by Gare Joyce
An assistant to Tom
Renney with the
1999 team, Claude
Julien came back the
next year as head
coach and faced
an entirely different
set of challenges in
Skellefteå.
Far from home, in the dark and without big-time reinforcements from NHL teams, Team Canada needed no more obstacles, particularly with the defending gold-medal-winning Russians having brought another strong team, and with the Swedes featuring the Sedin twins, Daniel and Henrik, for their third straight attempt at winning a world junior medal.
But there was one more obstacle, at least a psychological one. As the end of 1999 approached, the world was engulfed with concern—mass hysteria, really—over the so-called Y2K problem, or the Millennium Bug, as it was popularly known. Whether it was a global hoax, as some claimed, or an international problem ameliorated by hundreds of billions of dollars of pre-emptive planning remains a debate. But before the clock struck 12 on December 31, 1999, there was at the very least great uncertainty across the world. Would nuclear plants be tripped up by the problem of computers having used two digits to designate years for so long rather than four digits? How would the world banking industry be affected? Would the lights go out in Skellefteå, already one of the darkest places most of the Canadian hockey players had ever visited?
“It was New Year’s, 2000, and it was a big sacrifice for our guys to be there,” said Julien. “That was something unique. Everybody was waiting for all the computers in the world to shut down, thought the world was going to end.” As it turned out, it was more like the Comet Kohoutek than catastrophe, and
the world experienced only a few minor problems. In gloomy Skellefteå, 2000 was brought in with champagne, “Auld Lang Syne,” a spectacular fireworks show—and nothing out of the ordinary.
For Julien that was helpful, since he was already dealing with anything but an ordinary Canadian team.
For starters, it was a squad that featured 16-year-old defenceman Jay Bouwmeester, the youngest player to ever skate for a Canadian national junior team. And the next youngest? That was Jason Spezza of the Mississauga IceDogs, who was on the roster as well. These were two magnificently talented kids, to be sure, but their presence was very much the result of an absence of returning players and the reluctance of most NHL teams to lend their eligible players to Canada for the event.
So, no Vincent Lecavalier, Mike Fisher, Jonathan Girard, Simon Gagné, Robyn Regehr, or Rico Fata, some of whom had been available the year before when the Canadians weren’t quite good enough to beat Russia at the ‘99 world juniors in Winnipeg.
Oddly enough, the New York Rangers were willing to make Manny Malhotra available after declining to release him for the Winnipeg tourney. Malhotra had played for the junior nats two years earlier at the disaster in Finland, an eighth-place finish, so his experience was very useful. Montreal made available slick centre Mike Ribeiro, and the New York Islanders sent big Mathieu Biron, a godsend for Julien given that not a single member of the ‘99 defence corps was back.
Julien departed from
convention with
his selection of two
16-year-old phenoms,
defenceman Jay
Bouwmeester and
centre Jason Spezza,
to that point the two
youngest players
ever in the Canadian
juniors’ lineup.
Maxime Ouellet had
the bulk of the work in
net but in the bronze-
medal game, Julien
opted for his backup
Brian Finley.
Only backup goalie Brian Finley and forward Tyler Bouck were back from the defending silver medallists, with a third returnee, Blair Betts, unavailable due to injury.
The back end featured future NHLers like Bouwmeester and Barret Jackman, but also players like Matt Kinch, Joe Rullier, and Kyle Rossiter who would not go on to significant NHL careers. This, Julien understood from the outset, was not going to be one of the strongest, most talented teams Canada had ever sent to the world juniors. The team wasn’t even particularly big, which meant the heavy-hitting style of the previous year’s squad would not be repeated.
“We had to really dig deep without the talent Team Canada is used to having,” said Julien. “But we had a lot of hard-working guys.” Julien had been an assistant coach under Tom Renney on that 1999 team and previously a Memorial Cup champion, and perhaps he was also a fellow shaped by destiny to be a head coach. After all, 16 years earlier he and Gord Donnelly had been traded by the St. Louis Blues to the Quebec Nordiques for the rights to coach Jacques Demers.
Having been traded for a coach, perhaps it made sense Julien would in turn trade his holidays for a chance at coaching for gold. The team would have been even smaller had the diminutive Mike Comrie not been the last cut. Up the
middle there was Brad Richards, Brandon Reid, and Ribeiro, while Malhotra would centre a checking line. In goal, Finley made the team, but was challenged from the outset by Maxime Ouellet.
If there was a player expected to be a star, it was University of Wisconsin sniper Dany Heatley. On a team filled with players already drafted, or too young for the NHL draft, Heatley was already being watched very closely by NHL talent scouts as a potential top pick in the 2000 draft.
