A look back at the classic Kings/Leafs game seven, 25 years later

The Stanley Cup final got underway last night, with the Vegas Golden Knights making their first appearance in franchise history. That’s not bad for a team that didn’t even have a roster one year ago. And it might suggest that making it all the way to the final isn’t all that big of a challenge.

As a counter-point, we have the Toronto Maple Leafs.

The Leafs, of course, haven’t been to a Cup final since 1967, a fact that serves as a source of angst for Toronto fans and a source of non-stop punchlines for just about everyone else. But while the team has occasionally been known to take a decade off every now and then, there have been times when the Leafs came close to ending their drought. And they were never closer than they were exactly a quarter-century ago.

Today marks the 25th anniversary of one of the most memorable games in modern Maple Leafs history: Game 7 of the 1993 Western Conference final against the Los Angeles Kings. The game took place on a Saturday night at Maple Leaf Gardens, and saw the Leafs face Wayne Gretzky and the Kings for the right to play the Montreal Canadiens for the Stanley Cup.

It did not go well for Toronto, with the Kings earning a 5–4 win to punch their ticket to the first final in franchise history. You knew that, of course. But to mark today’s anniversary, let’s look back at that game with 10 fun facts about that historic night. Well, “fun” here will be relative — if you’re a Maple Leafs fan, some of these memories won’t be all that much fun at all. But you’re used to that, so let’s dive in.

1. The Hockey Night in Canada broadcast started with the single greatest montage in hockey history

The pregame montage is a tricky thing. You want to get fans hyped for the game they’re about to see, but not go so far that you oversell it. You want to set a dramatic tone without drifting into the histrionic or maudlin. You want to relive all the key moments in the series so far, highlighting the main characters and unresolved storylines. You want, if at all possible, to use the theme music from the move Hoosiers.

Some montages work, some don’t. The one that ran in the moments before Game 7 was a masterpiece of the genre. So before we get into what happened that night, let’s set the stage:

OK, I’m ready to start flipping over cars. Let’s get to the game. (Spoiler alert: This is about where the good news ends for Leafs fans.)

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Stanley Cup Final preview

The Stanley Cup Final is set, and it will see the Washington Capitals, a team that never wins it all because they're choking dogs, face the Vegas Golden Knights, a team that never wins it all because they didn't even exist until a few minutes ago. The world doesn't make sense and we've all been exposed as fools for caring about any of this. Nothing matters. On to the preview!

In this corner: The Washington Capitals (49-26-7, 105 points, +18 goals differential), who finished first in the Metro despite taking a significant step back after back-to-back Presidents' Trophies.

The road so far: They fell behind the Blue Jackets 2-0 and then went to overtime in Game 3, at which point I tweeted this. They won that series, slayed the dragon by finally beating the Penguins in round two, and then came back to beat the Lightning in seven.

The history books: Ugly. The Capitals have never won a Stanley Cup in franchise history, which dates back to 1974. They went to the final once, back in 1998, but didn't win a game, and spent the next 20 years failing to even make it out of the second round. Oh, and they have a history of blowing big leads in the playoffs, often in the most crushing way imaginable. Now they're four games away from finally winning it all. And they're not even close to being the most surprising team in the final. Nothing matters.

Injury report: Brooks Orpik and Devante Smith-Pelly both left Game 7 with injuries and are considered day to day, and Nicklas Backstrom is still playing through some sort of hand injury that's clearly affecting him. Also, it's the playoffs, so we'll eventually find out that John Carlson's sternum is made out of papier-mâché from a child's science fair project but nobody told us.

One player to watch: Braden Holtby. Here's the ugly truth about the NHL playoffs: It's not really about who wants it more, or who knows how to win, or even who has the best team. Often, it's just about the goalies. That's it. The best goalie wins, and everyone else is just there to shoot pucks into whichever goalie goes super-nova and becomes unbeatable.

