward the international game. There has been a grudging acceptance that not only are the small-market Canadian teams increasingly on fragile footing, but the Stanley Cup—last seen in Canada a decade ago when the Montreal Canadiens defeated Wayne Gretzky’s Los Angeles Kings—now only returns to go on exhibition at the Hockey Hall of Fame.

  There has not been a Canadian team in the finals since 1994, when the Vancouver Canucks lost to the New York Rangers, but it does not follow that this marks any concern for Canadian hockey talent. It simply means that the Colorado Avalanche can afford Joe Sakic, the Detroit Red Wings Steve Yzerman. Canadian teams continue, it seems, to excel during the regular NHL season, but once the tougher, differently officiated playoffs begin, the expensive free agent—the tough old guy on the third line making a few million a year—rises out of the tangle and the younger, inexperienced Canadian teams are soon gone.

  Canadians, however, have discovered that there is both national and personal joy in the international game. The Canadian men are the best in the world, as are the Canadian women, and Canadians anxiously look forward to the 2006 Winter Games to see the men and women defend their titles.

  Just as Canadian hockey fans are already looking forward to next year’s world junior championships in Finland, where a Russia–Canada final, for the third year in a row, would be perfect.

  And, just maybe, third-time lucky.

  CANADA’S LITTLE BIG MAN: RYAN ELLIS

  (The Globe and Mail, January 2, 2009)

  OTTAWA, ONTARIO

  The most feared power play at the 2009 world junior hockey championship is in hands that look more like they should be carrying one of the flags the house-league players ripple around the ice at the start of each match. Jersey a size too large, body several sizes too slight, face hidden by the full mask seventeen-year-olds must wear in this tournament for eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds, Canada’s Ryan Ellis has become a crowd favourite since his first shift.

  The Team Canada power play has come out of the preliminary round running at a stunning 60 percent efficiency (18 goals in 30 chances). While much of this has been the John Tavares story—five of his eight goals coming on the power play—the sideshow has been the little guy on the blueline.

  It is not so much his scoring—though Ellis’s six points in four games have him in the tournament’s top twenty—but rather his uncanny ability to keep pucks inside the opposition’s blueline and set up teammates for clear shots. Against Germany, Canada’s little big man—generously listed at five foot nine, 180 pounds—knocked one clearing shot down with a back kick that would have had soccer legend Maradona doing a double take.

  Ellis protects the blueline and sees the ice so well that when the final roster was named in December, he was the surprise “extra” defenceman added when the usual choice is to carry another forward. Head coach Pat Quinn figured Team Canada would have him solely to quarterback the power play—only to use the quick little defender increasingly in even-strength situations, as well.

  He is an accidental defenceman, going back from forward in atom hockey when flu and injury struck his little team. “I was captain,” Ellis remembers, “and the coach says, ‘You want to fill in for a few games until they get better?’ I said sure—and never looked back.”

  Tomorrow, Ellis will turn eighteen on the day the tournament truly begins—with every game a must-win situation if Canada hopes to win a fifth successive gold medal in this tournament. Canada and Sweden, the first-place finishers in the two pools of the preliminary round, have byes into the semifinals. Tomorrow afternoon, Sweden will meet the winner of today’s match between the United States and Slovakia; Canada will play tomorrow night against the winner of today’s game between Russia and the Czech Republic. If Canada wins, it will play Monday for the gold medal.

  If Freelton, Ontario’s Ellis is standing on the ice Monday while “O Canada” is played, it will mark his fourth gold medal in a year. He’s already captured the top prize at the summer under-eighteen tournament, world under-eighteen and the world under-seventeen championships. The Windsor Spitfires defenceman is also the OHL’s scholar of the year—an honour he says is the delight of his parents and the subject of a great deal of ribbing by his teammates.

  A decade or less ago, such a slight young man would not likely be playing defence and, if he played junior hockey at all, he would be looking toward a hockey scholarship. But not this seventeen-year-old. Ellis has his sights set on being picked high in the NHL entry draft in June and then moving on to an NHL career that in previous years would have often been denied the small of stature.

  One spectacular exception was on hand New Year’s Eve to watch Ellis’s team defeat the United States 7–4, with Ellis setting up the winning power-play goal by Cody Hodgson. “It’s about time,” Theo Fleury says about hockey’s recent embrace of smaller players such as the Chicago Blackhawks’ brilliant Patrick Kane and Daniel Brière of the Philadelphia Flyers.

  Fleury, at five foot six, 180 pounds, played 1,084 NHL games, mostly with the Calgary Flames, and represented Canada nine times in international play, picking up an Olympic gold medal in 2002 to go with his Stanley Cup ring from Calgary in 1989. “The game has definitely changed where smaller guys can excel at the NHL level,” Fleury says. “I don’t know if the game’s necessarily better or not. I loved my era.”

