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Bruce Dowbiggin

Connor, Johnny, Auston: You’ve Got To Have Hart

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Among the slimmest volumes of the past 30 years is Great Canadian NHL Champions. As most suffering fans of the seven Canadian-based NHL teams know, no Canadian club has won a Stanley Cup since 1993.

Just five teams have even gotten to the Final: Vancouver (1994/ 2011), Calgary (2004), Ottawa (2006), Edmonton (2007) and Montreal (2021). They all lost. (You can make a point that the transplanted Quebec Nordiques won the Cup in Colorado in 1996 and 2001, but it’s a lame argument.)

As the 2022 postseason begins, however, there are two bonafide contenders— Toronto/ Calgary—  to win the Cup and a third— Edmonton— with a puncher’s chance. Of course. these dreams can collapse for any number of reasons. In 2004 and 2011, the Flames and Canucks simply ran out of healthy bodies. As we wrote in an earlier column, goaltending can also trip up a team.

What’s just as interesting as the Canadian Cup chase will be the contest for the Hart Trophy as the most valuable player to his team. In the years since Patrick Roy led the Habs to the 1993 championship, going 10-0 in OT games, there has not been a year with a trio of Canadian-based players like this.

Toronto’s Auston Matthews. Edmonton’s Connor McDavid. Calgary’s Johnny Gaudreau.. (Ironically two of three are Americans on Canadian teams.) They’re key reasons why their teams have a chance at the Cup.

The Toronto media has— surprise— already anointed Maple Leafs captain Matthews as the putative winner. And Lord knows what the Toronto media decides instantly becomes gospel. Matthews has no doubt had a remarkable year, and deserves a lot of credit. Bookies love him too at an inflated -345.

Besides being the star of the team in the largest Canadian market, Matthews’ claim rests largely on being the top goal scorer in the NHL. His 58 goals in 71 games (all totals through 25/04) are just three more than his nearest competitor (Leon Draisaitl). He did manage a historic 51 of his goals in a 50-game span. But pure goal scoring is the only significant stat in which Matthews leads: his nine game-winning goals trail Draisaitl by two. And his 15 power-play goals trail Draisaitl by nine.

Matthews also trails McDavid, the NHL’s leading scorer, by 14 points, albeit with six fewer games played. Gaudreau leads him overall by 11 points. Gaudreau, meanwhile, currently sits third in league scoring behind McDavid and Florida’s Jonathan Huberdeau; he stakes his claim to the Hart based on some extraordinary plus/ minus statistics. With three games to play Gaudreau is a stunning plus-61; only his linemate Matthew Tkachuk  is even remotely close at plus-55. McDavid is plus-27. Matthews an ordinary plus-18.

He not only scored but his line kept opponents from scoring. Okay, generic plus/ minus can be overrated. But there is real value in Gaudreau’s leading his challengers with 86 even-strength points. (This from a player Flames fans wanted traded a year ago). McDavid and Matthews are tied at 76.

While Matthews’ has 15 PPG, McDavid’s has 9 PPG followed by Gaudreau has a modest 6 PPG. Gaudreau has managed these numbers while playing less than his rivals. His ice time is just 18:28. Matthews logs 20:33. McDavid plays a whopping 22:08 per game.

McDavid may have been the best player in the NHL the past half-decade (he’s won two Harts already), but his team has held him back come playoff time. This year he and Draisaitl have grabbed the underachieving Oilers by the scruff and made a late surge to a playoff spot.

All three could end up watching Huberdeau, a Canadian playing on an American team, carry off the Hart— especially if Canadian voters split the vote. The Florida Panthers star is second in scoring and leads the league in assists and may be the best playmaker on the runaway Eastern Conference leaders.

Who to bet on? Matthews is the favourite at -345 to win his first Hart Trophy. At +400, two-time winner Connor McDavid is the second favourite. Gaudreau is closing the gap, now at +1600. Remember that voting is due before the playoffs, so a bad postseason cannot hurt a Hart contender nor can it help a dark horse. Our vote in a narrow contest goes to Gaudreau.

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The sad passing of Guy Lafleur this week brought forth many memories of his greatness as a player. But as we noted in Inexact Science (brucedowbigginbooks.com) The Flower was considered something of a bust in his first few NHL seasons. After scoring “just” 27 goals in his rookie year, he was overshadowed by No.2 selection Marcel Dionne and No. 5 pick Rick Martin.

