The Presidents' Trophy Matters (For, Like, One More Week)

Stop clapping, damn it! Aside from the thing they won, they haven't won anything!

By now, you've probably heard the news that the Canucks have won the Presidents' Trophy. You've probably also heard some of the subsequent chatter surrounding the merit of the accomplishment. You may have heard, for instance, that this trophy doesn't matter, that only playoff success matters. That is patently false, and you likely heard it from fools.

Rather than explain why, I'll turn things over to Tom Benjamin, who recently debunked the crap out of this crackpot theory:

While there is no doubt that the big prize of any season is the Stanley Cup, its foolish to denigrate other accomplishments in the hockey season, be it the President’s Trophy or even a Divisional title. The more we diminish the regular season, the less reason any of us has to watch.

What he said. Regular season accomplishments may not be playoff accomplishments, but they are still noteworthy accomplishments. Ryan Lambert of Puck Daddy argues winning the Presidents' Trophy might even be more impressive than winning the Stanley Cup:

[...] don't get me wrong, I love the playoffs for all the drama that the ping-pong-ball probability brings. But the value placed on them, rather than the regular season, seems far too great to be reasonable. Winning in the playoffs isn't everything. In fact, it's occasionally a complete fluke. You don't get Edmonton/Carolina Cup Finals otherwise.

Yeah, winning the Stanley Cup is a pretty cool accomplishment, and one that should obviously be celebrated to some extent. But to also denigrate beating the hell out of everyone you play for 82 games? That's just stupid. Because winning the Presidents' Trophy is a more impressive achievement.

He might be hyperbolizing slightly, but he's got a point. The Stanley Cup has achieved a level of importance so vast that regular-season accomplishments are, comparatively, worth squat. That's not how it should be. Winning the regular season is a huge deal. Considering that it's technically harder to win than the Stanley Cup, it's silly to pretend it means nothing.

Consider, for example, the Olympics and the World Championships in any sport. The world championships may often be considered the last big tuneup before the Olympics, but nobody scoffs at a world champion just because he or she didn't win an Olympic gold medal. Yes, people place more value on the Olympics, but winning at the World Championships is far from meaningless.

You may have also heard someone espouse the theory behind The Presidents' Trophy curse, a laughable belief that being the winningest regular-season team means a postseason of cuplessness and utter damnation. Jonathan Willis recently debunked the crap out of this crackpot theory:

[Since 1994] the Presidents’ Trophy winner [has been] the most successful team, being:

• eliminated in the first round the fewest number of times
• eliminated in the second round the fewest number of times
• the Stanley Cup champion more frequently than any other seed
• in the Finals three times as often as the second seed
  

[...] Given that the Presidents’ Trophy slot is obviously the most favourable position, why do we create factually vacuous phantoms like the ‘Presidents’ Trophy Curse?'

Okay, so not only does the Presidents' Trophy matter, but it's actually a predictor of success. It is unquestionably worth celebrating, and usually means a pretty decent postseason run is on the horizon.

That said, as soon as the postseason actually starts, it stops mattering.

With that in mind, the Canucks might want to get that banner up lickety-split. The team will be awarded the trophy in a ceremony before their final regular season home game on Thursday, and it would be wisdom to prepare to raise the banner that same day. If they wait until next season, it either goes up alongside a Stanley Cup banner or it goes up without it. If it's the former, no one will care about a Presidents' Trophy banner. If it's the latter, people will just resent it, and we'll be subjected to more silliness about how it doesn't matter.

However, if you raise it on Thursday, there's a possibility that the banner--and the accomplishment it represents--will receive the fanfare it deserves.

Why it's Been 17 Years

The most ridiculous thing I hear in hockey is that Gary Bettman's hatred of Canada has led him to rig the game against the six remaining Canadian teams. Why else would Canada have such a long cold streak? A Canadian team last hoisted the Cup in 1993. If it's not a conspiracy, what is it? A curse?

No, it's the fans.

With the many many ways the media now penetrate into the game, fans have a better look into every aspect of the game than they did in decades past. One can sit for hours straight at a computer and read page upon page of commentary, rumor and discussion about players. Fans wanting information have instant gratification, and that's a useful tool. I'm so glad that technology has propelled us this far, into an age where it is almost impossible to destroy information.

