The National Hockey League’s finals series starts on Tuesday, and while ice hockey isn’t a terribly high-profile sport in Australia, there are still plenty of good reasons to watch… even if my mighty Penguins aren’t there this season.
The best part of this time of the year? The leagues do a bit of co-ordination on scheduling so that they don’t drown each other out (or get drowned out, or have people channel-flip if one game gets dull). Once game 7 of the Warriors/Rockets series is out of the way, the NBA Finals and Stanley Cup Finals are on alternate nights. With no schedule clashes you just get glorious live finals action every day for about a fortnight! Hope you can park your iPad at your desk and don’t have to do, you know, actual productive work for the next few weeks.
As for the hockey itself, there are a bunch of interesting stories emerging as the Finals loom. To whit:
The Golden Knights’ Cinderella story. Vegas (for some reason, not “Las Vegas”, just “Vegas”) didn’t even have a single player on the roster twelve months ago.
An expansion team, the Golden Knights put together a roster at last year’s expansion draft from players other teams didn’t want (or at least, hedged their bets on being able to keep). A hot start in October (8-3) had pundits wondering whether the bubble would soon burst, but the closest Vegas got to a slump was a 7-5-1 record in November. They continued to power on throughout the regular season, winning their division (the first expansion team to win a division against established teams since 1927), and cruising past favoured teams like San Jose and Winnipeg en route to the Finals series.
The Golden Knights are even fun to watch; a high-scoring team with three amazing attacking options, Vegas are fifth in the NHL in goals scored and have the league leader and two other players in the top ten in plus/minus (goal differential while those players are on the ice). Chief among those is Swede William Karlsson, acquired in the expansion draft from Columbus. Karlsson’s previous best year in the NHL was a 9-goal season for the Blue Jackets in 2016 but he has found a home in the Nevada desert, scoring 43 goals (third in the league) at +49 (best in the league). Karlsson’s line is arguably the best attacking group in hockey: he’s partnered by Jonathan Marchessault (+36, second in the NHL) and Reilly Smith (+31), and the three combined for 92 goals over the course of the regular season.
Vegas are no slouches defensively either, ranking eighth in the NHL in goals allowed. The Golden Knights’ defence is anchored by goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury, who won three Stanley Cups in a decade with the Pittsburgh Penguins. Fleury, who also joined the Golden Knights in the expansion draft, has been stellar in 2018, finishing third in the NHL in goals allowed (2.24 per game) and sixth in save percentage (stopping 92.7% of shots faced). In the playoffs he’s been ever better, winning 12 of his 15 games and stopping a whopping 94.7% of shots; in 4 of those games he didn’t allow a single goal.
Washington overcoming years of under-achieving. The Capitals have won eight of the last 11 division titles, including the last three Metropolitan Division banners and in Alexander Ovechkin have had the league’s leading goal scorer in five of the last 6 years, but haven’t even made it to the Stanley Cup Finals since 1998 (and were swept that year by Detroit). Indeed, the Caps’ long-running failure to win the big games has led to a long-standing joke amongst hockey fans that Washington’s favourite cocktail is the Ovechkin: a White Russian, on ice, with no Cup.
Ovechkin is 32, a veteran of 13 NHL seasons, and is still at the peak of his scoring powers; he led the NHL again this season in goals (49 from 82 games played) and has been extremely durable, missing only 7 regular season games in the last five seasons. This is the closest he’s ever been to claiming a Stanley Cup in his career, and time may be running out. (Then again, he might pull a Jaromir Jagr and play another decade. Who knows?)
Washington’s goaltending has also been shaky at times, with top goalie Braden Holtby struggling a bit during the regular season (34 wins, 16 losses); his backup, Philipp Grubauer, played in 35 games (15-10 over that time). But in the playoffs, the Caps have been rock-solid; Holtby’s goals-allowed average has dropped from 2.99 in the regular season to 2.04 in the post-season, and Grubauer (2.35) has been solid when called upon.
