Canucks vs. Flames: the playoff trauma continues

Without the hockey sorcery practised by the Ottawa Senators in recent weeks, the Calgary Flames and the Vancouver Canucks would have been the two biggest surprises of the 2014-15 NHL season. Both clubs were supposed to be quietly rebuilding, and yet here they are, facing one another in Round 1 of the Stanley Cup playoffs, while players for formerly blue-chip teams like the Kings and the Bruins are sorting their taxes or surfing Epicurious.

If your friend tries to tell you that he or she saw any of this coming, the chances are good that your friend is a liar and you should never speak to him or her again.

Which team will have its fine year ruined by the other? Which fanbase will suffer another lasting mental scar from this long playoff rivalry? Calgary supporters get night sweats when they recall Curt Fraser’s TKO of Flames tough guy Willi Plett just 14 seconds into Game 1 of the 1982 playoffs, a round swept by the Canucks. Or when they think back on the second they saw Pavel Bure break into the clear in double overtime of Game 7 in 1994, knowing full well that nothing—certainly not Mike Vernon—would stop him.

Likewise, Canucks fans still drop out of family conversations to mull over the trauma of Joel Otto’s kicked-in overtime winner in 1989, and find themselves yelling at traffic after a flash of memory brings back the agonizing image of former Canuck favourite Martin Gelinas flipping the puck over a sprawling Alex Auld to clinch the 2004 series for the Flames.

Let’s give the edge—the very slimmest of razor-thin edges—to Vancouver this time. Without question, the Flames have defied odds this year that would crumple most teams. First, everybody said the play of Cinderella-story defenceman Mark Giordano was the main reason this group of rookies and castoffs was rolling past higher-ranked teams. Then Giordano tore a tendon and they just kept right on rolling, as if running on a reserve of belief and talent that even they didn’t know they had.

But can they keep that roll going over the course of a best-of-seven series and beyond? Can their top line dominate the way it needs to, even though two thirds of it (Johnny Gaudreau and Sean Monahan, who may well be nursing an injury) have played in a combined total of zero NHL playoff games? Can their defence corps continue to supply crucial offense, even without its leader?

If the answer is yes, we’re seeing the incredibly fast rise of a bona fide power in the West, rather than a very promising team that happened to have a very good year early in its growth. If the answer is no, Flames fans may be nursing a new mental scar, one that has the same nasty diagonal shape as this: