The Edmonton Oilers were apparently feeling a little bit contrarian this week.
With all of hockey ready to crown the Florida Panthers, hand over the Stanley Cup and call it a season, the Oilers ruined the party on Saturday night. They finally showed up for the Final and turned what was supposed to be a coronation into a butt-kicking. In the process, they made all of us shelve our “Panthers win” takes for at least one more game and sent the hockey world grumbling to the airport for yet another travel day.
I can respect it. I’ve been known to dabble in the whole contrarian thing myself, with takes like “Mark Messier was a great Canuck” and “Ray Bourque’s Cup win was bad, actually.” With some unexpected time to kill before Game 5, let’s break that gimmick out again.
As always, the concept is simple: You make what you think is an obviously true statement, the kind of thing nobody could even argue with. I take the contrarian position and make my best case. And as always, you can try to guess which of these arguments I actually mean and which are just a case of a grumpy sportswriter instinctively going against the grain.
Note: Submissions have been edited for clarity and style.
Brett Hull WAS in the crease. — Christian L.
I can’t argue this one, in the sense that he absolutely was in the crease. Everyone has watched the clip, and we’ve seen the photos (see lead image). Hull’s skate is in the blue paint.
The contrarian take is that it didn’t matter. The league got it right, no matter what Sabres fans say.
For those of you too young to remember, the NHL spent most of the 1990s with a ridiculous crease rule everyone hated. It basically stated that any attacking player being in the crease, whether or not they had anything to do with the play, would result in no goal. (And yes, this is essentially the rule some people now want to bring back when they demand a black-and-white crease rule because a goalie interference call went against their team. Those people are wrong and you should ignore them.)
The end result of the terrible crease rule was that for years, right as offense was already plummeting across the league because of clutch-and-grab and the neutral zone trap, the NHL was working diligently to take tons of goals off the board because one guy had his pinky toenail in the other side of the crease, having no impact whatsoever on the play. It was terrible.
And then Brett Hull scored the Cup-winning goal with his entire skate in there, it wasn’t waved off, and everyone freaked out. And you can understand why. We’d spent years seeing plays like that result in no goal, and now the league seemed to be ignoring its own rule. Maybe they didn’t have the guts to overturn a Cup winner. Or maybe they just figured it was their job to mess with the Sabres. Either way, they messed up, and everyone knows it.
But everyone is wrong. The Hull call was the right one.
What people forget, or maybe never knew, is that there was an exception to the blanket crease rule: Players were allowed to go into the crease with possession of the puck, just like they can today. In Hull’s case, he had the puck when his skate went in the crease, and even though the puck had come out, he maintained possession before taking that Cup-winning shot.
The league even maintains they’d sent out a memo to teams in the weeks before the Final, outlining essentially this exact situation. They also claim they did review the play, but that it was such a clear example of a good goal that they didn’t need to delay the celebration before ruling that it should count.
You can blame the league for not communicating the nuance of the rule to the fans until it was too late, since private memos and expedited reviews don’t help your viewers at home. But while the messaging was flawed, the call itself was the right one. It always has been, no matter what the conspiracy crew tries to tell you.
Presenting the Stanley Cup directly to the winning team’s captain is the best trophy presentation in sports. — Jonathan S.
Jonathan is trying to bait me into arguing for the way other pro leagues do it, where they hand the trophy to the decrepit old billionaire who owns the team instead of the players who just earned it. Nobody likes that, and the NHL being the only league to skip the suits and go straight to the players is one of the few things they very obviously get right. I won’t argue with that.
But is there an even better way? Stay with me on this.
Tradition says that the Stanley Cup is handed to the team’s captain, who skates with it for a bit before bestowing the honor of the first handoff to one of his teammates. Then it becomes a bit of a free-for-all, with players passing the Cup around and making sure everyone gets a turn. It’s pretty great.
But is the captain always the right player to get the Cup first? Sometimes, sure, of course. Nobody’s arguing with Steve Yzerman finally getting his Cup in 1997, or Alex Ovechkin in 2018, or Steven Stamkos in 2020. Those were iconic players, the faces of their franchises, and they were the right hands to touch the trophy first.
But then you have the cases of guys like Derian Hatcher instead of Mike Modano, or Dustin Brown instead of Anze Kopitar or Drew Doughty, or even Scott Niedermayer instead of Teemu Selanne. Were those really the right guys to get the Cup first?
Maybe. I’m not sure, because I’m not a fan of those teams. And that’s why I’m proposing a new system, where fans of the winning team are invited to take part in a rapid-fire vote for which player should get to accept the Stanley Cup. You’d have to figure out the technology, and a way to make sure other fan bases couldn’t ruin it, but that shouldn’t be all that difficult in the smartphone era. We certainly have enough time to get in a quick vote while the players are celebrating and Gary Bettman is giving his traditional speech that absolutely nobody listens to.
You don’t even need any complicated criteria, beyond: Who do you fans want to see get the honor? Maybe they’d pick the best player. Maybe it would be the captain. Maybe an OGWAC, or the goalie, or the guy who’s been around for a decade, through all the ups and downs. Or maybe it would be the beloved grinder who left his heart and soul and half his teeth on the ice.
The point is, how great an honor would it be for your fan base to pick you as the guy to go get the Cup? It would feel at least as good as winning the Conn Smythe, right? Maybe better. It would basically be one big love note from a fan base to a specific player, sent right in the moment of their greatest triumph. And after that guy had the Cup, we’d revert to the players deciding who goes next and in what order.
The NHL’s longstanding system is the best in sports. This idea is even better, and we should make it happen.
It is an inarguable fact that the Stanley Cup is the toughest trophy to win in sports. — John R.