The Caps’ flakiness in recent years means the bookies still have them as underdogs, even against an expansion side like Vegas. But everything seems to be clicking at the right time for Washington, and after years of being tormented by the Penguins this could well be their year.
There’s an Australian playing. While the Australian sports media have mostly lost interest in the NBA with Ben Simmons’ Philadelphia 76ers eliminated (conveniently forgetting about Aron Baynes’ Boston Celtics, who are still alive as of this writing), the Washington Capitals have their own Aussie in Nathan Walker. Sure, he’s only played 9 NHL games in his career, but he did play 1 of those in the earlier playoff series against Pittsburgh and he has scored an NHL goal. In his first home game, no less.
Walker was born in Cardiff but grew up in Australia- at least until his teens, when he relocated overseas to pursue his ice hockey dream. After playing in the Czech Republic he signed a deal to play minor-league hockey in the USA with Youngstown (Ohio) before joining the Capitals’ minor-league affiliate, the Hershey Bears.
Okay, he’s probably not likely to play much in the Stanley Cup Finals, but if Washington wins, we could finally have an Aussie’s name engraved on Lord Stanley’s cup. And speaking of the Cup…
The Stanley Cup itself. The coolest trophy in sports, the Stanley Cup is 90cm tall, weights 15 kilograms, and has every championship-winning player’s name engraved on it. (Well, kind of- to stop it growing forever, older tiers of the trophy are periodically removed and housed at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto.)
One of the traditions associated with the Cup is that winning players each get to spend a day with it to do as they please; as a result it’s travelled around the world, ridden a roller coaster in Hollywood, been used for eating and drinking (everything from champagne to breakfast cereal to dog food), acted as a baptismal font, and gone mountaineering. As a result it’s also had some misadventures, ending up at the bottom of a pool (“the Stanley Cup does not float,” said Montreal captain Guy Carbonneau in 1993), getting kicked across a frozen canal, being left on the side of the road in a snowdrift, and having at least one baby urinate in it in its history. In addition to sparking endless amusement amongst former players as they watch modern players drink out of it, this has led to the creation of the official Coolest Job In Sports, the Cup’s chaperone (@keeperofthecup on Twitter).
A good cleaning and touch up on the #StanleyCup and a new case and we are ready for the final. @NHL @GoldenKnights @Capitals @HockeyHallFame pic.twitter.com/IM2ckhtPZ4
— Philip Pritchard (@keeperofthecup) May 26, 2018
The game itself. Basically soccer on fast-forward, ice hockey is a constantly moving loop of probing, looking for weaknesses, and finding the right angles for your shot. Or, alternatively, you can just pepper the opposing goaltender with shots and hope he messes up and you can pounce on a rebound. Or, alternatively alternatively, you can just go around hitting people and wearing them down in a war of attrition. And if one approach doesn’t work, every ninety seconds or so each side will substitute its players (a ‘line change’) and you might get a totally different strategy.
Ice hockey suffers a little from being on television; it’s fast-moving, so you need to learn what to watch for if you want to keep track of the puck, and the glass and boards enclosing the rink mean some of the ice isn’t visible to the cameras. But it’s an exhilerating, fast-moving sport to watch live, and the intensity is ramped up in the playoffs (every game must have a result, and teams play sudden-death, next-goal-wins overtime, so the slightest mistake can turn an entire series.)
And this year, one team is going to win the Stanley Cup for the first time ever. Guaranteed.
Stanley Cup Finals schedule (all times AEST or GMT+10):
Game 1: Tuesday, May 29, 10am, Capitals at Golden Knights
Game 2: Thursday, May 31, 10am, Capitals at Golden Knights
Game 3: Sunday, June 3, 10am, Golden Knights at Capitals
Game 4: Tuesday, June 5, 10am, Golden Knights at Capitals
If needed:
Game 5: Friday, June 8, 10am, Capitals at Golden Knights
Game 6: Monday, June 11, 10am, Golden Knights at Capitals
Game 7: Thursday, June 14, 10am, Capitals at Golden Knights
All games live on Fox Sports Australia
