Latvia Loss Reminds That World Juniors No Longer Canadian Walkover

It’s a Xmas holiday thing. With nothing better to do over the extended break Canadians watch the World Junior Hockey Championships. Little things get big very quickly. So it’s probably a good idea to put team Canada’s 3-2 SO loss to Latvia into some perspective.

After beating plucky Latvia 10-0 in a game last year, the highly rated Canadians allowed Latvia to tie this game late in the third period. Then, after a scoreless overtime session, Latvia scored the only goal of the shootout on their eighth try at Canada’s goalie, 17-year old Jack Ivankovic.

Meanwhile, Linards Feldbergs stopped 55 shots over 65 minutes before adding eight more in the shootout. For Latvia it’s the pinnacle of their hockey year. For Canada it will be quickly forgotten if they pull things back together to make the final.

But for Canadian fans on holiday, unsettled by Donald Trump jibes about making them the 51st state, the loss portends something deeper and darker. Canada has owned the tournament for much of its being, winning five golds in the past decade. But now the U.S. is suddenly king-in-waiting, winners three times in that decade, including last year. They seem a lock to win again this year (despite losing to Finland).

Meanwhile some pundits are calling this edition of Team Canada its weakest in years. Realists point out that, were it not for playing in the NHL, Canada could still have Connor Bedard, Macklin Celebrini and Carter Yaremchuck, among others, in their lineup. And yes, the quality of all the nations in the tournament has risen. This is no longer shooting fish in the barrel.

And here there might be some traction for the argument that with all its hockey advantages, Canada is not developing its elite talent properly. Generally the U.S. (or that small portion of the country that likes hockey) has adopted a hothouse strategy, concentrating its best players in exclusive development silos.

That’s the typical European soccer model, too. Elite prospects as young as 14 are brought into development programs run by top-tier teams. Canada, meanwhile, spreads its elite players over 60-plus CHL teams, second-tier junior and the NCAA. Best-on-best occurs at tournaments, but most players are trained for the unique rigours of team play and travel at the NHL level. For all the spaghetti thrown at the wall too much doesn’t stick. Or so goes the theory.

But there’s also the new reality. As we wrote upon the death of Walter Gretzky in March of 2021, “The days of amiable Ab Howe, father of Gordie, smiling benignly as his son taught himself the game are over.” Walter taught Canada how to train seriously for the Soviets. Inadvertently, he created an expensive, elite training model favouring those with true cash to train prodigies.

“As a pioneer of more sophisticated training, Walter adapted a number of the practises used by the USSR team under Anatoli Tarasov in the 1960s, drills and strategies that stood Canadian conventional thinking on its head. As I wrote in my 1998 book “Of Ice And Men”, Gretzky was unsurprised when the 1972 Soviet team swamped Canada in the early going of their Super Series.

“People said, wow, this is incredible,” Wayne Gretzky remarked later. “Not to me it wasn’t. I’d been doing this drills since I was three years old. My dad was very smart.” Among the many innovations in his Brantford backyard rink were playing Wayne on defence as a tyke so he could learn to see the entire ice and how plays developed. It also increased Wayne’s peripheral vision.

There were many more drills and insights, as Walter’s many tributes have described. Wayne has always bridled when people attributed his success simply to instinct. He always said he trained for his craft in the same way a doctor or scientist might train. “I’ve put in almost as much time studying hockey as a medical student puts in studying medicine.” That training was often under Walter.”

Their success started a quest for the best techniques. “Power skating, off-ice training, ice rentals, new equipment, travel and coaching all became necessary to get a leg up on the competition. It was also very expensive. Having the resources to send your child to the top fitness gurus like Gary Roberts or to place them in a school like Shattuck St. Marys (as Sidney Crosby was) becomes a process costing tens— or hundreds— of thousands of dollars.

“Where the NHL was predominantly players from blue-collar backgrounds till the Euros arrived in the 1970s, today it is often constituted of young men from families of means and education. The idea of the farming father of the six Sutter brothers affording his sons’ training today is highly improbable. Today’s NHL has a number of college-educated players and products of dedicated European training.

“In that way, through no fault of Walter Gretzky, hockey has become a sport for families of means or friends with means. He taught parents that the proper training and equipment was imperative. And that doesn’t mean simply the rink in your backyard. With a new pair of skates costs $500, a stick costs $125 or a set of goalie equipment runs into a few thousand dollars you are losing a segment of the population to financial costs. And so Walter’s legacy of training development if forever tied to a big price tag.”

