After beating the Los Angeles Kings last night, the Vancouver Canucks locked up the NHL's Presidents' Trophy, the award handed out to the team that finishes the regular season with the most points. The big question: "Do the players give a flying puck about it?"
Clark Gillies was a part of a number of New York Islanders teams that hung "NHL League Champions" banners in Nassau Coliseum ("NHL League Champions" was the title you earned prior to the creation of the Presidents' Trophy). He had this to say about the feat:
"Well, certainly it's something to be proud of. You can puff your chest out for a couple days until the playoffs start, but then you better suck it back in quick, because the real work is about to start." He added, "We won it in '78-79 and got knocked out by the Rangers — it certainly didn't do us any good that year."
And that seems to be the prevailing opinion — you're well on your way up the summit, but you're certainly not over the hump yet.
While I've never taken a crack at the Presidents' Trophy, I have competed for a couple titles in the minor leagues and junior - I joined the Alaska Aces just in time to take part in their quest for first place overall in the ECHL in 2007. We finished one point behind the Las Vegas Wranglers, with the regular season crown (the Henry Brabham Cup) coming down to the final day.
Despite the close race for that trophy, I didn't find out that it even existed until roughly two days after the regular season ended. There was nary a mention of it, as the only focus that mattered was getting the top seed heading into playoffs. We could've cared less about a trophy or a regular season title — it's all about the big one at the end.
That's not my attempt at devaluing the Presidents' Trophy, by any stretch of the imagination. When you play 82 games together as a family in a demanding sport and come out the side as the best of the year, that's sometime to tell people about and be proud of … down the road.
This Vancouver Canucks team knows, as much as the fans around the league do, that it's Stanley Cup or bust when you finish first in the league. As a player, you're fine with everybody else writing and talking about the feat. You're fine with players on other teams envying it.
But for you, it's a stride towards a goal, a small piece of the puzzle you're assembling that, when put together, looks like a picture of you drinking out of the Stanley Cup. You've found a corner piece to that puzzle by locking up home ice for the entirety of your playoff survival.
Coaches tend to avoid discussing these milestones, as they fear it will breed complacency. It's often not until the season ends that you hear your coach speak and realize he actually noticed all the little accomplishments along the way, but chose to bury his pride in them for the betterment of the team. As Alain Vignealt told the Globe and Mail, "For us to have home-ice in front of our fans, with the way we play in this building, it should be an added bonus."
Ah, yes. We're happy, just keep that focus forwards, friends. My guess is that he'd like the discussion of this accomplishment to go away as quickly as possible so his players don't puff out their chests so much they pop.
It's sad that as fans we don't get root more for Presidents' Trophy race, but because the players are taught that it's merely a stepping stone, we get the impression it doesn't matter all that much to them. Half the fun of watching a team celebrate the Stanley Cup is because they celebrate it and they mean it.
They weep, they can't talk, they make a mess — it's a slightly different reaction from the mild pride we got from the 'Nucks last night. Getting quotes on winning the Presidents' Trophy is akin to asking a guy who just won a fight how he feels, knowing that he's walking into the ring to fight someone even tougher in two minutes. Just a hundred variations of "good, but there's work to do."
The good news for Vancouver is that roughly 30% of Presidents' Trophy winners have gone on to win the Stanley Cup from a field of 16 — you have to like those odds. The bad news is that the last two winners haven't seen the second round.
There's no telling which side of that the Canucks will fall on, but they've certainly got the personnel to do it. They're about to enter the ring for the tougher fight — they can be proud of the previous win when they get out of this one alive, too.