  Fleury, now living in Calgary, was captain of the 1988 Canadian junior team that won gold in Moscow, a team that featured fast, fluid and small defenceman Greg Hawgood, who scored nine points that tournament—a Canadian world junior record that Ellis may surpass.

  Hawgood went on to play 474 NHL games for eight teams in the era of clutch-and-grab and teams seeking ever-larger players. “I tell my parents I wish they would have waited a little bit longer,” laughs Hawgood, who co
ached the WHL’s Kamloops Blazers for a partial season last year. “It’s good to see that there’s a place in hockey for this kind of player,” he says of Ellis.

  There once was, of course. Roy (Shrimp) Worters stood five foot three and played goalie for New York, Pittsburgh and Montreal in the 1920s and ’30s. King Clancy was tiny in the same era. Camille (the Eel) Henry weighed 152 pounds and starred for the New York Rangers in the Original Six years. But hockey players kept getting bigger. Frank (The Big M) Mahovlich came into the league in 1957 at six feet, 205 pounds, a tally that, in recent years, would make him below average in NHL size and necessitate a nickname change to “The Medium M.”

  Following the 2004–05 lockout and lost season, the league cracked down on obstruction, freeing up the swift and skilled and sometimes small. Kane—even more generously listed than Ellis at five foot ten, 176 pounds—was the 2008 NHL rookie of the year.

  “I had a great career,” Hawgood says with a sigh. “I wouldn’t change anything. But when I see how the game is today without all the clutching and grabbing that we had to fight through … It would be a different way of playing, for sure.”

  Ellis can only hope the style holds. If, say, Toronto Maple Leafs general manager Brian Burke succeeds with his plan to build a bigger team with what he terms “proper levels of pugnacity, testosterone tenacity, truculence and belligerence,” then copycat hockey will follow suit and, just possibly, smaller players will once again be suspect.

  Ellis doesn’t think so, though. “I think it’s not a factor anymore,” he says. “So long as you’re hockey smart and you can battle, I think you’re set. Once I get a chance, I try to prove myself night in and night out. Obviously, some people are going to think ‘he’s too small’ and things like that, but I think for the most part I let it just kind of light my fire.”

  Seeing Fleury and watching a video presentation of Fleury’s passionate role in that 1988 junior team win is just one more inspiration for the little defenceman. “He took it the right way and used it for motivation when people said bad things about him,” Ellis says. “I want to do that.”

  There is also the chance, however slim, that Ellis will not always be first noticed for his size. “My mom’s still taller than me,” he says, “so I think I got a chance to grow a couple of inches. And if I do, it won’t hurt me.

  “But if I don’t, I’ll still be happy. I’ll just play my game and not worry about height or anything like that.”

  Ryan Ellis was named captain of the 2011 Team Canada junior team. It marked his third year in the tournament. The Windsor Spitfire star was drafted eleventh overall in the 2009 entry draft by the Nashville Predators. In May 2011, he was named Canadian Hockey League Player of the Year.

  DÉJÀ VU, 1972?

  (The Globe and Mail, January 5, 2011)

  BUFFALO, NEW YORK

  Happy New Year—and welcome, again, to 1972. Or so it feels these past few days, as Canada seems pitted against Russia each time the puck drops in this rather unexpected Back to the Future twist to the national game.

  First it was the Winter Classic in Pittsburgh on New Year’s Day, with HBO, NBC and the hockey media world fixating on a wildly overhyped outdoor clash between Sidney Crosby of Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia, and Alexander Ovechkin of Moscow. Crosby, captain of the Pittsburgh Penguins, and Ovechkin, captain of the Washington Capitals, are today the two prime faces of professional hockey: Crosby, the polite, studious, respectful Canadian; Ovechkin the brash, fun-loving Russian who cockily raised his stick in victory as the final seconds ticked down in his team’s 3–1 victory at Pittsburgh’s Heinz Field.

  And this Wednesday in Buffalo, it will be Team Canada against Team Russia to decide world supremacy in junior hockey—a gold medal match that no one saw coming until Monday’s semifinal rounds, when the Russians stormed back to defeat the highly touted Swedes 4–3 in a shootout and the Canadians rode roughshod over tournament-favourite USA, winning 4–1 to reach the final.

  While it may feel a bit like 1972 at times, it most assuredly is not. That Summit Series—renowned in Canada for the Paul Henderson goal that won it with only 34 seconds left in the final game—was seen as a match between the flamboyant superstars of Canadian hockey and the faceless, emotionless Soviets. All passion—from Phil Esposito’s tearful Vancouver speech (“We came because we love Canada!”) to Henderson’s leaping victory dance—seemed clothed in the red maple leaf.

