What Should Really Concern Canadian NHL Hockey Fans

Forget the lockout, or the potential of a one; there’s a bigger issue at stake that should be concerning Canadian NHL fans. Why over the past several years have the big name free agents, the real stars of the game avoided if at all possible signing with Canadian teams? With the negotiating power of their agents and their attendant star power, free agents can usually - as long as they don’t price themselves out of range - count on eventually playing in the city or for the team of their choice. If for example Jordan Staal wants to play with his brother Eric in Carolina, he’ll eventually make it happen. If Mike Richards wants to skate under his old Tampa Bay coach John Tortorella in New York, he’ll make sure it gets done. Consequently, if self confessed lifelong Toronto Maple Leafs fan Steven Stamkos really wants to play with the team he grew up loving, he’d direct his agent to make it happen. Former Ottawa Senator Mike Fisher marries a country singer and ends up playing Nashville, need we go on?

Why is this not the case? Although we see them as partisans, warriors for their teams, NHL players are also union brothers (back to the potential lockout), they do charity work together in the off season, share the same agents and bottom line they talk. Word gets out; if you don’t want to miss your child’s first Christmas play because you’re too busy signing autographs and being gawked at by fans, then sign in Carolina. Newly married and want to take your wife out for quiet dinners, don’t sign in Toronto.

A couple years ago at an end of season outing with my eldest son’s hockey team conversation came around to Hockey Night in Canada commentator, and former NHL goalie Glenn Healy, who happens to live in our hometown of Ajax. Healy, fiercely proud of his Scottish roots enrolled one of his daughters locally in Scottish Dance lessons, as word got out the conversation went, instead of mom’s dropping their daughters off soon the dads started to, ‘star struck’ hockey dads wanting to chat and opine with him on all matters hockey. Needless to say Mr. Healy eventually stopped going.

This is perhaps the point, we love our teams to death and by extension suffocate their players. With the preponderance of teams in the National Hockey League located in American cities many young Canadian players end up marrying locally, with their children being born in the United States. Often their significant others do not want to move to Canada and adjust to the resulting change to a more public lifestyle, and in the case of the sunbelt teams a change in climate. To be honest, who wouldn’t want to make a living playing hockey in Florida, count me in!

Not to say that Lord Stanley’s mug won’t return at some point to a team north of the 49^th parallel, In recent years Calgary came within a disallowed goal of a possible championship. I am convinced that in the spring of 2006 if Dwayne Roloson had not been injured in the finals that Edmonton would have beaten Carolina (incidentally Edmonton, was the last team to sign a ‘star’ Canadian free agent – Chris Pronger, and we all know how that worked out), and it was arguably a goalie change – or lack of – that was the difference in Vancouver not beating Boston in 2011.

Eventually there will be again a Canadian franchise that through internal development and good trades hoists hockey’s Holy Grail. In the meantime; it is that same all consuming passion for The Game that propelled today’s young stars to give everything to someday skate in the NHL, that when mirrored back in the form of overwhelming fan and media attention helps keep them from coming back home to play for the teams they once loved.