Right now, that's Holtby. He had a miserable season, one that even saw the Caps hand the starting duties to Philipp Grubauer at the start of the playoffs. But he won the job back, got better as the postseason wore on, recording his first shutout of the entire season in Game 6 against the Lightning, and then earned another in Game 7. And it's not like he's some scrub having the hot streak of a lifetime. This is the 2016 Vezina winner we're talking about, not to mention last year's runner up. All season long, Caps fans wondered where that goaltender had gone. They found him, just in time.

Key number: 11 – The number of minutes that passed in Wednesday's third period before the Lightning managed a shot on net. That's insane. The Capitals were on the road, defending a three-goal lead against a star-studded roster that had scored more goals than any team in the last eight years and was in all-out attack mode with their season on the line. And the Lightning didn't even get a shot for more than half the period. Hockey fans love to talk about how defense wins championships, and it's usually overstated. But that was a clinic in how to shut down the other side, and if the Caps can bring that approach to the final then they'll be in great shape.

Dominant narrative: The redemption of Alexander Ovechkin. For years, he's been the guy who couldn't come through in the big one. Whether it was the NHL playoffs or the Olympics or anywhere that a meaningful championship was on the line, Ovechkin was there, and he was skating off the ice with his head down while somebody else—usually Sidney Crosby—was celebrating. And there was a simple reason: He was the sort of player who could rack up personal stats, but couldn't help you win when it mattered.

Never mind if it was true—it wasn't. Never mind if the stats backed it up—they didn't. Sports fan love this narrative, and once it lands on a superstar, there's no way to shake it. Except for one: Win the whole damn thing. Ovechkin has been scoring big goals all spring, including the winner in Game 7 against Tampa. This is his time. This is where he kills the narrative once and for all. This is where he redefines his legacy forever.

Or else, he reinforces it. Those are the stakes.

>> Read the full post at Vice Sports

Grab bag: Revisiting the rigged expansion draft

In the Friday Grab Bag:
- We rerun a debate from June 2017 about how everyone knows the Golden Knights will be awesome
- Please let this be the end of the don't-touch-the-trophy thing
- An obscure player who lost two games sevens on the same night
- The week's three comedy stars
- And yes, we have to do it -- a special 25th anniversary YouTube breakdown of Wayne Gretzky high-sticking Doug Gilmour

>> Read the full post at Vice Sports

Podcast: Stanley Cup picks

In this week's episode of Biscuits, the Vice Sports hockey podcast:
- Alexander Ovechkin and the Capitals head to the final
- Is it OK to not enjoy this Golden Knights story?
- Dave and I make our Cup picks
- Should Jon Cooper be fired?
- Evander Kane sings a monster deal
- Lou Lamoriello joins the Islanders; does this change where Jon Tavares winds up?
- Reader questions and lots more

>> Stream it now:

>> Or, subscribe on iTunes.

Six things we thought we knew until the Golden Knights came along

We used to think we had this hockey thing pretty much figured out.

Not completely, of course — it’s not like there was one standard path to winning a Stanley Cup, and anyone who followed it was guaranteed a championship. Hardest trophy to win in all of sports, we used to say. Anything can happen in the NHL, and all that.

But as the salary-cap era rolled into its second decade, the hockey world had compiled a decent batch of conventional wisdom. The road to building a champion was still a difficult one, but there were certain guideposts we could count on along the way. After watching 30 teams try to win a title every year, we felt like we had a pretty good idea about what worked and what didn’t.

And then the Vegas Golden Knights came along and made us all look like fools.

As the Knights get ready to play for the Stanley Cup, much of the attention has been on the big-picture stuff we all got wrong. The Las Vegas market wouldn’t work. The roster would be terrible. Expansion teams have to be terrible in year one. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

That stuff matters. But at the end of the day, whichever way this year’s final turns out, the big-picture stuff can’t teach us all that much. We’ll ratchet up expectations for Seattle, sure, but that’s about it. The far more interesting question is what kind of smaller lessons we can learn from the Golden Knights. And more specifically, which of our precious nuggets of accepted conventional wisdom may have just been proven wrong?