(He) may have had one more tally and just seven fewer points than Dionne, but it was the perception that mattered also. And the perception was that Lafleur didn’t match up to his draft “adversary.” Making matters worse was that Buffalo’s number five overall pick, Rick Martin, achieved the heights Lafleur supposedly should have reached in 1971–72 by amassing an NHL rookie record 44 goals—still tied today as the seventh-highest such total in league history… Even though he was the odds-on favourite for Rookie of the Year when training camp had rolled around, Lafleur wasn’t even a finalist for the award. The dashing of these rather lofty expectations naturally begat skepticism of Lafleur’s greatness. 

To the exasperation of Habs fans, Lafleur’s closest peers continued to outdo him in every way but in championship rings. Dionne avoided any sophomore jinx by posting 90 and 78 points in the next two campaigns, compared to Lafleur’s 56 and 55, while Martin reeled off 37- and 52-goal campaigns to show his freshman output had been no beginner’s luck. To add insult, even the number 10 pick of 1971, Steve Vickers—debuting for the Rangers in 1972—reeled off back-to-back 30-goal seasons to start off his career. When Lafleur bottomed out with only 21 goals in his third NHL season, 1973–74, there were whispers that maybe he was just a fluke, a flash-in-the-pan who peaked too early, spoiled by the weaker defences of the junior game and perhaps too mentally fragile to handle the immense pressure of being the next supposed legend in Canadiens lore.

The next year Lafleur ditched his tea-pot helmet and embarked on a brilliant career with three Art Ross scoring titles, three Hart Trophies, three Pearson Awards and one Conn Smythe—but he also shared in team success by winning five Stanley Cups and four Prince of Wales Trophies. Adieu, Guy

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author was nominated for the BBN Business Book award of 2020 for Personal Account with Tony Comper. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book with his son Evan Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx

 

BRUCE DOWBIGGIN Award-winning Author and Broadcaster Bruce Dowbiggin's career is unmatched in Canada for its diversity and breadth of experience . He is currently the editor and publisher of Not The Public Broadcaster website and is also a contributor to SiriusXM Canada Talks. His new book Cap In Hand was released in the fall of 2018. Bruce's career has included successful stints in television, radio and print. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster for his work with CBC-TV, Mr. Dowbiggin is also the best-selling author of "Money Players" (finalist for the 2004 National Business Book Award) and two new books-- Ice Storm: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Vancouver Canucks Team Ever for Greystone Press and Grant Fuhr: Portrait of a Champion for Random House. His ground-breaking investigations into the life and times of Alan Eagleson led to his selection as the winner of the Gemini for Canada's top sportscaster in 1993 and again in 1996. This work earned him the reputation as one of Canada's top investigative journalists in any field. He was a featured columnist for the Calgary Herald (1998-2009) and the Globe & Mail (2009-2013) where his incisive style and wit on sports media and business won him many readers.

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Bruce Dowbiggin

Canadians Thinks America Owes Them. Trump Has Other Ideas

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Breaking: It’s now being reported that in the 2024 U.S. election, zero Canadians voted for Donald Trump. In fact, zero Canadians voted for anyone on the ballot. They’re not allowed to. And yet rage monkeys in the Canadian media seem to have the idea that Canada is— and should be— an immediate priority of POTUS 47.

Here’s Globe & Mail/ CBC wind therapist Andrew Coyne about ten exits past normal on the idea of Donald Trump on Canadian soil. Okay, on Alberta soil. “We’re going to roll out the red carpet for the wannabe dictator of America at the very moment he is moving to suppress dissent with armed force?” (You mean like the Truckers Convoy?)

Cartoonist Michael DeAdder, who likely cries if you use improper pronouns, says “Hold my kombucha”. His latest etching has Trump asking a veteran what he did in the war. The witty retort is “Fought against people like you”. Get it? Trump murders six millions Jews. But The Hill keeps this guy working, and the laughs just keep on coming. Free speech!

The presumption is jaw-dropping. Even as Trump’s approval rating hits 53 percent, Canadians online were echoing Democrats’ fever dreams of forming a shadow government to take over from Trump via coup. This sense of impunity at a distance is why the Canadian government— along with other drive-by virtue signallers UK, Norway, New Zealand, and Australia— have imposed sanctions on two sitting members of the Israeli cabinet. They know it will rile Trump’s America.

