Game 7 Glory

Special to www.whl.ca, Courtesy of Jim Swanson (Prospects Magazine/Prince George Citizen, Spring 2005 Edition) – There is nothing in all of sport that compares to the finality of a winner-take-all encounter.
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rGame 7. The mere mention of it causes spines to tingle.
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rCauses coaches to open their eyes wide with fear. Causes players to start sweating buckets – before they set skate on the ice. Causes fans to grip their seats with white-knuckled anticipation.
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rThere is nothing in sports that rivals the intensity, the urgency and the finality of a Game 7. Add in the special dynamic of junior hockey, where teen-age players, many of whom will never play in anything bigger than that one big game, the stakes are immeasurable.
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rAnd yet, for all the stress, playing in a Game 7 is a dream come true for anyone involved in hockey. It is an opportunity like no other. There isn’t a player or coach worth his salt who wouldn’t be willing to stake his reputation on a Game 7 performance.
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r“I think players relish the chance to play in a Game 7,â€? said Cam Moon, a former Saskatoon Blades goaltender who is now the play-by-play voice for the Red Deer Rebels.
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r“The media hype intensifies, the crowd is louder, the building is electric, and there’s a real excitement to get out on the ice. How many of us growing up played Game 7 on the street in front of our houses? Now you get a chance to do it in front of a lot of people – mum’s not calling anyone in for dinner, and no one’s taking their net and going home. It’s a big-time game, big-time circumstances.â€?
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rThose circumstances are known and respected by everyone in hockey. Playing in a Game 7, surviving regardless of the result, is akin to earning the sport’s Purple Heart. Play in a Game 7, coach a Game 7, or even buy a ticket and ride the roller coaster through a Game 7, and you’re in a special club.
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rGame 7 stories are passed down from generation to generation like priceless heirlooms.
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r“It’s the excitement. All the preparation it takes to get there, to win, and to get to Game 7, and then when you get there, if you don’t execute and you don’t do well you know it’s over,â€? said Ottawa 67’s coach Brian Kilrea, the winningest coach in Canadian Hockey League history.
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r“You know if your team doesn’t play its best, … you’re out of it. When you lose a Game 7, which happens to everyone at some point, it’s final. There’s no relief to lose it and go onto somewhere else, you know it’s a long time until training camp. You wonder what you could have done to bring a different result.â€?
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rThe pressure of the 1999 Memorial Cup final, although technically not a Game 7, but a one-game confrontation that mirrored the pressures in so many ways, nearly reduced Kilrea, the only CHL coach with 1,000 wins, to a puddle. Host Ottawa and the Calgary Hitmen had one game standing between them and junior hockey immortality.
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r“We had to go to overtime in that final to win, and Calgary had a shot to beat us in the last minute,â€? said Kilrea.
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r“I’ll never forget one player telling me he was so nervous that he was shaking, and I told him I just called out the name of a player on our team who hasn’t been with us for four years. It was a nervous time for all of us. It turns out the guy who was nervous was Matt Zultek, and he scored the winning goal.â€?
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rBenoit Groulx has coached more than 250 games for the Gatineau Olympiques, but none more important than the winner-take-all game that decided the 2003 QMJHL championship. The Olympiques, then known as the Hull Olympiques, became the first QMJHL team to win a Game 7 on the road when they beat the Halifax Mooseheads 7-2.
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rEven before winning that game, Groulx was hit with the blunt realization that reaching a Game 7 in any CHL playoff series is an accomplishment in and of itself.
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r“I remember being alone in the dressing room before the game with Charlie Henry [the team governor] while the guys were on the ice for warm-up, and telling him how we played 70 games in the regular season, six exhibition games, 19 games in the playoffs, and it came down to the one game,â€? said Groulx, who has since led the Olympiques to back-to-back Memorial Cup appearances.
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r“Being there was quite an achievement for us that year, but if we didn’t win we had to go back and start it all again the next year and hope everything would fall in place again. I realized that night how far we were and how difficult it was to get there. I was almost discouraged, but we were fortunate to win and go to the Memorial Cup.â€?
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rWin or lose, challenged to the point of mental fatigue. Discouraged would be a perfect descriptive for the powerhouse London Knights, who were upset by the Guelph Storm in Game 7 of the OHL’s Western Conference final in 2003. Discouraged would work as well for the Saskatoon Blades, who twice in a three-year span (1991-92 and 1993-94) pushed the WHL final to Game 7, only to lose both times on the road to the host Kamloops Blazers. The Blades, the only team to play in every season of the WHL’s existence, have never won a league playoff title.
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r“For sure, the game we won in Halifax for my first championship, Game 7, the biggest win of my coaching career,â€? said Groulx. “It was the first time in the history of our league that a team won Game 7 of the final on the road, and it was special.â€?
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rThere is no magic formula for winning a Game 7. Home or road? For every franchise like Red Deer, which has played three Game 7s, all at home and all victories, there is also the Olympiques story of overcoming incredible odds and winning in a romp in enemy territory.
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rIt took 10 years of existence before the Rebels franchise faced a Game 7 experience – not even when Red Deer won the 2001 Memorial Cup did they face a winner-take-all game in a playoff run. But the following three springs, the Rebels faced the challenge three times. Red Deer got three goals from Boyd Gordon in 2002 in downing Brandon 5-2 to complete a comeback from a 3-1 series deficit; in 2003, the Rebels defeated the Medicine Hat Tigers 5-1 in Game 7 of their second-round matchup; and last season Red Deer got past arch-rival Calgary in a first-round Game 7, winning 4-2, riding the goaltending of Cam Ward into the second round.