  Monday night in Buffalo, however, it was virtually impossible to pick a Canadian star, so surgical was the Canadian team effort in dissecting the much-vaunted American speed and skill. Canada’s head coach Dave Cameron said that as long ago as last summer his staff had been working with these young men “to convince the players to give their skills to the team.” They did so, and no matter what the final score turns out to be Wednesday, the strategy has been a remarkable success.

  While Canadian hockey has evolved increasingly into team play and stringent coaching systems—three coaches back of the bench, one sending messages down from above, some even using iPads between shifts to point out errors—Russian hockey has gone in the opposite direction. Gone are the days when a tyrannical coach could treat his players as if they were soldiers, which they usually were. Today’s Russian coaches bemoan their lack of influence in what happens on the ice. In the years following Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost, individualism and self-determination became part of the Russian character, in hockey as well.

  Renowned Soviet defenceman Slava Fetisov—who referred to his former teammates as “ice robots”—was one of the first to leave the crumbling totalitarian system for the NHL. Already an older veteran, he eventually came to the Detroit Red Wings where he and old Russian teammates like Igor Larionov were able to practise the “creative hockey” they had always dreamed of playing.

  Fetisov and Larionov set in motion a Russian revolution in professional hockey that is still sorting itself out. Brilliant youngsters like Alexander Mogilny and Pavel Bure followed. While the traditional Canadian hockey hero is cast in a humble style set by Jean Béliveau and Gordie Howe and carried on by Bobby Orr, Wayne Gretzky and others, Russian hockey heroes have been more like movie stars, with all the glamour and problems that can entail.

  Modern Russian hockey players seemed, at times, so determined to show that they were different from their old image that when young Darius Kasparaitis dropped the gloves with respected NHL fighter Rick Tocchet, Kasparaitis later explained to the press that Tocchet had “called me a ‘commie’—I didn’t like that.”

  Russian players have certainly entertained, but they have also disappointed and frustrated fans who, early on, embraced them. Alexei Yashin may have been brilliant at times as an Ottawa Senator, but the lingering memory is of contract headaches and disappointment. Two of today’s most gifted NHLers—Alexei Kovalev of the Ottawa Senators and Ilya Kovalchuk of the New Jersey Devils—are having years in which their lack of interest and lack of production have outraged fans, Kovalchuk all the more so in that only last summer, the Devils signed him to a fifteen-year, $100-million contract.

  NHL teams have grown increasingly wary of Russian talent in recent years, the number of drafted eighteen-year-old Russians dropping to a half-dozen in 2009 and only eight in 2010, despite the proof that this junior team in Buffalo holds that Russian teenagers obviously still excel at the game.

  There is a long string of stereotypes that the hockey world applies to Russian players. They are called “enigmatic”—sometimes referred to as “the Russian factor”—and often dismissed as greedy players interested only in themselves, not their teams.

  While that may hold up in some instances, it does not in others. Washington’s Ovechkin is not leading the individual goal-scoring race as he usually does, but he has led his Capitals into an ongoing battle for the very top of the NHL’s Eastern Conference. The Washington captain is praised as much these days for his team leadership as for his wrist shot.

  His example seems to be filtering dow
n, as well. “It doesn’t matter who scores the goals,” said Denis Golubev, who scored the key shootout winner against Sweden. “It’s not about me—it’s about the team.”

  Golubev also, it might be pointed out, crossed himself just prior to taking that shot—something more in keeping with, say, Claude Provost jumping on the ice for the old Montreal Canadiens than with any heritage from the old Soviet Union. “God was with us,” added Russian captain Vladimir Taresenko.

  Another intriguing change in the stereotype of the Russian game is that what was once considered the Achilles heel of Russian hockey—an inability to fight back late in a game if they are behind—has been put to rest in Buffalo. These Russian teenagers staged a stunning comeback Sunday against the Finns after being down 3–1 to win 4–3 in overtime, then tied the Swedes in the dying seconds of Sunday’s semifinal game to force overtime and get to the shootout, which they won.

  Wednesday’s game will be played in an atmosphere rather reminiscent of the great Canada–Russia clashes of the past, including the 1972 Summit Series and the 1987 Canada Cup. Buffalo may be in northwestern New York State, but it has blushed red throughout this long tournament as fanatical Canadian fans have driven from as far away as Alberta and Nova Scotia to attend and raise signs calling the HSBC Arena “Canada’s house.”

  So dominant has the Canadian presence in Buffalo been that before Monday’s match against the Americans, the arena mascot, Sabretooth, tweeted that “Tonight will be strange. I will be hated by about 18,000 people in my own arena.”

  No such message need be sent to either team scheduled for Wednesday’s final, however. Canada knows from experience to beware the Russian bear. And Russia has to be wary of the power of the Canadian Maple Leaf.

  Just as matters turned out, much to Canadians’ surprise, in 1972. Just as it should, to no one’s surprise, in 2011.