For ordinary Canadians, Trump became a post-it note to justify giving Team Liberal another swing at ruining the nation. “We used to be such friends! He’s a tyrant.!” This just in: Love him or hate him Trump is employed by Americans to do their bidding. He’s not a sentimental buddy of Canada who’ll cut us some slack for old time’s sake. He has no remittance from Canada to please the Laurentian elites. If your defence is non-existent and your military gender-obsessed: you had it coming.

Are his policies jostling Canada? Absolutely. Read Art of the Deal. The 51st state jibe when Justin soiled himself was rude. But it worked on pliant Canadian liberals. Now the The Little Banker is disavowing the dissolute decade of Trudeau while employing Conservatives’ policies on defence spending, inter-provincial trade and border security. Hell, he’s naming longtime Tories to his personal staff.

In the end Carney knows this ain’t mock Parliament. That his dossier begins and ends with satisfying the beast to the south. None of this should be a surprise. Yet Canadians dozed when Trump made clear in his election campaign that the American economy is the greatest in the world. If you want to fish in that pond it’s not going to be for free. That means tariffs for a range of U.S. industries that couldn’t compete in a Biden world.

We can argue how well tariffs work, but Trump wants them to reduce taxes on the people who elected him. Not the Canadians who fly first class but pay economy. And who have pushed his approval ratings into the 50s, higher than ever before. (Likely to spike higher after the No Kings Riot season peters out.)

No wonder Canadians preferred the guy before Trump, the senile sock puppet whose government was run by anonymous figures using the auto-pen. Sleepy Joe let Canada slide into mediocrity and financial peril without any judgement. It was comfortable. Then The Donald had the nerve to expose the ditch Canada was in.

Canada, Trump pointed out,  was delinquent on its defence, harbouring Chinese drug lords, printing money like Canadian Tire and its banks were involved in money laundering. That was the nice stuff. Try Organized fentanyl networks operating with impunity in the largest cities of the nation So dumping on Trump in salty cartoons allows Canada’s Mod Squad to ignore the real issues that should have been litigated in the April election.

We have written extensively about the ruse that was played on gormless Canadians in  “U.S. Voters Smelled A Rat But Canadian Voters Bought The Cheese” We have catalogued Canada’s drug and money laundering disgrace in “Chinese Gangs Dominate Canada: Why Will Voters Give Liberals Another Term?” We’ve described the real-estate bubble economy created by Trudeau and sidekick Carney that threatens to crash the economy and ruin seniors’ pensions in

In the end, it is still la-la-la-la We Can’t Hear You. Trump-obsessed Boomers more concerned with the equity in their jumped-up bungalows gave the finger to the next generations and blamed it all on Orange Man Bad. In the monotone of Canadian political comment it all seemed so easy. Turn against Trump. Cash another dividend. Cheer on MSNBC and CNN bitch sessions.

The Family Compact don’t get it. Their Antifa heroes down south plan demos and “nonviolent” activity to crater the public resolve. In Canada that still works. But in the U.S. the Covid reverb is hitting the natural governing class of the nation. While they craft fine phrases about democracy the consumers remember them using a virus to stop society.

The appetite for Gavin Newsom blovaitors and Jen Psaki fart catchers is crashing in America. Riots may be coming in the U.S., but it won’t be like  George Floyd and Covid and the pussy hats. At some point Canada’s docile classes better wake up, too. America owes them nothing. They need to earn the respect.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

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Bruce Dowbiggin

Simone Biles Fails To Stick The Landing Going After Riley Gaines

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Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them. George Orwell

Or, in the case of Olympic legend Simone Biles, only gymnasts believe in the incendiary issue of trans men competing in women’s sports. Biles, who has made a secondary career as an object of pity, took exception when former swimmer Riley Gaines, an opponent of trans men competing against women, sent a picture of Minnesota softball team that recently won a state title with a pitcher who is reported to be transgender.

“Comments off lol,’ Gaines wrote in response to the post which wasn’t permitting any comments from the public. “To be expected when your star player is a boy.”

That brought Biles into the fray. ‘You’re truly sick, all of this campaigning because you lost a race. Straight up sore loser. ‘You should be uplifting the trans community and perhaps finding a way to make sports inclusive OR creating a new avenue where trans feel safe in sports. Maybe a transgender category IN ALL sports!! ‘But instead… You bully them… One things for sure is no one in sports is safe with you around!!!!!’