After being crushed by the Swedes in a pre-tournament game, the Canadians started the round robin with Ouellet in goal and beat the Finns 3–2. Stuck in the toughest of the two pools, it was clear Canada couldn’t afford to struggle in the early going or the team would risk finishing out of the medals. Ouellet then delivered a 34-save performance against the Czechs, pushing Canada to 1-0-1 after two games.
Spezza, meanwhile, was a big story, and not for his play—it was Julien’s decision to hardly use him at all that became a daily source of speculation and rumour. The IceDogs centre had been shifted to right wing behind Michael Ryder, Chris Nielsen, Jamie Lundmark, and Mark Bell, had played only two shifts against Finland, and then didn’t play at all against the Czech Republic.
Even Switzerland’s
stick work couldn’t
hold up Brandon Reid
or his teammates, and
Canada cruised to an
8–3 victory.
A 1–1 tie with the
Czechs set Canada
on course for second
place in Pool A and a
semifinal meeting with
the Russians.
Bouwmeester played a little more, but it was clear the two 16-year-olds were not going to be featured pieces on this Canadian junior team, one that had scored five goals in four games (two pre-tourney, two round robin).
“Sure, it’s hard to sit on the bench when we’re only scoring one goal,” said Spezza, who had tallied 38 points in 28 games with Mississauga to that point in the OHL season. “I don’t know why [Julien] won’t play me.”
The fact that the crowds for most of the games ranged from small to pitiful, an enormous contrast to the enthusiastic sellout throngs the previous year in Manitoba, added to the sense that this was not going to be a year to remember at the world juniors, for Canada or any other country.
After getting some offence going against Slovakia in a 4–1 win, the Canadians finished the round robin with a 1–1 tie against the United
States, stoned by Philippe Sauvé in the American net and once again shown to be a team without a great deal of firepower. Eric Chouinard was the only Canadian to beat Sauvé as the Canadians headed for a quarter-final game against the Swiss.
That turned out to be not much of a challenge for Canada, and the big news came in the other quarter, with the United States ousting the Sedins and the Swedes by an embarrassing 5–1 score on their native soil. In three world junior events, the Sedins had come away with no medals, and in big games against Russia and the U.S. in the 2000 event, the twins had been held pointless.
Still, the players argued that this was different. “We’ve travelled a quarter of the way around the world and we don’t want to go home with nothing,” said
Malhotra, who already knew the empty feeling of playing in the world juniors and not winning a medal.
It would be a North American clash in the bronze-medal game between the U.S. and Canada, a precursor to the major junior battles that lay ahead between the two countries in future tournaments. Ouellet had started all the games, but Julien turned to Finley for the bronze game, hoping he might deliver something special.
The 4-1-2 Canadians fell behind 2–0 after a period, and still trailed by a goal going into the third before fighting back and forcing overtime, then a shootout. Two years earlier in Nagano, of course, a Canadian Olympic team led by Wayne Gretzky had lost to the Czechs in a shootout, and since then the term, let alone the actual exercise, had been looked down on by many Canadians as a gimmick, something not quite hockey.
Yet here it was staring Julien in the
face, and without a particularly skilled offensive team at his disposal. But what he had came through. First, U.S. winger Andy Hilbert missed, and then Lundmark scored. Pat Aufiero scored on Finley, but Reid put another one into the U.S. net past Sauvé. Big American winger Jeff Taffe missed, but Heatley found twine, putting the Americans in a do-or-die position with Boston University winger Daniel Cavanaugh lined up at centre.
“I tried to make them all deke,” said Finley afterwards.
Cavanaugh deked, to his backhand. Finley stuck out his right pad and Canada had bronze—bronze that, given the team, the conditions, and the darkness, seemed to gleam like gold.
“The one thing we wanted was to at least get a medal, and we did that,” said Julien. “The States was a big rivalry, and we wanted to make sure we came up with a medal on that day.” A bronze medal for Canada.
And the world didn’t end.
The 2000 WJC gave
hockey fans their first
chance to see high-
scoring University of
Wisconsin winger
Dany Heatley, who
would be the second
pick overall in the 2000
NHL entry draft.
Winger Raffi Torres
brought his hard-
hitting game to the
WJC in Moscow.
His one-timer won
the bronze-medal
game in overtime
against the Swedes.
Often, veterans of the Program of Excellence will drop by and speak to young players in the formative stages of their careers with Hockey Canada—not only about the demands that come with the crest on the front of the sweater, but also about the accompanying privilege and the organization’s rich history.
Those guys over in the corner? Well, they might be a former coach talking to the current one, offering salient pieces of advice.
Stan Butler took everything in when he spoke with Mike Babcock, who had coached Canada to a gold medal at the 1997 world junior championship in Geneva. In major junior and NHL play, those who would be the 13th forward or 7th defenceman on the depth chart would be sitting up in the press box on game nights. But with expanded rosters in international hockey, a 13th forward and a 7th defenceman aren’t castaways. They’re on the bench and on call, ready to jump the boards on a second’s notice.
