Canadian hockey has never been better. Canadian hockey teams have never been worse.
This is the strange juxtaposition of this NHL season with the coming Winter Olympic Games not far away.
Rarely has Canada had so many legitimate candidates for its Olympic hockey team at a time where so many franchises in the country are struggling to find themselves.
On Tuesday night in Edmonton, longshot Olympian Wyatt Johnston — formerly of the GTHL’s Toronto Marlboros — scored four points in an 8-3 drubbing of the Edmonton Oilers.
That gave Johnston 25 points in 23 games with the Dallas Stars, numbers rather similar to another Olympic hopeful Mark Scheifele and just below that of the Maple Leafs’ John Tavares.
For context, Johnston has more points than Sidney Crosby, more than Tom Wilson, more than Nick Suzuki or Brandon Hagel or Sam Reinhart or Mitch Marner or Sam Bennett or Anthony Cirelli or Seth Jarvis or Mark Stone — many of whom are expected to get the Olympic call late next month.
Team Canada general manager Doug Armstrong and his staff have a more-than-difficult task ahead of them — living on the obvious choices, the Nathan MacKinnons, the Connor McDavids, the Cale Makers and the Crosbys, and surrounding them with the right mix of teammates.
For the first time in more than a decade and only the second time this century, the top four scorers in the NHL are Canadian. It may not finish that way, as it did in 2013-14, but as of today, MacKinnon leads the NHL in scoring, followed by the teenager Macklin Celebrini, by the 20-year-old Connor Bedard and, as per usual, by McDavid.
The most recent time four Canadians led the NHL in scoring they were Crosby, Ryan Getzlaf, Claude Giroux and Tyler Seguin. That’s a relatively good list. The list with MacKinnon, Celebrini, Bedard and McDavid is a sensational list.
The only other time this century that four Canadians finished Top 4 in scoring came in 2006-07, when Crosby won the title, followed by Joe Thornton, Vincent Lecavalier and Dany Heatley.
This rise in individual Canadian talent comes at a time of great hockey angst across the country. The two-time Stanley Cup finalist Oilers are seemingly in a deep dive. They are worst in the NHL in goals against. Dallas scored four times on Stuart Skinner in the first period Tuesday night.
While missing the playoffs still seems a longshot for a team with McDavid and Leon Draisaitl, the panic around the Oilers is both real and complicated.
It’s real also in Vancouver, where the Canucks don’t seem to know who or what they are. They are tied for 14th a Western Conference. They have one fabulous asset in defenceman Quinn Hughes, who probably wants out and the Canucks don’t want to trade him. They want to trade everybody nobody wants and way too many of their players have no-trade clauses in their contracts.
They can’t win with just Hughes and the little bits they have around him, and they can’t really deal Hughes because the historical return for a player of this quality rarely ends up with an equal deal.
Vancouver is trapped, in a different way than the Calgary Flames are trapped at the bottom of the Pacific Division and almost the bottom of the NHL.
The Flames have some assets of quality — veterans Nazem Kadri and defenceman Rasmus Anderson, to name two — but they have a pencil-thin lineup that works hard and scores less than anybody in the game.
This is Alberta hockey today: Calgary can’t score goals. Edmonton can’t stop them.
Winnipeg should be a playoff team. The Jets have a playoff roster and, until a recent injury, they had one of the only sure-thing goaltenders in a league without sure-thing goaltenders.
But now Connor Hellebuyck is out for six weeks or more after surgery, the Jets are 11th in the Western Conference, fifth in the Central Division — all this coming after a 116-point season of a year ago.
Their story is different from that of the Maple Leafs, but equally concerning. The Leafs finished first in the very-challenging Atlantic Division last season and went seven games with the Florida Panthers, who pounded the rest of the league on the way to another Stanley Cup.
The Leafs were last in the Eastern Conference heading into Wednesday night’s game in Columbus. To say everything has gone wrong in this first quarter of the season is almost accurate. They look old and slow which is never a good combination in today’s NHL and now they’re old, slow and injured in far too many places.
They don’t have a goaltending tandem anymore with Anthony Stolarz out. They didn’t have two-thirds of their first line with Auston Matthews and Matthew Knies — both of whom will return on Wednesday against Columbus — for a while. They don’t have their most indispensable player, defenceman Chris Tanev, and around them too many others are hurt or having horrible seasons or both.
The Leafs don’t look anything like a playoff team.
The Montreal Canadiens, currently out of the Top 8 in the East, look like they should be a playoff team. The Habs have all kinds of explosive talent from Lane Hutson to Suzuki to Cole Caufield — and if they get anything resembling adequate goaltending over the next four months, they should be a playoff team.
Right now, Ottawa is the only Canadian team in a playoff position as American Thanksgiving looms and it’s hardly comfortable. They are tied with two other teams for sixth in the Conference — or eighth, depending on how you view this.
Right now, they’re in a playoff position. Right now. Not a comfortable place with five teams within one point of them.
None of this will make Rogers Sportsnet happy after their wonderful run with the Blue Jays. They need Canadian teams in the playoffs to attract viewers.
It’s not looking like many will be around come May.
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