That said, it allows obsessives to easily obsess. Worse, in Canadian cities there's some sort of ridiculous sense of entitlement. We like hockey better than those American cities. In Canada, football worries about competing with hockey, and not vice versa. Why should a city with no natural snow, that isn't watching the game anyway, hoist the Cup?

That sense of entitlement turns nasty when they lose. It turns vicious. It gets stupid. Most of all, it gets distracting. Players who sign in Canadian cities sound excited about the added pressure, but they seem to expect it to be a lot more reasonable than it is. Canadian cities expect results, and whether that's fair or not, what isn't fair is that when their team doesn't win, they feel justified in treating the players like garbage. In every Canadian city is a ridiculous vitriol machine ready to tear its hockey team to shreds.

It happened in Ottawa, where Ray Emery, after some brilliant play taking over the starting position and helping his team to the Stanley Cup Finals, was ultimately run out of town, surrounded by questions of his attitude and stories of his coming late to practice. Instead of focusing on how far he'd carried his team, Ottawa focused on how he'd played poorly in the Cup Finals, and blamed their loss on him. It was their loss, as Emery is still a talented goaltender, who played well in the KHL and for the Flyers, before he was injured. The Senators have had question marks in goal ever since.

It happened in Montreal, where Carey Price was blamed for a series loss to Philadelphia in his rookie season. Despite showing flashes of brilliance in that series, a few flukey goals by Philly and a few ridiculous defensive breakdowns made his numbers in the series look bad, and the Canadiens' insistence on shooting the puck directly at Biron's logo made him look great in comparison. Canadiens fans haven't had faith in Price since, and unfortunately, Price lets that kind of stuff get to him.

It's happening in Calgary to Jarome Iginla. It happened in Edmonton to Joffrey Lupul. It's happening in Toronto to Phil Kessel.

But still, despite all the ridiculousness that goes on in the other five cities, Vancouverites are particularly good at it.

Markus Naslund spent the whole duration of his captaincy being blamed for the Canucks' not hoisting the Cup. Todd Bertuzzi... well never mind, he did screw up pretty big. Still, after coming back... he couldn't come back. Up until last season, the Sedin twins were criticized to no end as being second-line talent, not being true offensive stars, etc. Remember the old "Sedins for Jokinen" trade proposals? How about Kevin Bieksa? Even Trevor Linden -- oh sure, in 1994 he was our hero, but in his last couple seasons here, we couldn't give the guy a break. Canucks fans are already doing it to Cody Hodgson. How about Roberto Luongo? He's got to be my favorite example -- people yelling at him that he can't stand the pressure of their yelling at him.

These are issues that just don't exist in the American markets. Joe Sakic was a great leader, and Colorado fans knew it, but when the Avs missed the playoffs, no one threw things at Sakic, no one yelled at him in the street, and no one sat down next to him in a restaurant to offer HIS opinion on how Joe could improve his game. No one even questioned whether he was the right guy to wear the C. They just let Joe do his thing, and he brought them two Stanley Cups. Scott Stevens was never torn to shreds in New Jersey, and he presided over all three of their Cup victories. Steve Yzerman didn't have a whole lot of failure to be blamed for, but you can bet if his team missed a step, no one would be calling for Stevie Y's head.

It baffles me that no one questions whether these men could have accomplished the same things if they lived in cities that were completely unforgiving of every misstep. Cities where you can post a .913 save percentage and 40 wins and still be slagged all summer long. Cities where there are masses of vitriolic pessimists waiting for a single slip-up so they can call for your head in blogs, newspapers, on the radio and on television.

So, yeah, it's like Skeeter said -- "it wasn't a necessary change from the team's standpoint, but it may have been a necessary change from a PR standpoint." Thanks, fans. Once again, a good man and a great hockey player have been torn down because you feel entitled. Because anything less than a Cup victory is a disappointment, and someone needs to lose his job.

If Vancouver doesn't go another 40 years without winning a Cup, it won't be because they didn't try.