Players in other nations observed the same, too, and soon were applying intensive training methods from soccer and other sports. No wonder Canada is no longer gets walk-overs from the midrange nations.

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. You can see all his books at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

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Trudeau Parting Gift: Conceding Indigenous Land Claims For All Time

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Trudeau Parting Gift: Conceding Indigenous Land Claims For All Time

Published on December 26, 2024

Bruce Dowbiggin

Idea for a hit Canadian show. Law & Order: Indigenous Victims Unit. The shows begin with a horrific crime reported by the Canadian media. Children murdered by priests and then buried in the dark of night with no markers. PMJT tells the world we are a genocidal culture. Media goes Code red. Statues of Canadian PMs past are toppled.

The kicker in the show is that no one actually investigates the allegation. It’s just an hour of media mindlessly repeating the claims while local indigenous leaders say we didn’t use headstones and the dead are accounted for. Every episode ends with PMJT sending a whack of money to indigenous agitators and a promise to repeat the plot next week.

Okay, a bit glib. But amidst all the carnage PMJT has inflicted on his citizens, the Indigenous shell game of accusation = payout has received scant attention from a media salivating for Woke narratives on CBC. If possible, the PM’s tepid performance on this file— firing his indigenous finance minister was the highlight— is worse than almost all the others combined.

His cringing performance theatre in a graveyard was the most visible sign of this ineptitude. But for longer-lasting harm to the nation you probably need to look at the negotiations his government and the NDP BC government are conducting with the Haida Gwaii nation (population about 4,500) of the Queen Charlotte Islands archipelago. While no one was looking PMJT and his scofflaw partner BC premier David Eby have created a scenario where indigenous bands in Canada can achieve the daily double of independence while retaining all the perks of a social welfare state.

So far the tactic is working— for the Haida Gwaii. To be brief, the Haida Gwaii, who never signed a treaty with the Crown, are claiming the Queen Charlotte Islands as an independent nation that simultaneously is a recipient of financial and health benefits from the people they’re taking to court. The Haida Gwaii have reached something called the Rising Tide “agreement” with the BC. The federal Liberals are panting for the chance to do the same.

Geoff Moyse KC explains: “Trudeau succumbed to a provision in the Haida agreement to the effect it is not a ‘treaty’. The sole reason for this clause is to preserve the Haida position that they are not Canadians, rather they are a completely separate nation. As a separate nation they can negotiate “agreements” with other nations, such as Canada. But if they entered into a “treaty” they would be recognizing Canadian sovereignty. Which they are not prepared to do.”

In exchange for this agreement, explains Moyse, PMJT and David Eby received no concessions whatsoever from the Haida Gwaii. There is no release of the huge claim for damages for all the alleged things done to them nor for damages for the benefits BC has extracted from the land over the last 200 years. There is no release claim to being a completely separate nation, not subject to Canadian sovereignty.

Eby, the freshly re-elected premier, claims this is “the greatest thing he has ever done, and he wants to enter into similar agreements throughout BC.” Eby wants to grant indigenous bands throughout his province joint control over Crown lands. The province would then need consent from their new partners to do anything on that land. Say goodbye to forestry and pipelines.

What could go wrong? After all, this is Justin Trudeau we’re talking about. Mr. Sobriety. You guessed it. A bad deal became worse. BC has now instituted this Rising Tide agreement into provincial legislation. The federal Liberals seem intent on doing the same if PMJT can extend his mandate till October of 2025.

Instead of joint control, Eby and Trudeau will grant sole ownership and sovereignty of the Crown lands to the native bands, conceding aboriginal title over most of BC. Ergo, the PMJT/ Eby collapse could render property ownership worthless throughout the province.

What’s infuriating in this abject retreat is that, in the only two cases to have gone to final verdict after a trial, the bands obtained aboriginal title to only a very small part of what they are claiming. In short, the law seems to be demonstrating that a rigourous defence of the federal position would likely result in minor concessions, not complete surrender.

There is a chance to save the province and many other disputed hotspots across the nation if someone will show some spine in Ottawa when the issue is tested in court. That’s why PMJT’s government is in a hurry to pass equivalent federal legislation to BC’s for this to cement Aboriginal title over the entirety of the Haida archipelago for all time.

The bad news is that the spine needed for indigenous claims currently belongs to PMJT. A weaker spine is hard to imagine. The good news is that, if current trends continue, his window to pass the agreement— especially in a prorogued Parliament— is shrinking rapidly. So to the list of things Trudeau wants to wreck given enough runway, you can add this file to the urgency for his departure.

