It’s a depressing epoch in Portland sports. The Timbers are treading water two months into their season, and the Trail Blazers are dead and buried. At least the Timbers are graceful enough to shoot themselves in the foot without giving us false hope.
It isn’t all bad news, though. One Portland sports team, in direct contrast to the overwhelming mediocrity that is the Portland sports zeitgeist, is competing in a national championship right now. In fact, by the time you read this, they might have already won that championship.
If you haven’t figured it out, I’m talking about the Portland Winterhawks, our junior hockey team. These plucky teenagers have taken our lovable hockey mascot, Tom-A-Hawk, to the championship finals two years in a row now, and as I write this they are currently leading the Edmonton Oil Kings, dreaded feeder team to the National Hockey League squad who hosted Wayne Gretzky, 2-1.
The schadenfreude train doesn’t stop there. Our Winterhawks were the original Edmonton Oil Kings. We poached them from Edmonton, Alberta, in 1976, and since then the Winterhawks have won the Memorial Cup twice, while graduating more NHL prospects than the Oil Kings. Take that, Canada!
But as good as the Winterhawks are, they aren’t enough to cure the Portland athletic malaise. The Memorial Cup is nice, but hockey fans aren’t sitting on the edge of their seats for that. They’re watching the NHL Stanley Cup playoffs. This might just be the megalomania talking, but I think Portland should be in those playoffs.
But Randall, you say. Portland doesn’t even have an NHL team. Don’t we have enough bitterness to occupy ourselves with complaining about sports that are already here?
Nonsense, I say. The city of Portland has a storied history in professional hockey. The Portland Rosebuds were the first American team to ever compete for the Stanley Cup, when they went to the championship finals in 1916. The sporting gods were cruel and took our hockey team away, but we deserve to have our names engraved on that trophy.
Portland is a perfect fit for hockey. The Rose Garden is already equipped to host hockey games. The Winterhawks are playing there tonight at 7. It seats more than most NHL stadiums, and the Trail Blazers wouldn’t get in the way (we could always just shove them back into the Memorial Coliseum if they get too uppity), several NHL teams already share stadiums with their National Basketball Association cousins.
Let’s face facts. The Winterhawks are the best thing we have going for us at this point. We can’t keep polishing that 1976 NBA World Championship Series win forever. The NBA Finals aren’t even called that any more. The institutional knowledge is there. Three Winterhawks are ranked in the top half of the NHL scouts draft rankings just this year. It’s time to sweep some of that up and get a real contending team going.
I say we start by completing the set and taking the Edmonton Oilers.