Logical Divisional Realignment

Did you read about the radical realignment of the NHL's divisions and conferences? It's radical!

OK, arranging teams in divisions (or are they calling them conferences now?) where most every team is in the same time zone strikes most fans as the most logical realignment the NHL has ever done.

Remember this is the league that when the Vancouver Canucks entered in 1970 this westernmost team was placed in the Eastern Division. That started the Chicago Blackhawks (oops, sorry, Black [space] Hawks back then) on their westward divisional journey that has lasted to this day.Then despite two years later adding two expansion teams (the Atlanta Flames and the New York Islanders) based in the Eastern Time Zone, left the Canucks in the Eastern Division.

No, radical is further defined by what happened when the NHL decided from the 1974/75 to go with four divisions and two conferences and to heck with geography as follows:
CAMPBELL CONFERENCE
PATRICK DIVISION
Atlanta Flames
New York Islanders
New York Rangers
Philadelphia Flyers
SMYTHE DIVISION
Chicago Black Hawks
Kansas City Scouts
Minnesota North Stars
St. Louis Blues
Vancouver Canucks
WALES CONFERENCE
NORRIS DIVISION
Detroit Red Wings
Los Angeles Kings
Montreal Canadiens
Pittsburgh Penguins
Washington Capitals
ADAMS DIVISION
Boston Bruins
Buffalo Sabres
California Seals (no longer Golden)
Toronto Maple Leafs

Sealing the deal

It doesn't stop there. When the Seals who had moved to Cleveland and were now known as the Barons merged (say what?) with the North Stars, the league folded the Barons and "moved" the North Stars into the Adams Family.

Then for the 1979/80 and 1980/81 the merger with the WHA became a free-for-all. A balanced schedule was set up (imagine that!) and the divisions were now:
CAMPBELL CONFERENCE
PATRICK DIVISION
Atlanta Flames
New York Islanders
New York Rangers
Philadelphia Flyers
Washington Capitals
SMYTHE DIVISION
Chicago Black Hawks
Colorado Rockies (the former KC Scouts and the now New Jersey Devils)
Edmonton Oilers
St. Louis Blues
Vancouver Canucks
Winnipeg Jets
WALES CONFERENCE
NORRIS DIVISION
Detroit Red Wings
Hartford Whalers
Los Angeles Kings
Montreal Canadiens
Pittsburgh Penguins
ADAMS DIVISION
Boston Bruins
Buffalo Sabres
Minnesota North Stars
Quebec Nordiques
Toronto Maple Leafs

Finally, from 1981/82 the NHL woke up from its most likely drug-induced haze (hey, it was the '70s, man) and created divisions from then on that had a semblance of geographical sense while still naming the divisions after founders of the league.

I won't even go into how the playoffs worked over those seasons as you may need serious medical attention in trying to understand the best-of-three series and byes in the first round to division winners.

Here We Go Again: Calgary Invading Toronto

For a couple of cities who have hardly anything in common, Calgary and Toronto sure seemed to be tied together a lot at least when it comes to the Grey Cup.

It's also sort of poetic that the 100th anniversary of our national party known as the Grey Cup should feature not only the Calgary Stampeders but also be held in Toronto. The Grey Cup may go back 100 years but it really was Calgary Stampeder fans who made the Grey Cup come alive. All they had to do was ride a horse through the lobby of Toronto the Good's most venerated hotel--the Hotel York.

 THE place to horse around in Toronto

I'm not referring to yesterday's "incident" of Marty making an appearance in that hotel's lobby. It's a far more significant, out of the blue ride to glory after the Stamps won the 1948 Grey Cup. Even before beating the Ottawa Rough Riders 12-7, Stamps fans were already hootin' and hollerin' it up on Yonge Street and beyond. Two trainloads (yes, pre-airplane days) of fans had arrived in T.O. the week of the Grey Cup to show the staid Easterners how it was done. It also didn't hurt that the 1948 Stamps had run the table going 12-0 in the regular season (take that, '72 Miami Dolphins) in the Western Interprovincial Football Union.

Yes, back then there was no Canadian Football League yet. Besides the union in the West there were two Eastern "unions"--the Interprovincial Rugby Football Union (featuring most of the teams we have grown up with in the CFL Eastern Division) and the Ontario Rugby Football Union which included a team called the Toronto Beaches-Indians. I'm not sure what our now known as First Nations people had to do with Toronto beaches other than probably having a pretty legitimate land claim to them but they Jim Thorped it up at least for that season. After 1948 the Indians disappeared (I fully expect a Royal Commission to investigate this!) and the Balmy Beach Beachers resumed play until 1957 when the sands of Lake Ontario beaches one assumes blew them off the football map.

So when you're still calling your sport rugby football at least back East, we're not talking the nationwide appeal it has today. That's where Calgarians came in. It wasn't just the horses that showed up in the Hotel York's lobby, it was also Varsity Stadium's goalposts that the fans brought along. There's more, and it's worth reading what the Calgary Sun dug up on the legendary 1948 party at the Hotel York.

Needless to say the "modern" Grey Cup (and the impetus to create a national league although it took until 1958 for the CFL to actually form) really was sparked by the excitement generated from the perfect season of the 1948 Calgary Stampeders and its fans showing the nation that sports events are meant to be a party.

Fast-forward 23 years to 1971 and again we see Toronto and Calgary somehow become tied fatefully together. The 1971 Grey Cup held in Vancouver was to be the crowning glory for ending a 19-year championship drought for the Argos. Led by its colorful coach Leo Cahill and its even more colorful players (check out the "Engraved On A Nation" Greatest Team That Never Won episode online or on continuous repeat on TSN for more on that team), this was supposed to be the coronation of a team for the ages. One Leon McQuay fumble at the 12-yard line later and the Stamps were 14-11 champions on the rain-slick Tartan turf of Empire Stadium. X-Ray McQuay's fumble aside, the entire vaunted Argo offence was more to blame but then again this was an offence that managed barely 21 points a game in the regular season.

 

Suited up for the Argos

Twenty more years pass and the Argos are matched up with the Stamps in the 1991 Grey Cup. This is another star-studded Argo team put together by none other than Los Angeles Kings' owner Bruce McNall with a couple of his buddies, Wayne Gretzky and John Candy, along for the ownership ride. This time there was no unlucky Argo Bounce and Toronto's Rocket Ismail ran a kickoff back 87 yards to clinch the 1991 Grey Cup on a snowy field in Winnipeg.

Sure the Stamps and Argos have been in other Grey Cups vs. other opponents, but when they all too infrequently get matched up together something memorable seems to happen. Combine this with the teams both finally meeting up in the Centre of the Universe at the 100th Grey Cup and, well, put on your spurs and hitch up the horses, Martha, this one could be an all-time classic.

  Cowtown? This is a One-Horse Town!

Less Than Perfect But Perfectly Great

 

The perfect player shoots...and doesn't score?

Nicklas Lidstrom will go straight into the Hall of Fame as one of the best defencemen of his generation but where do writers get the idea that Lidstrom, let alone any player, is perfect? Some writer even claimed he's the perfect human.


I'm confused by all this but should I really be? When Mark Messier retired he was hailed as the greatest leader since Alexander the Great (of the Macedonian League not the Great 8 from Russia). This supreme leader idea was created mainly from the two Cups he won without #99 and especially the Messiah moniker came about after leading the '94 New York Rangers to the Holy Grail. Of course, far be it for me to suggest any discussion of any player's career should cover that player's entire career. It never does as why let the fact that the teams Messier captained for the last seven seasons of his career missed the playoffs every single year get in the way of the myth making.

If Lidstrom is the perfect player would someone please explain to me his performance in the '00, '03, '06 and '12 playoffs.

In '00 and '06 he was either the worst (or tied for worse in '06) plus/minus player on the team. Yes, he logged the most minutes per game but maybe he should have had his ice time curtailed just a bit so he'd have been fresher those two seasons when the Avs got revenge in rd. two in '00 and the Wings got Rolosoned by the Edmonton Oilers in '06.

If we tote it up, those four playoff seasons spit out a stat line as follows:
23GP 3G 7A -11

Offensively very good even with not getting a single point in this year's playoffs but defensively is -11 considered perfection? Yes, it's nitpicking (sent your hate mail to this man) as out of a 20-year NHL career he's basically had 16 very good to great playoff seasons, but recalling my elementary school math, that still is not "perfect" no matter how you twist the New Math.


So, please, let's be satisfied by saying Lidstrom was the Jean Beliveau of his generation--pure class with a high calibre of play and enough Cups and awards to say he was one of the best. I'll even go with the Doug Harvey comparison even if this writer also overplays the perfect angle. Personally, I think Lidstrom was more like a better Mark Howe even if Lidstrom never played at an all-star left wing level early in his career like Mark did with his brother and dad.

Class--thy name is Beliveau