Not so fast, though, because after blowing the 3-2 series lead at home against their rival Detroit Red Wings, the Avs got absolutely wholloped in Game 7 of the Conference Finals, losing 7-0.
The sale led to a decade of sadness in Chi-town as a result of unthinkable trades.Īvs fans were treated to some glowing success early on in their history, and it looked like they were going to have another crack at the Stanley Cup after they’d already won two times in five years of existence. In 1944, the team’s owner passed away and his family sold the club to Bill Tobin, who ended up being secretly connected to the Detroit Red Wings. Though the Blackhawks definitely faced some hard times in the early 2000s when they missed the playoffs for nearly a decade before the beginning of their modern dynasty, it wasn’t the worst time the franchise has ever faced. So when 2003 rolled around and the Canes had a very similar core, fans were expecting them to have a pretty good season, which seems pretty reasonable, right? Wrong! The Canes finished dead last in the league the year after losing in the Finals.
The Canes were a pretty new team to make a run all the way to the Stanley Cup Finals in 2002 they weren’t expected to win it, and were taken down by the Wings in just five games, but looked pretty happy to be there. The play was called bad and wasn’t reviewed, and the Lightning took home the Cup the next games. The Flames had a 3-2 lead in the series on home ice when Martin Gelinas scored them a go-ahead goal in the dying minutes of the final frame. They were the underdogs all the way until they made it to the big dance, but when they did make it there, it looked like they were going to take the whole thing home. Listen, the Flames had no business being in this series. Of course, there was the whole thing when they didn’t have an owner, but today definitely wins (which says a lot about the state of things). It’s been bad before, but never like this. A loss doesn’t get more finite and deflating than that. Though they won the Cup in 2011, they were just SO CLOSE to forcing Game 7 against Chicago, until the Blackhawks stunned them with two goals in the final 1:17 of Game 6 to steal the Cup. Though we really wanted to say the moment that Brad Marchand skated past the puck and subsequently lost the game for the Bruins, we have to say that it’s probably their loss in the 2013 finals. Of course, league commissioner Gary Bettman stepped in to keep the team in the desert, but not without the embarrassing spectacle that this situation became. The Coyotes filed for bankruptcy in 2009 and their current owner planned to sell them to a buyer who intended to move them to a suburb of Toronto. Is there anything more embarrassing than literally going bankrupt for a team that faces more than enough criticism for lacking a fan base? Probably not. Kariya led the Ducks all the way to the Stanley Cup Finals in 2003, only to leave the very next season for Colorado, when the Ducks would have a disastrous year that left them well outside of the playoff picture. He was everything the Ducks could have dreamed of and more, until he wasn’t. He was the face of the franchise, the captain, and became the team’s first-ever draft pick in the team’s history when they drafted him fourth overall. Nope, not even the Seattle Kraken are safe To make you feel better about whatever your team’s most embarrassing moment is, here’s each of the 32 NHL franchises’ most embarrassing moments. Though it’s particularly horrible to feel this way, every single fan base - no matter how good or bad the team is - has absolutely been there.
While there’s no high quite like your hockey team performing exceptionally well, it’s definitely a double-edged sword there’s nothing quite as demoralizing and humiliating as your hockey doing something so genuinely brutal that it’s hard to believe it was done by a professional hockey organization. If you haven’t experienced a brutally embarrassing moment as a result of loving an NHL team, are you really a hockey fan?