Edmonton’s Cinderella Story On Ice

In the postseason of any team sport, the higher-seeded teams are there for a reason. They also have the rewards of extra home games in their playoff series in addition to their presumed advantage of talent and ability that comes with their superior regular season resume. For the most part, this system does its job, making sure that at least most of the better teams advance against their weaker adversaries.

Aside from the NCAA basketball tournament, which uses single elimination and neutral sites, one exception to the power of home advantage in a seven-game series apparently is the NHL. The revitalized league has proven to be a utopia for underdogs in the 2006 playoffs, most notably in the mess — I mean the West.

An NHL playoff bracket may be more difficult to find than a music video on MTV, but if you were to take the time to write one out, or even picture one in your mind, it would be quite the startling sight. In the West, you would notice advancing to the second round were the Sharks, the Mighty Ducks, the Avalanche, and the Oilers. That seems all well and good until you realize that in their wake lay the conference's top four seeds, all of which had superior records, and home ice advantage. In this sense, four Cinderellas, four giant-killers had emerged with no favorites left standing. The outcomes of these series had seemingly been decided with all the chaos and random elements of a bouncing-on-end puck in ice traffic.

Those top teams to burn out were the Flames, Predators, Stars, and most notably, the Presidents' Trophy-winning Detroit Red Wings. While winners of this trophy given out to the team with the highest regular season point total have not always fared well, Detroit was a talented veteran team with championship experience (numerous holdovers from the 2002 champs), as well as a great deal of championship expectations. Their opponents, the Oilers, had squeaked into the postseason's final (and unenviable) spot with no reason to be thought of as any more than dinner for the inevitable octopi.

However, one element may have been overlooked. Edmonton's franchise, long dormant since the Wayne Gretzky/Mark Messier/Jari Kurri dynasty of the '80s died off, swung a trade deadline deal for goaltender Dwayne Roloson. While balanced scoring and veteran leadership from stars Chris Pronger and Michael Peca certainly provided key contributions, Roloson's goaltending has made all the difference.

In that fateful No. 1-8 matchup, the Oilers had managed a split of the first four games. Edmonton then stunned Hockeytown with a one goal win in Joe Louis Arena to set the stage for a raucous Rexhall Centre matchup in Game 6. The Red Wings kept the underdogs and the fans under control as they went ahead 2-0 after two periods, but once again, the unexplainable happened.

A wild, delightfully entertaining shootout broke out between the two teams in the final period. The pace picked up and Edmonton came roaring back with two goals from Fernando Pisani to tie the game. Just under the 10-minute mark, Detroit answered with a crowd-silencing goal to retake the lead at 3-2. Yet the Oilers were far from finished with their onslaught of Red Wing goalie Manny Legace. Ales Hemsky tied the game on a bizarre goal where his body was checked into the puck from behind right in front of the net. Just like a cue ball deflects the eight ball into the corner pocket, Hemsky's body unconsciously knocked the puck past Legace to tie the game at 3.

While the tying goal may have been a fluke, Hemsky scored the game-winner with just over a minute left on a red-hot slapshot to show he could score the pretty ones, too, and with that, he may have single-handedly killed off a contemporary giant of an NHL franchise while reviving another one that had been in a long hibernation. A minute later, the Oiler players were celebrating amongst an endless, deafening sea of waving white towels. The eighth-seeded Edmonton Spoilers had just done the unthinkable.

The story was a charming one, although San Jose did not take kindly to it in round two, taking the first two games of their ensuing series. That was okay though, they had had their George Mason-esque moment of glory. No one on Edmonton, however, was willing to rest on such laurels.

Game 3 was as defining a moment as has ever marked a playoff run. A tie game spills into an overtime period. Then a second, then a third. A 3-0 series deficit and the edge of the playoff cliff stood behind them, should they falter. Roloson makes an unfathomable glove save in the second overtime to keep that deficit from ever seeing daylight, and a period later, center Shawn Horcoff finally all but wills the puck past Sharks goaltender Vesa Toskala to end the marathon in favor of the still-standing home team, the heroes in navy blue.

The Oilers would take another nail-biter at home, overcoming a pair of two-goal deficits in the process, and suddenly found themselves on their way to a remarkable seven straight playoff victories, and eight out of nine. With each win seemingly easier than the last, the Oilers polluted all over the Sharks' and then the Ducks' (in five games) home ponds en route to a sensational and historical Stanley Cup Finals berth for the first eight-seed ever to reach the NHL's final round.

While many are eager to compare Edmonton's sudden success to their glory days of the '80s, another comparison seems more appropriate, that of the last major North American team sports champion of the calendar year, the NFL's Pittsburgh Steelers.

Here was a team known almost entirely for a dynasty long past, that being the '70s Steelers of Terry Bradshaw and Lynn Swann and the Steel Curtain, with no title banners hung since then. The 2005 edition reached the sixth and final NFL seed at a modest 11-5 record, knocked off the juggernaut Indianapolis Colts in heart-stopping fashion along the way, and suddenly found themselves celebrating in a Super Bowl champions parade. Hmmm, sound familiar?

At the moment, Edmonton lay in wait for their opponents from the east. Whether it is Carolina or Buffalo (Carolina currently leads the series 3-2 as of this writing) who advances, the Oilers will have a considerable chance to defeat either team and thus become the first eighth-seed champion in the history of professional sports.

With ours being a country that often does not know what to make of hockey, it is only fitting that a story this inspiring goes to a city, and a country full of rabid fanatics north of the border, who can properly appreciate the home team's heroics, as well as playoff hockey in and of itself, in all its wonderfully random glory.