Was Matt Duchene's Goal Celebration in Losing Effort out of Bounds?

When the Colorado Avalanche won the Stanley Cup in 2001, beating the New Jersey Devils in a seventh game and sending Ray Bourque on to retirement with his first championship ring after 22 years in the NHL, Patrick Roy was mad at himself. 

He'd allowed a goal in the 3-1 victory, and Roy told his teammates before Game 6, when the team was down three games to two, that there would be no more Devils goals from that point forward. Roy was magnificent in a 4-0 Game 6 victory at the Meadowlands and essentially just as good in the seventh. But he'd allowed that one goal, to Petr Sykora (on the power play) and Roy was ticked. Besides, this was his fourth Stanley Cup ring. He'd been there before. He didn't need to over-celebrate anything.

That helps explain why Roy, now the coach of the Avs, didn't like one of his players jumping up in celebration Sunday night, with under five minutes left in a game they were trailing 4-0 at home to the St. Louis Blues.

Act like you've been there before. Actually do something meaningful. Then you can celebrate a little. 

Roy might be hopelessly old school in this age of Facebook likes and manufactured safe-space zones from anything negative in the world, but he was right to call out Matt Duchene for his hippety-hop celebration of his 30th goal, which was punctuated by his two-fisted pump toward the heavens and a guttoral yell.

First, here's video of Roy's postgame presser in which he said, "Are you kidding me? What is that???".

Before everyone calls Roy an out-of-date ogre, who wrongly had the temerity to question an expression of pure joy from his top goal-scorer, more background: Roy had been relentlessly positive all season toward his team and, in particular, his top players. Only a little more than a week ago, Roy called his team a "special group" after a 3-1 loss in St. Louis, that they had given a "great effort." Roy was immediately barbecued by Avs fans on social media for being too soft on his team.

But something changed on the flight back from St. Louis. Roy went on Denver radio station 104.3 The Fan the next morning for an in-studio appearance. Roy was asked by The Fan's Mike Evans about the team's core of young players—Duchene, Gabe Landeskog, Tyson Barrie, Semyon Varlamov, Erik Johnson, Nathan MacKinnon—and whether it was good enough now and for the near term.

"That's where I'm going to have to do a much better job," Roy told Evans. "I'm going to have to make them accountable."

In the two games the Avs have played since, at home to Washington and St. Louis, they've been outscored 9-3. When Roy saw his team's highest-paid player, Duchene at $6 million, celebrating like he'd just won the Stanley Cup after scoring a personal-milestone goal in a 4-0 game, he'd had enough.

Roy was right to do it. Don't jump around and celebrate in a game you've been losing 4-0 at home with time running out. There has been some dissenting opinion on this, including from venerable TSN hockey analyst Bob McKenzie, who told Edmonton's TSN 1260:

"

You know what? I’m going to flip this around a little bit and say yeah, I can understand some people, including Patrick Roy, being a little miffed by the level of celebration from Matt Duchene. But I’ll tell you something else. It was 4-0. It wasn’t 14-0. It was 4-0 and there were over four minutes left in the hockey game.

Now, I understand the odds of the Colorado Avalanche coming back to get a playoff spot are slim and none. And I understand that in most hockey games when you have a three-goal lead with four minutes left that most teams do button it down and that’s that and you’re not going to win. But I mean, it’s not unheard of for a hockey team, especially one in dire straits that’s that desperate – maybe somebody else should have got more excited about Matt Duchene’s goal that made it 4-1.

Instead of having Patrick Roy admitting after the game that this reflects our losing mindset, maybe we should have more of a winning mindset. That is, when Matt Duchene scored the goal, the bench should have been up celebrating. Patrick Roy should have been up celebrating. Everybody should have got fired up to try and score three more goals in the final four minutes and salvage a point and keep the dream alive, however unrealistic that might be given how far behind Minnesota they are. But Minnesota was also losing on the day, so…

If there’s a losing mindset, I think it permeates the entire organization and that probably Matt Duchene took an excessive amount of blame for what probably is an organizational problem, and not just with the players. Because if the coach is saying that you shouldn’t be celebrating a 4-1 goal with four minutes left, what the coach is basically admitting to me is, ‘We’re not winning this hockey game and we’re not making the playoffs.

"

There is nobody in hockey I respect more than Uncle Bob, but I'll politely disagree on this one. Look, I'm not saying there is no hope in a three-goal deficit with four minutes to play. Sure, cheer for the comeback, get yourself fired up to shock the world. No problem with that mindset. But is that really what Duchene was cheering for the most at that moment?

Otherwise, you don't jump around on a goal that makes it 4-1. You do that when it's 4-4, and you've actually done something. Until then, you don't celebrate. You get mad. You get mad that you've been down 4-0 at home, against a team playing its backup goalie by that point, Anders Nilsson. You get mad that it took this long to do anything. You act like the goal never happened, that you're mad many more hadn't already happened and race to the faceoff circle to try to get that next one.

You don't jump around and pump your fists at the sky that you just scored a goal in a meaningless situation. You toss the puck back onto the ice, like a baseball fan in the bleachers who catches a home run for the other team. 

Doug Pensinger/Getty Images

And, let's get real: How many teams have come back from four-goal deficits with under five minutes in a game? I don't actually know the answer to that question, but it can't be many. 

Here, to me, is what made the whole thing look worse: Duchene's linemate, Mikkel Boedker, fished around to get the puck to give to Duchene. It was his 30th goal, after all.

Is that what the standard of saving pucks for posterity has come to in this game? You used to never see guys posing for a photo with a puck unless it was their 500th, or unless it had just won a Stanley Cup with a goal, or some other truly momentous occasion. 

Now, we have guys wanting the puck for their 30th goal in a non-playoff season? In Duchene's case, a guy being paid $6 million a year to just play hockey? Isn't he supposed to score at least 30? 

And, by the way: How would Boedker, a guy who has only been with the team a few weeks, have known Duchene was only one goal away from 30? Does he read the papers? Did he say to himself in advance, "You know what, I want to get that puck and give it to Dutchy, and I don't care what the score is. It'll be a surprise."

Or, did Duchene tell him something before the game, something like, "Hey, if I score tonight, you get me that puck, OK? It'll be my 30th, a career high, and the first time since anyone from this team has done it in nearly 10 years."

The Avs had a day off Monday, so there was no further comment from Roy or Duchene. But, to me and many others, the Boedker retrieve of the puck was an even worse optical moment than the brief celebration by Duchene. Look, you score a goal, the Pavlovian reflex is to celebrate the moment. Nobody in hockey begrudges a brief moment like that. 

But to jump around, and then have the puck saved for posterity? Optically, it can well be argued that it looked like a selfish moment for Duchene. It looked like a moment where a guy said to himself: "Yay me! I just got my 30th goal!"

Duchene is a good person and a good player, and there was nothing evil about what he did. But was it a leadership moment? Roy didn't think so.

"I think we have some good leadership, but maybe not from our core," Roy told the team's website. "Our core has not proved that they have the leadership to bring this team to another level. I mean, eventually we have to admit it, isn't it?

Roy went on to say that the captain, Landeskog, is "pretty much alone" in his leadership qualities, and gave the defenseman Johnson some praise for "trying," but didn't mention anyone else. No mention of Varlamov, or Barrie, or Carl Soderberg or MacKinnon and, most of all, no mention of Duchene.

Earlier in the season, Bleacher Report reported that Avs general manager Joe Sakic was shopping Duchene around in a trade. At that time, the team, and Duchene, was off to a terrible start. After winning a division title in 2013-14, the Avs were just coming off a non-playoff season and out to a 5-9-1 start. There are many virtues to hockey, but patience isn't one of them. It's win-or-else, and it was close to being "or else" time in Denver.

Bruce Bennett/Getty Images

But then Duchene and the Avs started doing great things again. He started scoring goals, and the team won a lot of games, enough to be ahead of the Minnesota Wild for the final Western Conference playoff spot just three weeks ago. But then Duchene, along with MacKinnon, went down with knee injuries. The team won its first two games without Duchene, but then lost three of its next four, including a critical 4-0 loss at home to the Wild.

Since then, there has been nothing else to celebrate. The loss to the Blues at home, on national television, had Roy fuming after the first period. Had Duchene just tied or won the game, he easily would have celebrated his goal with him. But it turned out to be a meaningless goal in a 5-1 loss.

There was nothing to celebrate. Unless, that is, you don't know what true victory tastes like.

Adrian Dater covers the NHL for Bleacher Report