Thatcher Demko returned from injury just in time for the start of the Stanley Cup Playoffs but now is injured again.

After the Vancouver Canucks’ victory in Game 1, Demko was not made available to the media as he was “receiving treatment.” This is not unusual, so was not heavily reported at the time. Monday’s practice was turned into an optional skate — just nine players participated — so Demko’s absence did not seem particularly significant.

But when Demko was also missing from Tuesday’s gameday skate, alarm bells started going off.

According to multiple reports — and now the Canucks’ head coach, Rick Tocchet —Demko will not play in Game 2 and is in fact questionable for the rest of their series against the Nashville Predators.

Demko made 22 saves on 24 shots, none bigger — and potentially injury-inducing — than his first-period save on Anthony Beauvillier where he went into the full splits.

While this is not necessarily where Demko got injured, it would be understandable if it was. Demko still stayed in the game and didn’t seem to be experiencing any difficulties at the time.

Demko is a major difference-maker for the Canucks and his injury casts a pall over the team’s emotional Game 1 victory. 

Tocchet confirmed that Demko will not start in Game 2 but said Demko did skate on Monday on his own. He also said that Demko’s injury is unrelated to the knee injury he suffered during the season that caused him to miss five weeks. Instead, Tocchet suggested Demko was day-to-day, leaving open the possibility for his return in the first round. 

TSN’s Farhan Lalji, however, has reported that Demko’s injury could indeed be to the same knee, even if it is not the same exact injury.

If Demko does indeed miss the rest of the series, the pressure will be on Casey DeSmith, who had a strong season when called upon intermittently as the team’s backup but struggled when thrust into the number-one role when Demko was injured. Behind DeSmith is rookie Arturs Silovs, who has come through with heroic performances in international competition for Latvia but hasn’t been able to repeat those performances at the NHL level.

DeSmith played one game against the Predators this season, making 26 saves on 28 shots in a 5-2 victory in December.

While DeSmith has limited experience in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, his one appearance was spectacular.

On May 3, 2022, DeSmith had to step in for the injured Tristan Jarry for the Pittsburgh Penguins, starting their first postseason game against the New York Rangers. DeSmith made 48 saves on 51 shots before leaving the game in the second overtime with an injury of his own, with Louis Domingue stepping in to make 17 more saves for the win.

The Canucks will look to allow significantly fewer than 51 shots on Tuesday night.

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In the middle of a record haul at the Tokyo Olympics, Canada’s women’s swim team had one letdown – the 4×200-metre freestyle relay.

Canada had taken bronze in the event at Rio 2016 and again at the 2019 world aquatics championships. The team looked good for another medal.

On the day of the final, a Chinese team that was not considered a contender surprised everyone, winning in world-record time. Canada came fourth.

A battling result, but still disappointing. It looks a little worse than that now.

Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that nearly half the Chinese swim team failed a drug test seven months before the Tokyo Games. Twenty-three swimmers tested positive for trimetazidine, or TMZ.

TMZ is a synthetic substance. You’re not going to pick it up because you’ve chosen the wrong hot-dog vendor.

China was allowed to do its own investigation into the mass positive. That probe determined the athletes had been exposed to TMZ in tainted food at a team hotel. How exactly so many of them ingested it, while others did not, wasn’t explained.

Unusually, no announcement was made about the positive tests, and no one was suspended while the investigation was under way. The World Anti-Doping Agency knew what was going on, but decided the best way to determine if China had done anything wrong was to ask China to look into it. When China gave China the all clear, WADA signed off.

One of those who tested positive was Zhang Yufei. Zhang won three medals in Tokyo, one of them as part of the 4x200m relay team.

The swimming world is now playing doping leapfrog throughout those Games. The Canadian relay team is on a long list of unlucky losers. Had China’s violations stuck, the medal table would look very different.

It would also have pushed a Games that was on the edge closer to the drop. Few in Japan were super stoked about the world dropping by en masse during what would become that country’s first mass COVID wave.

The main reason the Tokyo Games happened was that so much money had been spent, much more was still owed, and insurers were not willing to write down 10 or 15 billion.

Picking a fight with China in that precarious moment could not have seemed like a great idea. Even more precarious – the next Games, to be held six months later in Beijing.

As an event, at absolute best, Beijing 2022 was going to be a very expensive bummer (which it absolutely was). That’s the sort of party that’s easy to call off.

You don’t need to be a Reddit obsessive to see what happened here. The Chinese swim team got caught mid-purge, and the people in charge had to prioritize their response.

Priority No. 1 – the Olympic business.

Priority No. 2 – the Olympic ideals.

They picked money over fairness.

It’s easy to lash them now, so plenty of people are. The head of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency called it “a devastating stab in the back of clean athletes.”

(Is it possible to be undevastatingly stabbed in the back?)

The stickiest criticism involves Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva. She also tested positive for trace amounts of TMZ before an Olympics. She also had one of those ‘maybe the dog gave me steroids’-type excuses.

But since everybody hates Russia, Valieva did not get the benefit of an in-house probe. She was dragged upside-down and backward through the global press and stripped of her medals. There’s your fairness.

It’s fitting that WADA take a reputational beating here. That is its most useful function – to absorb stakeholder rage after another own goal has been scored by the Doping Police.

But out in the real world, no one cares. Of course the Olympics is dirty. The Olympics has spent the last half century repeatedly reminding us of that.

Between Games, the Olympics makes news only two ways – ‘Upcoming host city X is having serious second thoughts’ and ‘So-and-so cheated their way to gold.’

These stories have become so numerous that the only people registering them are the ones who make their living in an Olympics-adjacent business, like sports administration or media.

Those people are happy to complain – complaining is good for trade – but they don’t want things to change. Change is dangerous. Who knows where change will land you?

In this specific instance, real change in the form of zero tolerance could have hobbled one Olympics and gotten the next one cancelled. Then what?

You start cancelling Olympics and people learn to live without them. Sponsors find new things to sponsor. Broadcasters move on.

Better to compromise. Chinese swimmers did a little TMZ. So what? Figure skaters, tennis players, breaststrokers – everybody’s doing it nowadays. It’s like weed for the Marx and Engels crowd.

With all that in mind, here’s something you won’t often read in this space – WADA made the right call.

It’s not like it was going to go swanning into Guangdong province in early 2021, right in the teeth of the pandemic, to figure out what was what. The only way to get any sort of answers was to rely on Chinese investigators. How do you know if they’re on the up and up? You don’t. WADA had two choices – take China’s word for it, or go scorched earth right before the two most tenuously assembled Games in history.

The proof that WADA made the correct choice is that those Games happened. Maybe it would make a different call now, and that might be right, too.

As far as fairness goes, it doesn’t belong in this conversation.

If a Belgian or a Tanzanian gets caught cheating, don’t even bother asking for consideration.

An American? Probably not.

An American everyone knows? Maybe.

A lot of Americans everybody knows? Let’s talk.

This can’t be discussed because once that discussion gets going, it points toward the sort of change no current stakeholder want to think about. If someone who tests positive can negotiate their way out of it and fairness is the goal, isn’t it fairer to stop testing altogether?

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Whatever it was, it was the goal Toronto Maple Leafs fans were waiting for.

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