Oilers have chance to end Canada’s long Stanley Cup drought

MONTREAL -- “Unbelievable!” read the bold-face type atop the advertisement in the June 11, 1993, edition of the Montreal Gazette. “The Stanley Cup May be Over… But the Memories Live Forever!”

The NHL-authorized 60-minute showcase of the 1993 Stanley Cup Playoffs -- round-by-round highlights and behind-the-scene interviews -- could be yours for $24.98.

On VHS tape.

Ask your parents/grandparents.

Elsewhere in the newspaper that June 11: a review and reader promotion tied to that day’s Montreal premiere of the movie “Jurassic Park,” fitting in that it now seems like dinosaurs were roaming the Earth the last time an NHL team based in Canada won the Stanley Cup.

NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, in his first year on the job, presents the 1993 Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP to goalie Patrick Roy; Canadiens coach Jacques Demers presses the Stanley Cup overhead.

Thirty-one years later north of the border, the good news is where we find it: the Stanley Cup Final between the Edmonton Oilers and Florida Panthers, beginning with Game 1 on Saturday at Amerant Bank Arena (8 p.m. ET, ABC, ESPN+, SN, TVAS, CBC), will feature not one, but two national anthems.

Hockey’s holy grail has been just a rumor in Canada for a full generation of fans. But now, thanks to the Oilers, the red-and-white flag-waving anticipation is at fever pitch once more.

Will this be the year that the Stanley Cup is paraded through a Canadian city -- by a full team, not by a single proud member of a champion from a U.S.-based club -- during his day with the trophy?

Hall of Fame forward Guy Carbonneau is the most recent captain of a team from Canada that won the Stanley Cup, wearing the “C” for the Canadiens during a 1993 run that featured an unthinkable 10 consecutive overtime victories.

Guy Carbonneau, winner of the Stanley Cup with the 1986 and 1993 Canadiens and 1999 Dallas Stars, in a July 2019 portrait; and an ad for a videotape celebrating the Canadiens’ 1993 championship, the most recent title won by an NHL team based in Canada.

“I’m surprised,” Carbonneau said a year ago of a nation’s three-decade drought, the Oilers having just been bounced by the title-bound Vegas Golden Knights. “If we had only one or two teams in Canada, we might say, ‘OK, it’s normal.’ But we have seven teams.”

The chronology isn’t pretty. The Canadiens are the most recent Stanley Cup finalist from Canada, falling in five games to the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2021.

A decade earlier, the Vancouver Canucks lost a seven-game Final to the Boston Bruins in 2011. Then three consecutive seasons of coming up short -- 2007, Ottawa Senators, five games, against the Anaheim Ducks; 2006, Oilers, seven games, against the Carolina Hurricanes; and 2004, Calgary Flames, seven games, against the Lightning.

The 1992-93 Canadiens engraved on the Stanley Cup in a photo that, for a time, was displayed at Montreal’s Bell Centre.

You’ll need to scroll back 10 more years to find another Canadian team in the Final -- the Canucks lost a seven-game series to the New York Rangers in 1994.

The “woe Canada” narrative is flawed, of course, given that at least eight players on all 32 NHL teams this season were Canadian by birth or nationality, and that the modern dressing room is a melting pot of passports.

That said, many Canadian fans are bitter that every single Stanley Cup championship since 1993 has gone south.

The Oilers would like to put the brakes on this three-decade skid. For the next seven or fewer games against the Panthers, they will do something that partisan politics and the expanse of geography simply cannot do: Edmonton will largely unite Canada, the Oilers logo tattooed on our hearts -- if even with temporary ink.

The Canadiens pose for a celebration team photo at the conclusion of Game 5 of the 1993 Stanley Cup Final on June 9, 1993, at the Montreal Forum.

The Canadiens did a bit of that in 1993, even if those from Canada’s school of ABC -- Anyone But Canadiens -- held their noses as they roared to their championship.

The 14-page Gazette souvenir section was anchored with a full-page in-your-face ad from Bell, the national telecommunications giant and official long-distance network of the new champions:

“Why not share the good news with that special Torontonian?”

This was the 24th Stanley Cup title for the Canadiens in 1993’s 24-team NHL; No. 1 had come in 1916 in the National Hockey Association, the next 23 in the NHL that was born in 1917.

Montreal Canadiens coach Jacques Demers asks Los Angeles Kings center Wayne Gretzky for a souvenir stick after the Canadiens' 1993 Stanley Cup victory.

In the commemorative section, the Canadiens having triumphed in the Stanley Cup’s 100th anniversary year, legendary Montreal sportswriter Red Fisher pondered No. 25.

“Now that No. 24 has come home to Montreal, can No. 25 be far behind? Do the Canadiens build on what they have? Is this the start of something big? The answer: no,” Fisher wrote on June 11 with his usual wisdom.

Canada’s late dean of hockey writers cited NHL realignment and that month’s expansion draft that would welcome the Panthers and the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim.

“Nothing’s impossible, as the Canadiens demonstrated this season,” Fisher wrote two days after the Canadiens had dusted the Los Angeles Kings in a five-game Final. “But back-to-back victories are improbable, at best.”

Jean Beliveau poses with his replica number sweater in the Montreal Canadiens dressing room at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto in Nov. 1993, five months after his retirement as the team’s senior vice-president.

This was the swan song for retiring Canadiens legend Jean Beliveau, who skated his last game in 1971, winning the Stanley Cup for the 10th time, before adding seven more titles as a senior vice president of the team through 1993.

The Canadiens had won the Cup an unprecedented five consecutive years, from 1956-60, then went winless until 1965; in his 1994 autobiography, Beliveau wrote of the franchise’s relief when its four-season “drought” had ended.

The Canadiens ended a different drought with their 1993 win, the team’s first championship since 1986. Montreal had not gone more than seven years without one since the end of World War II.

The Oilers’ last title was in 1990, a five-game waltz past the Boston Bruins. Forward Craig Simpson and captain Mark Messier tied atop the team’s postseason scoring with 31 points, Simpson scoring a team-high 16 goals.

Craig Simpson of the Edmonton Oilers celebrating with the Stanley Cup following his team’s Game 5 championship-clinching win against the Bruins in Boston on May 24, 1990.

It was a genuinely great playoff performance, Simpson having scored 29 times in 80 regular-season games.

“The regular season isn’t the same as the playoffs,” he said in grand understatement on the eve of Game 5, soon to score what would be the Cup-clinching goal in a 4-1 victory at Boston Garden.

Now, Simpson will be in Hockey Night in Canada’s broadcast booth, serving as analyst for play-by-play voice Chris Cuthbert. Messier will be in ESPN’s intermission studio, offering his keen insight.

“Jurassic World 4,” the latest in the dinosaur movie franchise, is set to hit theatres in 2025. It would be a perfect bookend for Canada’s Stanley Cup shelf that’s been empty since 1993 … if it weren’t for the fact that the Oilers will be crowned champions this month.

Right?

Top photo: Canadiens goalie Patrick Roy celebrates, his team having defeated the Los Angeles Kings in Game 5 of the 1993 Stanley Cup Final at the Montreal Forum.