Frustration bubbles for young superstars still chasing a Stanley Cup

There was a time in the NHL when just about all the greats eventually got their Stanley Cup. Conversations on the “best players to never win a Cup” have centred around a handful of players depending which team you cheer for, with the consensus including guys like Marcel Dionne and Eric Lindros.

Still though, it’s surprising how consistently the great-greats of hockey’s past have won rings. Of the top-25 all-time leading scorers, only Dionne didn’t get his, with Joe Thornton still TBD. For a while it felt like Alex Ovechkin could join that unfortunate group, but with enough cracks and a good team around him he eventually got over the hump, as we’ve become accustomed to seeing. Whoever is on your respective hockey Mount Rushmore – be it Wayne Gretzky or Gordie Howe or Bobby Orr or Mario Lemieux or Sidney Crosby or whoever – they’ve got their Cup.

Even so, Ovechkin's Cup felt less than guaranteed, for two main reasons: One, there are 32 teams now (and 31 then). And two, the salary cap has pushed parity to the point where it’s nearly impossible to surround your elite talent with valuable contributors.

The days of the Avalanche adding Ray Bourque to make it happen may not be all the way gone, but it’s sure a lot harder to make a deal like that today. And the days of teams having the volume of superstars that the early-'90s Penguins had feels impossible, too. There’s a lot more luck involved now.

The list of today’s young great-greats – the type of players who could conceivably climb on to the league's top all-time scorer list mentioned above – includes Connor McDavid, Auston Matthews, Leon Draisaitl, Mitch Marner, and Nathan MacKinnon. None of them were fortunate enough to be like Crosby and win a Cup early in their careers to take some of the pressure off. And don’t look now, but these are hardly new players in the league anymore.

MacKinnon has been in the league nine years(!). McDavid seven. Draisaitl eight. Matthews and Marner six. Whatever you think their respective career lengths will be, we’re creeping up on the halfway points – maybe past for some – with no Cups to their names.

Welcome to the era that contains all-time greats who won’t win Stanley Cups.

It’s like musical chairs, and it’s clear from the actions of some of the young stars mentioned above that the frustration of still finding themselves still standing is starting to seep through. There’s pressure to solidify their legacies, as they surely know that winning the Cup is the ultimate goal, and is the one thing that puts players over the top perception-wise. And make no mistake, these guys care about that perception, because they’re wired different from most players.

Most hockey players dream of simply playing in the NHL, and that’s the goal. Getting there, and staying there as long as possible, is a monumental, life-changing accomplishment. For great players whom the league is never in doubt, though, chasing a Stanley Cup as a lifelong dream is the pinnacle of the sport. Many have dreamt about that, played for it, and see it as the summit of their career climb. But there’s no doubt there’s another level for the all-time greats, the top-drafted, top-paid, top-praised players, who aren’t just competing for a championship, but for their spot in hockey’s history.

The guys I mentioned above are pursuing the Hall of Fame, and legacies, and for one or two of them, a place on the sport’s Mount Rushmore. And you can’t take your spot on that mountain without a Stanley Cup. You just can’t.

So the competitiveness and urgency has seemingly ramped up as these guys put the hammer down on their career primes. There’s some feistiness they didn’t show in the opening acts of their careers.

In the past 12 months MacKinnon has been fined for whipping a player’s helmet back at him (I’d like to insert a Nelson Muntz-esque “HA-HA” here because that’s still hilarious), he was in the crosshairs for a perceived head shot on Nolan Patrick, and he forced the NHL to put out a statement saying “We don’t think MacKinnon angrily tried to slash our official, we’re pretty sure.” Say what you want about MacKinnon, but you can’t say he isn’t heavily invested (way too invested?) in the games he’s playing lately. (Heck, his own teammates commented on his hockey obsession in the off-season, with the whole chickpea pasta thing.)

This season, McDavid was ejected and got a major for running Adrian Kempe from behind. In December he also got fined for a high elbow on Jesperi Kotkaniemi, and in 2019 he was suspended two games for an illegal check to the head on Nick Leddy. He’s never been a shrinking violet, but there’s no denying he’s grown a bite to his game over the past few seasons.

With Matthews, you can hardly paint a more clear picture of a guy who has taken constant abuse and smiled … before he’s started to push back. The image of him literally smiling -- showing himself as unfazed, I guess -- through a Ben Chiarot horse-collar in the playoffs last year has summed up his general comportment towards the abuse he takes.

He's tried to be above it all, but even the most well-intentioned among us have moments where we want to turn into The Joker. For context, Matthews and McDavid are both among the players who control play most often in the league, they both have the puck the most often on their respective teams, and Matthews sits 367^th in penalties drawn (seven) to McDavid’s 41, which is first in the NHL.

In the Heritage Classic, Matthews went ahead and fairly viciously cross-checked Rasmus Dahlin in the ear, which earned him a conversation with the Department of Player Safety, and a two-game suspension. (If you’re the Leafs, you’re probably more than OK with what he did there, and hope the images of him doing that are broadcast around the league as often as possible so that some players see you can’t just take endless liberties on the guy without potentially receiving some damage back.)

Certainly part of the frustration we see from these elite superstars is aimed at the officiating. If more players got calls when opponents hang off them, there would likely be less frustration. If they got the “star treatment” the way some players do in other sports, maybe they wouldn’t feel the need to lean on “frontier justice” to deter their opponents. That’s a real criticism, and a likely contributing factor here.

Yet what I’m talking about isn’t just on the ice. We see frustration from these same players in the media when their teams lose. They try to put on the brave face most days, but the more losses add up, the more you can feel the player’s desire to crosscheck the media in the ear, too. They’re pushing for more here, not just against the officiating, and it isn’t coming as easy as everything else may have earlier in their careers.

When you zoom out to their careers at large, a portion of it comes from this pressure to win Cups, and in a 32-team league it gets late early these days. You can fairly argue that all of the players mentioned above have legitimate chances at winning one this season, but it’s not impossible to see the Lightning winning for a third time in a row. It’s not impossible to see elite players Jonathan Huberdeau and Aleksander Barkov getting their first Cups in Florida.

And that’s the point – with the way the league is set-up today, nothing is guaranteed when it comes to elite superstars winning Cups, or even coming close to it. There are too many teams now, and too much parity for it to be assured. It will likely happen for a couple guys on the list above, but it’s more likely than not that some of them will never win hockey’s greatest prize.

Some of their frustration surely comes from the fear of being left standing when the music of their careers stops.