She then poked Gaines again, saying: ‘Bully someone your own size, which would ironically be a male.” (Gaines husband is 6-foot-4)

The loser reference was to Gaines having lost to a trans swimmer in an NCAA race. Since then Gaines has launched a campaign to outlaw biological males from competing with cisgendered girls and women. She has testified in the U.S. Congress and has appeared in numerous interviews espousing a position supported by the vast majority of Americans.

One might think the proof of this position— unquestioned as recently as a decade ago— would be obvious. But Biles and  gender radicals who’ve tried to make trans into the Emancipation Proclamation of the 21st century are not giving up the fight.

Here’s someone named Nancy Armour in USA Today. “There is no scientific evidence that transgender women athletes have a physical advantage over cisgender women athletes, but that hasn’t stopped Gaines from claiming they do..” When legislation banning trans men in girls/ women sports was presented in the U.S. Congress 106 Democrats voted against the motion. The chattering class on CBC, MSNBC and CNN likewise have a cohort of those opposing the ban.

But it was the outburst from Biles that most appalled fans who’d worshipped her as the GOAT of Olympic gymnastics and then sympathized with her victimization by Dr. Larry Nasser. Even when she bailed on her teammates at the 2024 Games they cut her slack. But suddenly a woman who’s preached against body shaming and intolerance was deriding a fellow athlete’s body and mocking her complaints.

Critics were quick to post Biles’ hypocrisy about compassion, citing her own tear-stained testimony about how she was taken advantage by a doctor. Here’s how we described her psychological distress last August during the Olympics. “Prominent among them was gymnast Simone Biles who described the abuse she’d suffered from a male trainer and on social media as the greatest female gymnast in history. Even as she added more golds to her mantle she’d seemed unable to find peace in her accomplishments.

“Due to mental blocks, she’d had to step away from the sport for a time to get her head straight. She had a lot of company from fellow competitors who described sexual harassment and intimidation on social media for their unhappiness. (Hence the constant mental health commercials on the TV broadcasts.)”

Now the same role model is mocking Gaines? It seems unthinkable. As for the claims that men have no advantage against women, it was pointed out that there are zero women who try to reverse the equation, going into men’s sports. They show the hard truths about competitive records of men versus women in a range of sports. They describe the physical risks for women playing against larger, stronger men. Here. Here. And here.

It’s still stunning to see Biles toeing the radical LGBTQ line while asking for traditional pity of a victimized woman herself. Or the amount of support that the cause has garnered from progressives throughout society. When did people became so obtuse about the growth this societal contagion?

We wrote earlier this year about how such notions take hold. MacDonald Laurier Institute fellow Mia Hughes charted a history of similar social contagions such as bulimia and multiple-personality disorder. “In 1972, British psychologist Gerald Russell treated a woman with an unusual eating disorder involving binging and purging. Over the next seven years, he saw a further 30 woman presenting with the same condition. In 1979, he wrote a paper published in Psychological Medicine, in which he gave it the name bulimia nervosa….

“Then something remarkable happened. The illness swept the globe like wildfire… affecting an estimated 30 million people by the mid-1990s, the majority of whom were teenage girls and young women. The explanation for this rapid spread is what philosopher Ian Hacking calls ‘semantic contagion’ – how the process of naming and describing a condition creates the means by which the condition spreads. The epidemic of multiple-personality disorder in the 90s was spread this same way… Multiple studies demonstrate the media’s culpability in the spread of social contagions.”

The new contagion is trans athletes. USA Today is just one example of how influencers try to legitimize campaigns to boost their own self esteem. As the battle to reverse the trans incursion shows, there are only too many willing to play politics in the gender debate. Like the pro-Palestinian movement in North America the trans athlete hoax exists is a bubble where reality and fiction can co-exist, knowing they’ll never be put to the test.

Orwell called it doublethink “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” Biles and the liberal elites have it mastered. Nursing their grievance while finding it a fault in others.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, Bruce is regular media contributor. The new book from there team of Evan & Bruce Dowbiggin is Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL & Changed Hockey. From Espo to Boston in 1967 to Gretz in L.A. in 1988 to Patrick Roy leaving Montreal in 1995, the stories behind the story. In paperback and Kindle on #Amazon. Destined to be a hockey best seller. https://www.amazon.ca/Deal-Trades-Stunned-Changed-Hockey-ebook/dp/B0D236NB35/

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