There are 32 NHL teams, meaning that any given team has a 1-in-32 chance of winning the championship in any given season. That means it’s exactly as difficult to win a championship in the NHL as it is in other 32-team leagues, like the NFL, and only slightly harder than it is in the 30-team MLB or NBA.
Is that the best way to measure how “hard” a trophy is to win? Trick question, it’s the only way.
Of course, it’s not what most hockey fans seem to mean when they drone on about the whole “toughest to win” trope. In my experience, most fans aren’t actually sure what they mean at all, and will just change the subject if you try to push them on it. Others will mutter something about how tough the playoffs are on the players, because it’s such a physical grind and so many guys are playing hurt. But if that’s true for one team, it’s also true for their opponents, so the “hard” parts cancel out, and you’re back to that 1-in-32 shot.
Aside from that, this is just another example of the hockey world patting themselves on the back over how tough their sport is. And yes, you do need to be tough to play hockey, there’s no doubt. If you want to just say it’s a hard sport, say that.
Just don’t try to hang some special achievement on winning the Cup. You fought hard to overcome the odds, sure. But they were the same odds as pretty much everyone else who’s out there trying to win a championship, so ease up on the self-congratulatory nonsense that barely even makes sense.
The Toronto Maple Leafs are the greatest sports franchise of all time. — Zack E.
Counterpoint.
Sudden death, continuous, five-on-five overtime is the best way to decide a tied playoff game. — Jon M.
Sure, most of the time.
The problem is when you get a game that goes three OT deep. Sure, that makes for great drama for the fans of those two teams. But the rest of us eventually have to go to bed, and watching teams play scoreless hockey for hours on end isn’t anyone’s idea of fun. OK, fine, anyone who isn’t an NHL coach.
Mix in the fact that the actual goal inevitably comes on a lucky bounce, and overtimes that go past two periods are almost always a case of diminishing returns. So that’s where playoff games should end.
That’s right. No more marathon overtimes in the playoffs. Two periods, that’s all you get. After that, it’s over.
So do we have a shootout? No, we do not, don’t be ridiculous. Do we just have the game end in a tie? Also not an option, especially in the playoffs. Some sort of gimmick, like three-on-three? Getting warmer, but I don’t think we need that either.
No, we just give the game to the home team. Play two periods of scoreless overtime, the home team gets the win. Nice and simple.
I realize you hate the idea, but give it some thought, because it has a few advantages. First, we’d be giving real home-ice advantage to teams in a league where it matters less and less. And we’d be flipping the usual playoff dynamic, where the visiting team tries to grind the game into a dull paste. You want to play low-event, boring hockey on the road? Cool, you lose every overtime game until you remember a rink has two ends to it.
The only caveat I’m putting on this is that I think we have to drop the concept for Game 7. If it’s truly winner-take-all, then yes, play for as long as it takes to get a real winner.
But for the rest of the series? Two overtimes is more than enough. After that, hand the win to the home team. The visitors had all of regulation plus 40 minutes to get another goal, next time make a play.
Wayne Gretzky should’ve shot in the shootout in the 1998 Olympics. — Donald C.
It’s been more than a quarter-century, and hockey fans in Canada are still mad about this. Team Canada head coach Marc Crawford never really lived the decision down, and it’s probably what he’s best known for to this day even though he coached six NHL teams and won a Stanley Cup.
It’s not hard to see why. With the whole world watching and a gold medal on the line, you need one goal against Dominik Hasek, and you happen to have the single greatest goal scorer in the entire history of the sport available … and you leave him on the bench.
It was the right call.
No really, it was. Here’s a fun exercise: I want you to close your eyes and picture your favorite Wayne Gretzky breakaway goal. Not one where he came in and blasted a slap shot past a goalie, or drifted into the exact right spot right before the puck got there, and definitely not one of his classic assists where he’d find a guy nobody else saw. Let’s do a clear breakaway, where he speeds in and dekes out the goalie.
No? Nothing? That’s weird, right? You can probably think of a few dozen for Mario Lemieux, or Pavel Bure, or Connor McDavid, or just about any other star in the league. But with Gretzky, it’s at least a tougher challenge than you’d think.
Here’s why: Gretzky wasn’t very good on breakaways. It just wasn’t his game. He even said so himself.
So would he have been any good in a shootout? The NHL didn’t adopt the tiebreaker until after Gretzky had retired, so we can’t go by his career record because there isn’t one. But we can look at his penalty shot history. It’s not great! He had six in his career, and scored only twice. And both of the goalies he beat were having nights in which they gave up at least eight goals, meaning they weren’t exactly Hasek-like in that moment. Meanwhile, Gretzky couldn’t win one-on-one against goalies like Pierre Hamel, Pat Riggin and even Peter Ing.
And by the way, those attempts all came back when Gretzky was still a dominant offensive threat. He may be the NHL’s all-time leading goal scorer, but those days were long past by 1998; while he was still a fantastic setup man, he hadn’t so much as topped 25 goals in a season in four years by that point and hadn’t had 50 in almost a decade. Leaving him on the bench was a gutsy decision, but the right one, because an almost-retired Gretzky just wasn’t beating peak-of-his-power Hasek that night.
Was anyone? Probably not, which makes the whole thing moot. The one pick people are still mad about is Crawford having Ray Bourque shoot. And sure, giving one of your five slots to a defenseman is a bit weird. The logic was Bourque had the most accurate shot in the league and might be able to pick a spot against Hasek. He didn’t. On that night, it’s possible nobody could have, including Gretzky in his prime.
But Gretzky in his prime wasn’t an option for Crawford, and he made the right call. Stop complaining about it.
(Photo of Brett Hull scoring on Dominik Hasek in 3OT to win the Dallas Stars the 1999 Stanley Cup: Kevin Frayer / Associated Press)