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rIn fact, the 2003 series between the Rebels and Tigers was a foreshadowing of what was to come for Medicine Hat, who won the WHL championship a year later. The Tigers had their mettle tested in the playoff fires, and that experience gave invaluable experience for the 2004 post-season.
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r“The Tigers had been through tough times for so many years before,â€? said Moon. “They upset Swift Current in the first round. Red Deer won the first two games, but Medicine Hat was lights-out at home. They served notice to the league they were on the way up, and look where they went the next year. I think that Game 7, even though they lost, taught them a lot and they used it wisely.â€?
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rFor coaches, there is no template to follow to prepare your team for Game 7. Kilrea contends that keeping the players loose, even aloof, is the key, but Groulx and the Olympiques took a different route.
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rIn 1988 in a first-round series, Kilrea’s 67’s were down 3-0 to the Oshawa Generals and were down by a goal in the final minute when they caught a break. A Generals defenceman inadvertently put the puck in his own net, leading to overtime, which Ottawa won. After that game, 67’s forward David Gibbons stood up in the dressing room and said, “Boys, we got them right where we want them.â€?
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rIt turns out he was right.
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r“That created a loose atmosphere,â€? said Kilrea, “and we won the next three games by five goals each, including Game 7. It was intense, very hard on the heart. We went from being 27 seconds away from being eliminated to winning the series after being down 3-0.â€?
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rGroulx used an unorthodox pre-game schedule to spur his team to the win over Halifax in 2003. Going on the advice of assistant coach John Chabot, the Olympiques went for a 15-minute skate at 4:30 p.m. – all the players except starting netminder Eric Lafrance.
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rWhat made the routine change even more remarkable is this – Game 6 was the night before in Hull, and the teams arrived in Halifax at 3 a.m. after a bumpy flight from Ottawa. The Olympiques were focused on keeping their psychological edge after forcing Game 7.
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r“It was different, but something special,â€? said Groulx.
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r“John told me when he played for Detroit, they tried that a couple of times, having a light skate three hours before the game, and we did it two or three times during the season and it worked very well. That light skate was a turning point, and it gave us a lot of confidence early in the game, and within 10 minutes we were up 3-zip. Halifax was a tired team and we thought we had the momentum and we had to go at them right away. We ended up winning 7-2 – it was a big, big upset. We were on the road, we had a very young team, we had that unusual preparation, and they had 10,000 people there ready to party. It was their first time in the final, and they couldn’t believe what they were seeing.â€?
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rThere will be more of that this spring. When winter starts to release it’s icy grip across Canada and the northern U.S., junior hockey players somewhere in the CHL will be going through the biggest challenge of their hockey lives. For some, it will make them. For others, it will show them they have a way to go.
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rSeventh Heaven
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rSome memorable Game 7s from recent years in the CHL playoffs, and how they impacted the Memorial Cup:
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rWHL, 2004 – The Everett Silvertips certainly did not behave like an expansion franchise. With former NHL coach-of-the-year Kevin Constantine behind the bench, the upstart ‘Tips did the unthinkable, beating the Kelowna Rockets in seven games in the Western Conference Final, winning the last three games to do so. The Rockets went on to win the Memorial Cup as the host team, but Everett stole a big piece of the Rockets’ plan through their stingy defensive play. Everett lost to Medicine Hat in four straight in the WHL final, missing out on a chance to upset Kelowna once again in the CHL championship tournament.
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rOHL, 1999 – Belleville beats London in the OHL final in seven games. Neither team was considered a powerhouse – Belleville finished second in its division behind Ottawa, London was third with a mediocre 72 points in the regular season – but they staged an epic. The 67s, who played host to the Memorial Cup, were knocked off in five games by Belleville in the conference final, but won the CHL championship with an overtime win over the Calgary Hitmen.
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rQMJHL, 1999 – In a matchup of two teams that were not supposed to be there, Acadie-Bathurst and Hull collide in the best-of-seven final. Acadie-Bathurst finished fourth overall in the regular season; Hull’s record was below .500 at 23-38-9 – yet the two battled until the bitter end. Acadie-Bathurst, with Mathieu Benoit leading the playoffs in scoring, emerged victorious, although it was the Olympiques, who dumped the top three teams in their division without requiring a seventh game, who stole all the headlines.
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rWHL, 2002 – The Prince George Cougars and Kootenay Ice break all the rules in the first round of the playoffs. The favoured Ice lose the first two games at home, but journey north to Prince George to beat the Cougars in three straight games at the Multiplex. Prince George then returned the favour in Cranbrook in Game 6, leaving the series without a single win on home ice until Kootenay salvages the seven-gamer in Game 7. Kootenay went on to win the Memorial Cup.
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rOHL, 2000 – The top two teams in the OHL meet in a marquee final. The Plymouth Whalers and Barrie Colts, newcomers to the league’s championship series, extend it the distance before Barrie wins Game 7 on the road. Barrie used the experienced gained from winning Game 7 in the conference semifinal against Sudbury to earn a berth in the Memorial Cup.
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rWHL, 1992-94 – For three consecutive years, the WHL final goes to Game 7. In 1992 and 1994, the story is pretty much the same, with the Kamloops Blazers using home-ice advantage to rout the Saskatoon Blades and move on to the Memorial Cup. In 1993, a star-studded Swift Current Broncos lineup featuring Andy Schneider, Dean McAmmond and regular season scoring leader Jason Krywulak escapes an all-out confrontation with Lonny Bohonos and the Portland Winter Hawks.