It's true, the NHL isn't out of the Tiger Woods yet, but there are enough good vibes emanating from the 2008 Stanley Cup final that might have you thinking that even the league's caretakers couldn't screw this up.
Could they?
Red Wings' Darren Helm gives Pens defenceman Ryan Whitney a taste of timber in Game 6.
Well, of course they could. This is the NHL, people, and screwing up good things is just how they roll.
Still, fresh off the Detroit Red Wings' victory over the Pittsburgh Penguins in a series that went from dud to Dude!, it's conceivable that the series could someday be looked back upon as a defining moment in the league's efforts to gain respectability and visibility in pockets of the U.S. that have abandoned the NHL in the last decade.
Just the other day, in fact, the aforementioned Woods was on a conference call with reporters in Detroit to discuss the upcoming PGA Championship at Oakland Hills, Mich., when for some strange reason young Tiger was asked who he was rooting for in the Stanley Cup Final.
"I don't really care," he shrugged. "I don't think anyone really watches hockey anymore."
Big pucks fan, Woods.
To be fair, Woods was just stating a fact. Up until the last month, no one in the United States was watching hockey anymore. Which makes the Penguins-Wings series all that more significant, given that ratings on NBC continued to escalate to a peak in Game 6, when the network scored a 4.4 overnight rating -- the highest for a final since 2000.
So it will be worth seeing if this final will turn out to be a blip, or a signal that the NHL's recent brush with obscurity in the States could be reversed. Only time will tell.
But this series was more than about cold television numbers.
For starters, how about those Swedes? Six of them on the Red Wings roster and more in the chute. Not to mention the bedrock of defencemen, Nik Lidstrom, who around 10 p.m. on Wednesday night became the first European-born captain to lift the Stanley Cup over his head. Finally, all the stereotypes about foreigners not having the jam necessary to win team sport's most gruelling marathon can be mercifully put to rest.
After all, there was always a whiff of bigotry in that slice of NHL history which may have been made a moot point long ago if Mats Sundin didn't play for so long on such a dead-from-the-neck-up hockey team.
Indeed, the true beauty of the Wings championship -- the club's fourth in the last 11 seasons -- is not just the European flavour, but the incredible list of players unearthed so deep in the NHL draft: Pavel Datsyuk (171st overall in 1998), Henrik Zetterberg (210th overall in 1999), Tomas Holmstrom (257th overall in 1994) and Mikeal Samuelsson (145th overall in 1998).
Add to that list Manitoba's own Darren Helm (132nd overall in 2005), a 21-year-old speed merchant who played his first NHL game in March and kissed Stanley's mug less than three months later. The kid from St. Andrews scored twice in the playoffs, the first goals of his NHL career.
So for those scoring at home, Helm in the last 18 months has won a gold medal with the Team Canada's juniors in Leskand, Sweden, led his Medicine Hat Tigers to the Memorial Cup final (losing to the Vancouver Giants) and won a Stanley Cup ring just 13 weeks into his fledgling NHL career.
Yes, the Wings can sure pick 'em.
So the better team won, which is only fair. But just as important for the NHL is that Sidney Crosby and his young, gifted teammates lived up to the hype, for the most part. Sure, Evgeni Malkin, the 21-year-old Russian, struggled and found his game too late (Game 6). But you can bet there's a number of impressionable youngsters out there who will take to the Penguins like a previous generation took to the Oilers of the early 1980s.
Better times will come for Pittsburgh.
But better times for the NHL? That remains to be seen. This is a league that is often its own worst enemy, taking the quick buck over the long-term welfare of the game. They bungle expansion. They blow television deals. They botch labour agreements.
Finally, when it needed it most, the NHL caught a break; a final that put on full display some of the game's brightest young stars, pitting a present small-d dynasty against a potential future powerhouse.
The players held up their end of the bargain. So did the fans, for that matter.
Now let's see if a league so prone to self-destruction can find a way to build on the momentum, rather than fumble it away over greed, arrogance and putting their own short-sighted interests ahead of the game itself.
randy.turner@freepress.mb.ca
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