Stanley Cup drought for Canada reaches 25 years

MONTREAL -- Famously, at one point during the Montreal Canadiens' run of four consecutive Stanley Cup championships from 1976-79, the city's mayor issued a press release that today sounds cocky, but at the time was simply a matter of fact.
"The Canadiens' Stanley Cup parade," Mayor Jean Drapeau announced, "will follow the usual route."

Monday marked the 39th anniversary of the Canadiens' 1979 championship when they defeated the New York Rangers in five games. It was the 22nd of 24 titles the franchise has won spanning its 1909 birth in the National Hockey Association into the NHL, founded in 1917.
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Championships would follow in 1986 and 1993, and it was the latter victory, an improbable, even miraculous run that saw the Canadiens win 10 consecutive playoff overtime games, which marked a significant event, not just in Montreal history, but in that of Canada.

With the Winnipeg Jets' elimination by the Vegas Golden Knights in Game 5 of the Western Conference Final on Sunday, Canada has now reached 25 years without one of its teams having won the Stanley Cup.
A quarter-century drought for the nation that lays claim to the birth of hockey, the country that serves as the caretaker of the Stanley Cup at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto.
For 25 years, Canada has, in a way, loaned hockey's grandest prize to its neighbor to the south like it's a sterling library book. In Toronto, the Stanley Cup is polished every June to a high gloss for its seemingly inevitable trip to the U.S., where it will be paraded by its winner.
It's safe to say that at some point since 1994, when the New York Rangers defeated the Vancouver Canucks in a seven-game Final to sign out the Cup with their first championship since 1940, this loan became overdue.
Two Canadian teams were among the NHL's 16 playoff qualifiers this season. The Toronto Maple Leafs bowed out in a seven-game first round loss to the Boston Bruins, and the Jets advanced to the conference final before falling to Vegas.

That gave the country two more teams in the postseason than it had in 2016, when all seven Canadian-based franchises were on the outside looking in. That season, the drought officially continued with 11 days remaining in the regular season when the Ottawa Senators, the last team with a shot to make the postseason, were eliminated from contention.
That season marked the first time since 1970 that Canada was without a playoff team, the Canadiens and Maple Leafs each failing to qualify in what then was a 12-team League.
The growth of the NHL, economic realities, free agency and parity among teams have changed the landscape since the days of the Original Six. In the 14 years from 1956-69, two seasons into an expanded League that in 1967 doubled from six to 12 teams, the Canadiens (nine) and Maple Leafs (four) won the Stanley Cup 13 times. The stretch was interrupted only by Chicago Black Hawks in 1961, so long ago that the Windy City's team hadn't yet made their nickname one word.
And even that was a shocking upset. The regular-season champion Canadiens, winners of an unprecedented five consecutive championships and heavily favored to make it six, were eliminated in a six-game semifinal by Chicago, which had finished third, 17 points up the track. The Black Hawks needed six games in the Final to defeat the Detroit Red Wings, the last of four playoff qualifiers who had sailed past the second-seeded Maple Leafs in their semifinal in five games.
The Earth would tilt back on its proper axis, at least as far as Canadian fans saw it, when the Canadiens (six) and the Maple Leafs (four) would win the Stanley Cup 10 of the next 12 seasons, the Bruins of 1970 and 1972 the only stick in their spokes. The stretch included Toronto's run of three straight from 1962-64.
The Canadiens' return to what would be their "usual" parade route came in 1965, in a seven-game Final against Chicago. In his autobiography "My Life In Hockey," the late, legendary Canadiens captain Jean Beliveau would reflect on Montreal's return to the winner's circle.

"When we took to the ice for the final game against Chicago," Beliveau wrote, "the (Montreal) Forum fans were Cup-starved and showed their desire to end our four-year 'drought' with a huge ovation."
Beliveau published his life story in 1994, a year after his unparalleled 17th Stanley Cup win as a Canadiens player or team vice-president, the last time Montreal has gone to a Final.
So there are droughts, and there are droughts. A full generation of Canadiens fans have not attended a Stanley Cup parade unless they've travelled to the U.S. to watch one. Toronto fans, meanwhile, haven't witnessed one in their city since 1967, the nation's centennial year, and the mocking Canadiens fans who say is that it's difficult to find color photographs of that Maple Leafs parade should remember that their own most recent celebration came when photos still were shot on film.
Canadian teams have knocked on Lord Stanley's door, three times coming within a single victory of having it answered. In 2004, 2006 and 2011, the Calgary Flames, Edmonton Oilers and Canucks lost in seven-game final rounds against the Tampa Bay Lightning, Carolina Hurricanes and Bruins, respectively. The 2007 Senators fell in five games to the Anaheim Ducks.
So now, at 25 years and counting, Canadian fans will see the Stanley Cup won by a U.S.-based team, buoyed at least a little by the idea that light surely is at the end of the tunnel with a few fast, young, promising teams making some noise north of the border.
And even if a Canadian NHL team hasn't gone all the way in a quarter-century, one prominent, reasonable voice in Canada says that a special Stanley Cup tradition means the priceless prize is never too far away.

"It's wonderful how the players get to take it home for a day," says Peter Mansbridge, the recently retired 29-year anchor of The National, CBC-TV's flagship nightly newscast and a long-suffering Maple Leafs fan.
"There are still a lot of Canadians in the NHL, no matter where they play. So the Cup does come back to Canada every year, to small towns and communities. It goes to all these little places across the country where these kids, the players who have won it, have never forgotten where they started."