That’s the sort of stuff that, if it sticks, could change how NHL teams around the league make decisions. So today, let’s run through six lessons we can learn from this Vegas miracle, and how they could influence the way rosters are built in the future.

What we thought we knew: A few bad contracts are just the cost of doing business

Just about every team has them. Scroll through the rosters on a site like Cap Friendly, and you’ll find almost all of them cluttered with bad contracts, buyouts, retained salary and long-forgotten veterans stashed away on the LTIR. Add it all up, and virtually every team is starting the season with a big chunk of their payroll and their cap space dedicated to dead money.

Some of those contracts were just mistakes, where a team gambled and lost. That’s unavoidable in a cap league. But plenty of them were predictable cases of a team taking on a deal that they knew would almost certainly go bad. At some point, every NHL team apparently decided that short-term gain meant long-term pain, and every well-built roster could afford to kick the can down the road on at least a few mistakes.

If you think a player has three good years left, you have to give him five. If he has five good years left, you give him eight. The approach kept the cap hit down, and you could always consider buyouts or LTIR shenanigans down the line. And hey, if things went really bad, the player would end up being the next GM’s problem.

What the Golden Knights taught us: When people write the “How did we get here?” stories about the Golden Knights, most of the focus lands on the expansion-draft picks and the trades that surrounded them. And rightly so — that’s where most of the big mistakes happened. But we’re overlooking one of the greatest assets the Knights started with: A crystal-clear cap situation.

No long-term commitments. No mistakes. No dead money. And no guys on the wrong side of 30 who still had five years left on a contract that was paying them based on what they did at 25.

If you don’t think that’s important, look at how many of the expansion-draft trades the Knights pulled off were based around another team desperately trying to get out of a bad deal. Without David Clarkson, the Blue Jackets may not lose William Karlsson. Without Reilly Smith, the Panthers don’t have to part with Jonathan Audy-Marchessault. The Islanders coughed up a first and more to get rid of Mikhail Grabovski.

On the day they were born, the Knights were the only team in the league without any cap mistakes. They have some now, but it’s by choice, and they were paid a premium to take them on. And once they’re done winning the Stanley Cup, they’ll still head into the off-season with a ton of cap space to work with.

What the other 30 teams can learn: A contract that seems good for the first few years but is likely to go bad down the road is not a good contract. Sure, keeping the term reasonable might jack up the cap hit, or even cost you a chance at certain players. But maybe it’s not enough to sign a deal you know will turn into an albatross, then shrug and say “Everyone does it.” We’ve just seen what a smart team can do when a cap sheet that isn’t cluttered up with foreseeable mistakes.

What we thought we knew: You win with elite talent

Depth matters. Character matters. Coaching matters. Having the right guys in the right roles who understand what they need to do matters. But as parity and the salary cap work relentlessly to flatten the talent gap between teams, the NHL is becoming a league where elite talent makes the difference. Compare any two random teams, and chances are that 80 percent of the rosters will be largely interchangeable. But the elite talents — the Crosbys and McDavids and Doughtys and Kucherovs — are the ones that make the difference between contending and pretending.

And we all know it. That’s why we see so many teams tank in hopes of landing a top draft pick. Giving up an entire season just to increase your lottery odds seems like a bad tradeoff. But when those top picks are your best shot at acquiring the sort of elite talent that wins championships, you bite the bullet and do what you have to do.

What the Golden Knights taught us: You can win without anything approaching elite talent, as long as you have the right mix.

Marchessault is a very good player, but he’s nowhere near the Crosby tier. Neither is William Karlsson, even coming off a career year. Marc-Andre Fleury has been fantastic in the playoffs, and goaltending is a bit of a different case, but he hasn’t received a Vezina vote since 2012. And nobody else on the roster is really even in the elite-talent discussion. And yet, here they are.

What the other 30 teams can learn: Maybe tanking isn’t the answer. Then again, a lot of us wondered if the Knights were tanking heading into this season, and look how that turned out. But at the very least, the idea that you do whatever it takes to get players who are (or will be) in the elite tier and worry about the rest of the roster later may be worth a second look.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet