Canada’s Future Claimed the Present and Etched Themselves into History

As a diehard hockey fan who grew up rooting for Team Canada legends like Joe Sakic and Patrick Roy on my beloved Colorado Avalanche, I felt a different dual allegiance last night, exacerbated by my rabid UMass partisanship honed through years of Hockey East wars. My sworn enemies like Connor Hellebuyck, Jack Eichel and Matt Boldy were in red, white and blue, while the good and perfect UMass/Avalanche savior, Cale Makar, was in that gorgeous and classic red and white getup. Growing up on the Dream Team red-pilled me forever* as a Team USA fan no matter my feeling for the political situation in the USA, but USA Hockey never grabbed me the same way USA Basketball did because I was usually rooting for Sweden and my favorite player, Peter Forsberg. Only when they were out of the Olympics would I begrudgingly root for Team USA, led by another legend in Brian Leetch, yet another Team USA player whose alma mater I would later develop deep antipathy towards. Boston College is a fucking problem for my patriotism.

*I have already written about how Nikola Jokic, the official athlete of Splinter, made me change my lifelong international basketball allegiance towards the wonderous Serbian culture in that gold medal game I will never forgive Serbia’s coach for blowing (just pass it to #15!!! ffs!), and last night I admit I couldn’t help but root for Team Canada. Not because of politics (although Bill Guerin did help get me to where I was going anyway), but because two of my favorite athletes ever who earned this moment.

If you search for lists of the greatest Team Canada hockey goals ever, you hear a lot of familiar great names. Like Gretzky to Lemieux. Or Paul Henderson’s goal of the century. Or Joe Sakic doing vintage Joe Sakic things and telling the fat lady to start warming up. Or Jonathan Toews’ gargantuan tip in against Sweden. Or Sidney Crosby’s golden goal, the last legendary highlight in a best-on-best final for Team Canada before the NHL owners and its players began fighting over the Olympics, of which the 4 Nations was a compromise in the process en route to all these players meeting up again in Italy come 2026.

The names you don’t hear in those memories etched into the hockey soul of every Canadian though, are the modern greats, like Sidney Crosby’s protégé Nathan Mackinnon, or Connor McDavid, the man who claimed a well-earned spot alongside Canadian legends last night by firing home the game-winner past the greatest goalie alive. It’s a bit eerie how similar these goals from 87 and 97 are–a sneaky pass from the corner to literally god all alone in the slot, and boom. Line up and shake hands, gents. They’re not the same goals, Crosby sneak attacked Ryan Miller low, while McDavid took a beat to tap the power button up and rip a perfectly placed heat-seeking missile past Connor Hellebuyck’s high glove-side, but they echo each other.

Connor McDavid is widely considered to be the greatest hockey player alive, and he earned last year’s Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP in a losing effort. He is beyond lethal, and Auston Matthews and many other Americans will be wondering ’til the end of their days why he was chasing the puck to leave probably Canada’s best player all alone in the most dangerous part of the ice. Maybe it was fate intervening in the way we rarely notice in sports, where it takes some stupidity to create the space for greatness to shine.

I say “probably” the best Canadian player because this is where we reroute towards my Colorado Avalanche bias, and the NHL’s defending regular season MVP and current points leader, Nathan Mackinnon. Nate Dogg, as he is affectionally called by his people, has one more Stanley Cup Championship than Connor McDavid’s zero, sweeping his Edmonton Oilers en route to it. McJesus winning game MVP while Mackinnon was voted tournament MVP is an apt description of the only other NHL player(s) to at least orbit McDavid’s universe. Mackinnon scored the first goal of the game and was a menace all tournament, as I have watched him take every Oilers game personally in an attempt to prove to everyone that it is not a foregone conclusion that the league’s most talented player is also its best.

But to hear Nathan Mackinnon say it time and time again in the Colorado Avalanche locker room, and again to SportsCenter on ESPN last night after the game, he put that (s) after player above, not me, and continuously leaves rhetorical space for his teammate Cale Makar to be “potentially” the best player in the world. Makar is a little younger than McDavid and Mackinnon and is a defenseman, taking a less prophesized route as the mere fourth overall pick, not first, who had to spend two years rehabilitating my moribund alma mater’s hockey program, the University of Massachusetts. After taking a team that had gone 4-35-5 the last two years to the National Championship his second year, Makar jumped right from the National Championship to the NHL playoffs and scored in his first professional period. He missed the first game between the two teams that Canada lost, and Mackinnon told SportsCenter that it’s not a coincidence that Canada went undefeated with Makar in the lineup.

Cale Makar is a defenseman unlike any other since Bobby Orr, the universally agreed-upon greatest defenseman of all time who invented the modern way to play defense. Makar is every-freakin-where on both offense and defense, and he is redefining how teams have to account for a defenseman in their defensive zone coverages. Like everything he’s done while speedrunning his Conn Smythe-laden career towards all-time greatness from the jump, Makar claimed his moment too, playing a game-high 27:58 and getting the second assist on McDavid’s goal that will reverberate throughout Canadian time forever. If you are a casual American and want to pretend to be a real hockey head today, say things like “boy did Makar get them out of the zone a bunch last night.” He is a stud of all studs and last night he proved like he did for Nathan Mackinnon against Connor McDavid in the 2022 Western Conference Finals, that like we will see next year, there are Connor McDavids and Nathan Mackinnons and Auston Matthews’ and Leon Draisaitls and Nikita Kucherovs out there, but there is a significant difference between teams that have a Cale Makar, and teams that don’t.

As P.K. Subban said on SportsCenter last night, this coming age of NHL players back at the Olympics will be led in Canada by the three M’s: McDavid, Mackinnon and Makar. Legendary status on Team Canada is the sport’s most exclusive club, and it was the lone thing missing from Mackinnon and Makar’s already Hall of Fame resumes. McDavid’s Hall of Fame one is just missing a Stanley Cup to equal them now, but he also claimed a moment alone in front of the net on Team Canada forever. These guys all had their first crack to really make a best-on-best memory, and they were Canada’s three best players, what legends. This tournament was great and the ratings for it reflected that fact. I hope many of my fellow American casuals who found themselves cheering the MAGA hats towards the exits last night stick around to keep watching the world’s most exciting sport. We get to do this all over again in Milan next year.