Thirty Years of the Game at its Best

by Gare Joyce

  After the medal presentation, Jonathan Toews and Carey Price stood outside the dressing room.

  Toews was smiling—no, beaming—through the pain. He had a welt under his right eye, a cut across the bridge of his nose, and a patch of tender skin under one nostril where he’d had stitches removed days before. There was a big blotch of blood on the right sleeve of a sweater he has saved and never washed.

  Carey Price was unmarked but subdued, keeping his emotions in check, as he did throughout. He had silenced Peter Mueller and the Americans and then the Russians. He almost meditatively took it all in, quiet satisfaction—his resolve issued from that silent bus ride out of Vancouver the year before.

  The Canadian juniors

  stormed out to a 4–0

  lead in the gold-medal

  game but had to hold

  off a surge from the

  Russians to secure

  the title.

  Seventeen-year-old

  Steven Stamkos

  started out as a small

  part of the Canadian

  team’s game plan in

  the 2008 WJC, but

  his smooth skating

  and smart defensive

  play earned him more

  ice time in the medal

  round.

  Canada was distinctly lacking in humility upon the team’s arrival in Pardubice, Czech Republic, for the 2008 world junior hockey championship. The players felt bulletproof.

  Canada was riding an 18-game winning streak in the tournament. The golden run had survived a serious challenge the previous year in Leksand, Sweden. Most of the players on the 2008 team had thumped rival Russia a couple of months earlier in the Super Series, an eight-game set commemorating the 35th anniversary of the 1972 Summit Series. The Super Series was hardly super-competitive, with Canada outscoring Russia 39–13.

  Head coach Craig Hartsburg preached to his players how hard it would be to win the country’s fourth straight gold medal at the world junior championship. It was a tough sell, maybe an impossible one. He could see them nodding their heads and his words going in one ear and out the other.

  “We knew at the start it was going to be a battle with young kids and a younger team,” Hartsburg recalled. “The core group of kids went through that summer program without a real challenge.

  “They had to experience that there were some good teams in this tournament and a lot better teams than the Russians in the summer.”

  Brad Marchand

  (number 17) was

  Canada’s player

  of the game in the

  gold-medal victory

  over Sweden. Kyle

  Turris, about to

  take the faceoff,

  was the Canadians’

  leading scorer in the

  tournament.

  One player who might have had a modicum of humbleness was Brad Marchand. He and defenceman Karl Alzner were the only two returning players from the previous year’s squad.

  As a veteran, Marchand was expected to be in the lineup again and put that experience to work. But coach Brent Sutter benched him in the final game of the Super Series for his lack of discipline and told Marchand he wouldn’t play for Canada again if he didn’t clean up his act.

  Marchand was named to the team but still hadn’t lost his swagger.

  “After we dominated the Super Series, I think we thought we were going to walk through the world juniors,” Marchand said.

  Alzner, named the team’s captain, felt the weight of the expectations created by three straight gold medals.

  “Right away I felt a little bit more pressure because I didn’t want to be the captain of a team that broke that streak,” Alzner says now. “I know it’s not a big deal, but to me it was.”

  This Canadian team was similar in makeup to the young squad that emerged victorious in Vancouver in 2006 despite having one returning player from the previous year. The 2008 group faced the additional challenges of taking it on the road to Europe and onto the bigger ice surface.

  Three exhibition wins and then back-to-back shutouts against the host Czechs and Slovakia to open the tournament reinforced Canada’s sense of invincibility. The players were so self-assured, the chatter in the dressing room between periods touched on non-hockey topics.

  Their third game against Sweden was following the script in the Canadians’ heads. They led 2–0 early in the third. What happened next was akin to a sucker punch in the solar plexus—and Canada would not recover easily from it.

  When the Swedes had needed a 5–4 win over Belarus five years earlier to avoid relegation, it galvanized their hockey federation into examining what was missing in the development of their junior-aged players. Officials convened a summit conference to plot a new strategy. Better coaching for young goaltenders and fostering a more physical and aggressive game were identified as primary goals.

  Those changes were manifested in the Swedish junior program by 2008. Sweden had 12 NHL draft picks on their WJC roster that year.

  The biggest, fastest, and toughest Swedish team Canada had faced in years scored three unanswered goals starting at 5:14 of the third period to take a 3–2 lead.

  Momentum swung hard to the Swedes on their second goal, when Tony Lagerstrom’s shot from behind the goal line went off the back of goaltender Jonathan Bernier’s skate.

  Canada’s Claude Giroux managed to tie the game at 16:18 with a power-play goal, but the Canadians were scrambling in the face of Sweden’s pressure. Tobias Forsberg scored the winner for the Swedes with seven seconds left.

  More than their inability to protect a lead, the Canadians were stunned by the discovery they had chinks in their armour.

  When Alzner and assistant captains Marchand, Logan Pyett, Brandon Sutter, and Stefan Legein met with the coaching staff to analyze video the following day, they saw the room they gave Sweden’s speed down the middle, breakdowns in coverage, missed backchecks, and turnovers.

  While Canada generated more even-strength chances on offence than in their first two games, they also gave up more scoring chances to the Swedes.

  With an average age of 18 years, 11 months, it was Canada’s fifth-youngest team at the tournament. Their composure rattled, they faced the task of having to win a quarter-final en route to gold.

  In the six years the tournament format awarded each pool winner a bye to the semifinal, only Russia in 1999 had won gold via a win in the quarters.

  Swedish goaltender

  Jhonas Enroth stones

  Steven Stamkos in

  the gold-medal game.

  Canada struggled

  to get the puck to

  the Swedish net,

  managing only 20

  shots in regulation

  time.

  The loss to Sweden marked a sea change in Canada’s attitude. It started to sink in that gold was not assured.

  “We thought we were a little bit invincible before then,” said Alzner. “We turned into a team that knew we had to be desperate every single game.”

  There was the danger, however, that the young team would not recover its confidence in time for the games to follow.

  When they weren’t at the rink, the Canadian players spent most of their time back at the hotel scanning the internet and reading email. After the loss to Sweden, the players read comments from some people at home doubting their ability to win another gold. That galvanized the team and drew them closer together in an us-against-the-world mentality.

  “That struck a chord with everybody and kind of fired us up,” Alzner recalled. “We were all more focused after that. We turned it up and were snapping the puck a little bit more.”

  Canada scored a 4–1 win over minnow Denmark in their next game. Even though their subsequent 4–2 quarter-final win over Finland booked Canada into the semis, there was a sense they were playing with white knuckles. The chemistry and confidence still wasn’t quite there.

  There wasn’t any non-hockey talk in the dressing
room now.

  A subplot to the tournament was Hartsburg’s decision to go with Steve Mason in goal for the medal round, even though some hockey pundits felt he should put Bernier in net.

  Canada rarely had goaltending controversies extending into the tournament, as one of the two goalies usually established himself as the starter either during camp or in pre-tournament games.

  The day of Canada’s semifinal against the United States was tumultuous for Mason, who found out before the game that the London Knights had traded him to Kitchener. The timing couldn’t have been worse, and Mason’s focus was going to be even further tested.

  Mason persevered. So did the team in front of him. Cockiness was a character flaw of this team, but it was balanced out by emotional resiliency.

  Even when it looked doubtful Canada was strong enough to win gold again and the goaltending question loomed over the team, the players seemed unaffected off the ice.

  They were still enjoying the experience of playing for their country. When it came to dealing with the media, they were a bunch of chatterboxes and relished the attention.

  “We had a colourful group of guys,” agreed Alzner. “When you get back to the hotel, you talk about the game for half an hour and then it’s about having fun and being buddies. That’s something that really helped us. We were tight-knit.

  “You look at the guys now, where they are in their career, they’re still talking lots and still letting that colourful attitude and personality come through.”

  Canada was also buoyed by the ever-growing army of fans from home who followed them to Europe. If Canadians didn’t make up the majority of people in the stands, their raucous support made them the loudest of any country’s contingent.

  A 4–1 semifinal win over the United States put the Canadians back on firmer ground emotionally. They regained confidence, but not the arrogance they’d brought with them to the tournament. Mason quieted his critics with a 33-save performance against the Americans.

  Craig Hartsburg made

  the toughest call a

  coach might face late

  in an international

  tournament: switching

  starting goaltenders.

  Hartsburg decided to

  go with Steve Mason

  (shown here) in place

  of Jonathan Bernier

  during the medal

  round.

  Shawn Matthias

  crashes into

  goaltender Jhonas

  Enroth just as Matt

  Halischuk slides the

  puck into the net for

  the golden goal in

  the fourth minute of

  overtime.

  “All we needed was to realize we could beat the good teams again,” Alzner said.

  But once again, Canada would face Sweden—now established as the tournament favourite with a fast, dangerous attack. Hartsburg was ill with the flu and had just 24 hours to prepare his team for the gold-medal game the next day.

  The Canadians were ready for payback versus the Swedes. They’d matured over the course of the world junior tournament, but they would be pushed to the limit to get the gold.

  Canada lost Legein to a shoulder injury in the first period, but led 2–0 after two periods on goals from Marchand and Giroux.

  There was a sense of déjà vu in the third, however, as Jonathan Carlsson scored at 5:13 and Thomas Larsson tied it up with 38 seconds remaining in regulation and the Swedish net empty.

  The extra game Canada had played in the quarter-final was taking its toll by the end of the championship game, as the Swedes outshot Canada 14–3 in the third period.

  “We were literally halfway through the third period and it was like a switch

  went on for them and turned off for us,” recalled Kyle Turris, Canada’s scoring leader in the tournament.

  Hartsburg had a job to do in the dressing room before overtime to calm down his distraught players.

  “The first thing was to get them off thinking ‘Well, we just blew the gold medal,’“ Hartsburg said. “We had to get them settled down because there were kids who were devastated by it and they were pretty close to tears. We needed one shot and we talked about that immediately.”

  And as it turned out, it was just one shot. After Mason made three saves on the Swedes, Matt Halischuk swarmed their net and shovelled the puck past Jhonas Enroth at 3:36 of overtime. Canada’s post-game celebration was a whirl of joy, gratitude, and relief.

  Halischuk’s goal will go down in history as one of the many big ones a Canadian has scored in the world junior championship. But as a defining moment, Canada might not have won without the dose of humility served to them in their earlier loss to the Swedes.

  “You hate to say when you lose it’s good, but it was the best thing that happened to the team,” Hartsburg said.

  Marchand was named player of the game for Canada in the final. He’d taken only two minor penalties the whole tournament and finished second in team scoring behind Turris with four goals and two assists.

  Marchand agreed that both he and his teammates grew up during the 2008 championship.

  “I think we thought it was going to come way too easy for us,” Marchand said. “After that loss, we realized we had to suck it up and do everything we can to win the tournament.”

  Alzner often thinks about that roller coaster of a world junior tournament now that he’s playing in the NHL.

  “I look back on things like that, big games in tournaments like world juniors, for help sometimes when we do get into a sticky situation on the ice and I personally need something to propel me to play a little bit better,” he says.

  Riley Holzapfel waves

  the maple leaf after

  the gold-medal win

  over Sweden. In the

  last six minutes of

  regulation time, a tired

  Canadian team had

  given up a two-goal

  lead.

  In his second trip

  to the world juniors,

  18-year-old John

  Tavares provided

  offensive skill up

  the middle for the

  Canadian team in

  Ottawa.

  Jordan Eberle didn’t have time to think about how his life was about to change, or about how close he was to scoring one of the most famous goals in Canadian hockey history. His only concern was how much time was left on the clock in the semifinal game of the 2009 world junior championship against Russia.

  To be exact, at the moment the puck went into the net there were 5.4 seconds left.

  Eberle had tied the score at five, gathering up a bouncing puck on a centring pass from John Tavares that had caromed off a Russian defender and onto his waiting stick. Seeing that Russian netminder Vadim Zhelobnyuk had gone down, Eberle went to his favourite move: forehand, backhand, up.

  The Ottawa crowd exploded, and Eberle was mobbed by jubilant teammates. “I don’t remember much,” Eberle said, recalling the moments after the goal. “Except that P. K. Subban slammed into me pretty hard. My shoulder was sore for a while.”

  “I looked around and saw the Russians kneeling on the ice,” Tavares said. “They were absolutely crushed.”

  In the broadcast booth high above the ice, I could feel the building shake from the roar of the crowd. There was no time to react, so I said the first words that came to mind: “CAN … YOU … BELIEVE IT!”

  It was more of a statement than a question, because the truth was, I couldn’t believe it.

  In a motel room near Comox, British Columbia, Al Murray, watching the game on television, smiled. The chief scout for Hockey Canada had known Eberle for years, having coached and later scouted him in their native Regina. Murray had seen that move countless times before, most often in the Eberle family driveway.

  “My son Jake and Jordan went to school together and were teammates in all kinds of sports,” Murray remembered. “We’d swing by Jordan’s house and there he�
��d be in the driveway, with a stick and a tennis ball, going forehand, backhand, roof, over and over again.”

  Despite having such a close relationship with the chief scout, Eberle’s spot on the 2009 national junior team was far from guaranteed. A prolific scorer in minor hockey, Eberle was often overlooked—his hometown Regina Pats didn’t take him until the seventh round of the WHL draft.

  Even with Murray in charge of player selection, Eberle wasn’t invited to try out for the 2008 world junior team, one of the few highly ranked prospects for the NHL draft who wasn’t there. The following summer, when Eberle was invited to the August evaluation camp in Ottawa, he struggled.

  Eberle had just been drafted in the first round by Edmonton, and seemed anxious to prove that his new-found status was deserved. When the coaching staff finished the evaluations from the camp, Eberle was rated last among the 44 players in attendance. “He was awful,” Murray said later, laughing.

  Like so many memorable moments for Canada at the world junior championships, Eberle’s magical goal was the product of some hard work and more than a little good luck.

  The road to a fifth straight gold medal began with a bumpy summer. Two weeks after the evaluation camp, head coach Benoit Groulx unexpectedly stepped down, taking a job with the AHL’s Rochester Americans.

  Picking one assistant over the other to be the head coach would be awkward, and finding someone on short notice outside the program wouldn’t be easy either, since the coach would be asked to leave his junior team for nearly a month.

  And so, Hockey Canada president Bob Nicholson picked up the phone and once again called an old friend: Pat Quinn.