BY LORNE ECKERSLEY
Advance staff
Early this week I watched, in a fashion, the final games of the NHL and NBA playoffs. On Sunday I propped my iPad on the coffee table and had Game 6 of the NHL final between Pittsburgh and Nashville on, sound turned down so we could watch episodes of the Netflix series House of Cards. The next night I checked the basketball score first, then turned on Game 5 of the Golden State-Cleveland series.
I watched more playoff hockey this year than in recent years, but probably saw less than a half dozen complete games. The final was a compelling one, though, and I felt myself leaning toward Pittsburgh more to see the team have a chance to become consecutive year champions than having any dislike for the Predators.
It felt all the more poignant to see Mario Lemieux down on the ice during the Stanley Cup celebrations, bringing forward the memories of his winning championships along with Jaromir Jagr. In their day, Lemieux and Jagr were among the very best in the NHL (which to North American fans, means “the world”). It surely was no coincidence that each winning team this year also featured a pair of players who rank among their league’s elite.
It seems almost unfair when a team, in this case the Penguins, can dress both Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin, who have both won scoring and most valuable player in the regular season and playoffs trophies. The trick, of course, is that the team also has great management, which has given the stars a great group of often unheralded teammates. After Kris Letang was injured I would have been hard pressed to name another Penguin defenseman.
In the tradition of Kareem Abdul Jabbar/Magic Johnson and Michael Jordon/Scottie Pippen tandems, Golden State featured Stephen Currie and Kevin Durant, another pair of multiple award winners. Those two managed to overmatch another freakishly great pair in Lebron James and Kyrie Irvine. James is already, at the age of 32, being mentioned as one of the sports’ all-time greatest, and its hard to argue with, even for someone like me who watched Dr. J., Magic and Kareem, Larry Bird, Karl Malone and John Stockton, Michael Jordon and Shaq. In the last few minutes of Monday night’s game, James was isolated one-on-one with a defender and was all but unstoppable with his lethal combination of size, strength, quickness and smarts.
I couldn’t help but cheer for Golden State, though, because back in the 1960s I listened to the San Francisco Warriorbecause their games were broadcast on a powerful AM station that I could pick up after dark on my radio. Nate Thurmond became my favourite player, solely from what I learned on those broadcasts and in newspapers.
On Sunday night I enjoyed seeing Crosby hoist the Stanley Cup, and then accept the Conn Smythe Trophy, and again my thoughts went back to radio days, when I could usually catch the third period of Edmonton Oiler games (we built a house in Riverview and we had no cable or satellite). Crosby is not as dominant as Wayne Gretzky was in his prime, but they were both suited to wear superstar mantles, with squeaky clean images and ability to handle the media.
I don’t have the same enthusiasm for sports as I once did, but I certainly enjoy watching marvelous athletes perform to their highest ability, and I readily admit that today’s athletes are far superior to the ones I admired only a few decades ago. They are bigger, stronger, faster and have off the charts eye-hand co-ordination. When I watch today’s NHLers routinely tip 90 mph slap shots in mid air, I think back to what a marvel I thought Pat Stapleton was when he became a star around 1970. As a defenseman on the Chicago Blackhawk power play, he mastered the art of knocking pucks down with his hand, keeping it in the opponents’ zone and getting off a slapshot. Today, defensemen do the same thing with the blade of their stick, and make it look easy.
The best part of watching those two games, though, was seeing the child-like joy exhibited by the winning players. They were as thrilled and uninhibited as they were as children, and their actions served as a reminder of why we continue to call these competitions — for all their commercial and corporate-ness — games. For those few short minutes, every more complicated thought is abandoned as joy takes over, and to see that takes me back to my own childhood.