“I told Stan you have to trust those guys, and if you trust those guys, in big moments they can be good for you,” Babcock said. “And if those players happen to be the guys you know really well, that is a benefit. I just knew that when I coached that team, it was an important part of the process.
Maxime Ouellet
played well for
Canada through to
the semifinal, but he
struggled in the loss to
the Finns that sent the
team to the bronze-
medal game.
“You know if they don’t play one shift, everything is rosy and they are with you.”
Babcock’s extras who became integral in 1997 were centre Trent Whitfield and defenceman Hugh Hamilton, two players he coached in Spokane in the Western Hockey League. Both Whitfield and Hamilton ended up playing bigger roles than even they might have imagined.
Butler was mindful of Babcock’s advice when he assembled the roster for the team that would go to Moscow for the 2001 world juniors. For his 7th defenceman Butler took Jay Harrison, whom he coached on the Brampton Battalion in the Ontario Hockey League. For his 13th forward he took Mike Zigomanis, the captain of the Kingston Frontenacs. Butler had never coached Zigomanis, but he had coached against him. He knew that Zigomanis was carrying a full load of courses at Queen’s University and had been nominated for the league’s academic excellence award. Butler and Zigomanis shared hockey roots, both coming out of the Wexford minor hockey association.
“I had known Michael for a long time,” Butler said. “I had always admired him as a player.”
It’s true that in the world juniors, players are experiencing things they never have before. For some, they’re hearing for the first time in their career that they’re not going to be getting a regular shift. Zigomanis was winding down
an excellent junior career with the Frontenacs when Butler chose him for the squad that was going to Moscow. The 19-year-old had put up 94 points in 1999–2000 with Kingston and was a second-round pick of the Buffalo Sabres. In other words, if hockey was going to be a living, Zigomanis had a long hockey career ahead of him.
He could not help but bristle a bit when Butler told him he wouldn’t be starting among the 12 forwards.
But the feeling didn’t take long to dissipate.
“I was playing a lot in Kingston and to go into that extra-player role was a change,” Zigomanis said. “You are one of the 22 players going over there, and that is an accomplishment.”
Of course, Zigomanis had no idea at the time how his career would unfold. He also could not say what would happen in the next couple of weeks.
But he had not been designated as the extra forward just because he had the fortune of knowing the head coach. “When you’re talking about
Ziggy, you’re talking about a team player,” said Barry Trapp, who was the head scout for the program at the time and as such spent months travelling the country, watching more hockey games than most people do in 10 years.
“If there was a choice between taking a highly skilled player who had no character and one who might not have been as skilled but had lots of character, I would take the second guy. I would always have room on my team for a Zigomanis.”
As the tournament started, Zigomanis had sporadic shifts—today, he says that if he had enough time to think about it, he could recall each one.
Canada won two games, tied one, and lost one in the preliminary round. A 5–2 loss to Finland in the semifinal meant Canada’s medal hopes rested on a bronze, not a gold, or even a silver.
The Canadians had been dealing with various illnesses over the course of
Canada’s leading
scorer in the 2000
tournament, Val-d’Or
forward Brandon Reid,
was back for a second
shot at the gold in
Moscow.
Jay Bouwmeester
clears U.S. forward
Kris Vernarsky from
the front of the
Canadian net.
Sweden blunted the
Canadian offence
though 60 minutes
of the bronze-medal
game. Here, Brandon
Reid gets mus
cled off
the puck.
the tournament, but even those who stayed healthy had to feel a bit off. This was before Hockey Canada sent a chef to the championship to feed an eager bunch of teenagers. The food in Russia, Butler said, fell well short of what his players were accustomed to in Canada.
Though the players had no desire to travel back to Canada without a medal, their final game—versus Sweden, and with the bronze medal to be awarded at the end—did not start with much intensity. It was clear that Butler’s team needed energy, and quickly.
Zigomanis, despite his lack of ice time, had produced a goal and an assist to that point. “You don’t think about [getting few shifts] at the time,” Zigomanis said. “It was one of those things where you just have to live in the now. I still try to do that in every game. You build off your past shifts. But you can’t reminisce about your shifts and what you did wrong and what you did right. You are only as good as your last shift, and you have to give it everything you have on your new one. That is how I took that tournament—do everything you can when you are on the ice.”
Butler recalled what he told Zigomanis, and would give the same message to Jay McClement a year later. “You are one injury away from getting more ice time, or you are one play away from a coach getting fed up with a player and putting you in a spot,” Butler said. “At least you are on the bench. You can’t get on the ice
Another player
returning to the
Canadian lineup, Mike
Cammalleri would
get going against the
Swedes to claim his
second bronze medal.
Stan Butler was
