Playoffs? Don't Talk About Playoffs

The National Hockey League season is over, and Canada is in mourning.  No Canadian teams made the playoffs, for the first time since 1970, when we only had three teams.  So we already know that the nation's Stanley Cup drought will reach 23 years.

What are the chances of all our teams missing the playoffs?  Let's see, I used to know how to do this...23 choose 16...the 16 factorials cancel...ah, one in 593.  As if that's not enough, I notice that the two American teams that used to be based in Canada (the Arizona Coyotes and Colorado Avalanche) also missed the playoffs.  Even stranger, in the past twelve months, the Toronto Raptors, Toronto Blue Jays, and all three of Canada's Major League Soccer teams did make the playoffs.

At this point, you've got to think this is more than chance.  The Toronto Sun is doing a series of articles trying to explain it.  Today that explored the lack of free-agent signings going to Canadian teams.  Their explanation for that was the weather, the pressure, and the vicious circle of players not wanting to come to a losing team.  You could tell the Sun was pretty devastated by this topic - they forgot to blame Canadian taxes.  But they further pointed out that teams from the northern U.S. don't have problem attracting free agents, so that puts paid to the weather excuse.  It really just comes down to the crazy fans and media.

But really, the teams that did make the playoffs are dominated by players drafted and traded, rather than free agent signings.  More of this comes down to not developing better teams. In the nineties, a low Canadian dollar and no salary cap meant that most Canadian teams had difficulty competing.  But we've had about a decade of a high-dollar & salary cap world, and it's surprising how little success the Canadian teams have had constructing good teams.  For the most part, our teams have had the same attitude they had when the economics were against them: try to hang on to one or two good players, and hope that our goalie gets hot at the right time.

That's why it's good to see the Leafs' pronounced rebuild.  The fans were surprisingly accepting of it, though we'll see how much they still support it a couple of years from now. Hopefully their effort will prove to other Canadian franchises that their fans are more patient than everyone assumed.