It’s hard to imagine a more tendentious, perverse way to run a country. But Canada has been watching Law & Order: Indigenous Victims Unit, directed by PMJT and his deputy Jagmeet Singh, since 2015. It’s time to cancel the show.

Bruce Dowbiggin

How The NFL Grinch Bought Xmas: Drowning In A Sea of Football

Published on December 24, 2024

Bruce Dowbiggin

After rummaging about for two months to no great effect the NHL has now embarked in its traditional Xmas break. Under the NHL’s collective agreement, no one plays any games from Dec. 24-27. This comes after a roster freeze that forbids trading a player during said holiday season. The annual World Junior champions, too, doesn’t crank it up till Boxing Day.

It’s a throwback to a more tranquil time when most of the Western world went home to eat too much and fall asleep on the sofa for three days. Then go shopping. So props to Gary Bettman’s NHL for keeping to their family stance. In such frenetic times there’s something to be said for pausing to sniff the frozen roses.

But catching your breath in the sports world is now an anachronism, driven by the massive dollars paid by networks and digital providers to sports leagues. In a time when the NFL rakes in $105 B ($2.1 billion a year) from its broadcast partners while the 32 teams collect a tidy $300 million each it’s no wonder the equity in NFL franchises has soared of late.

And that means using every minute of the calendar to schedule games— especially on days like Christmas when hundreds of millions are sitting at home after opening the prezzies, itching for something to watch besides It’s A Wonderful Life. So the Xmas break this year features two games on the day and another on Boxing Day. Followed by a full weekend of games on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

In doing so it big foots the NCAA CFS’s new 12-team playoff and bowl-game format which also uses every day but Sunday this time of year. On the past Saturday FS games were given a head start before the NFL stole eyeballs with its own games an hour later. Tough luck college boys. It’s unlikely to change as the CFS is eager to expand the playoffs in the future.

The NFL is not the first to exploit this previously virgin calendar break, of course. Th NBA broached the prohibition against Xmas Day in 1947, first placing a single high-profile game that day. Later it expanded to an all-day menu of games. Anything sacred about the family day went bye-bye as folks either went to the TV or the kitchen for the rest of the day.

The reason that pro sports is creating also many windows for their product is the sudden arrival of so many new outlets for games. Where legacy TV/ cable networks had exclusive dibs on buying rights for decades, cable cutting has now exploded the bidders. As GTM expert Rhys Dowbiggin told us in our July 29, 2024 column the model was UFC. Yup. UFC. “ESPN+ (Disney) has been working directly with the UFC for a number of year and packaging their events on the streamer.

And let’s not ignore the monkey in the room: YouTube, which dominates all the streamers for eyeballs – YouTube (Google) has more live sports than any of the other streamers. Just for context, there is a massive amount of money in these deals: the recent NBA media rights deal is going to be 70B+ – split across a number of media partners. All the streamers took a similar GTM strategy – and they’ve led us back to 2001.”

Disgruntled consumers dumping cable/ satellite carriers sought other outlets for their spots viewing for NFL, NBA, NHL and NCAA. Leagues responded so we now have special placement games for YouTube, Amazon Prime, Apple, Disney and Google. And the Xmas season cornucopia of games. Watching whatever you wanted. The strategy was to compete on bidding for original content to bring in the subscribers.

Then a funny thing happened. It was now only some of what you wanted. The expansion of carriers pissed off viewers just as much as the arbitrary cable companies. the magic solution of cable cutting is now the tragic solution. Explains Dowbiggin, “The original product fit for streaming was the promise of all the content you could need was in a single place, on-demand. You only needed Netflix (in a sense) and you never had to wait or choose what to watch. Once the market fragmented into multiple players, the fit evaporated. Half the problem that was solved by streaming was now gone:

Watching whatever you wanted. It was now only some of what you wanted. The streamers GTM strategy was to compete on original content to bring in the subscribers. But creating content and not consolidating content exasperated the issue.”

The latest strategy is to bundle services across outlets to give consumers easier packaging. Says Dowbiggin, “Will bundling partnerships change things? It can’t hurt. But unless it drastically shrinks the numbers of players at the top to 2-3, the problem of ‘watching whatever you want’ won’t be solved, because I’ll still need Disney for my Star Wars.

All I know is, I’ve kept my library card for years, because I always saw this coming. And I don’t plan on getting rid of it anytime soon.”