This hockey team has lost every single one of its 48 games this season. Its last shot at a win is this weekend

A curious thing about the sport that this country loves so much is that it is essentially, on any given night, random. Good hockey teams will win more often than bad hockey teams, of course, but there is a high degree of uncertainty baked in. Pucks that deflect off a stick and then a skate. Shots that find their way through a crowd of bodies in front of the net. Goalies who make saves by sprawling the right direction at the right moment. There’s even a term for it: puck luck. It’s one of the reasons why the best team over the course of the NHL’s regular season rarely wins the Stanley Cup, and why that annual postseason tournament regularly produces upsets: hockey is just too unpredictable. Which brings us to the Sarnia Legionnaires. The Junior B team in the Greater Ontario Hockey League lost to the LaSalle Vipers on Thursday night by a 9-2 score. If that sounds like a not-particularly-random result, that’s because it wasn’t: it was the Legionnaires’ 48th loss in a row. Not a typo: 48 games played, zero wins, 48 losses. Not even a single overtime or shootout loss than would have earned Sarnia a point. A record of 0-48-0-0. It is a streak that defies all hockey logic. The Legionnaires will finish their season with two games this weekend, two final chances to put a point on the board. They will need all the puck luck they can get. So, how did this happen? How does a team, even an overmatched one, go an entire hockey season without fluking its way into a win or two? The team’s former head coach, Brian Irwin, left to take a job on the East Coast in the summer. As sometimes happens in junior hockey, which doesn’t have the restrictions on player movement that exist in the professional ranks, a number of Legionnaires veterans decided not to remain with Sarnia after the coach left. That meant new coach Mike Bondy had to fill out the roster with players new to the GOHL. The Legionnaires have had 20 rookies in their lineups this season, most of those 16- or 17-year-old players. Almost the entire defence corps are first-year players. The results have, obviously, not been great. Not only is Sarnia 0-48, but they have scored 81 goals on the season and given up 328, for a goal differential of -247. They are 16 wins and 35 points behind the Komoka Kings, the second-last team in the GOHL’s Western Conference. The Kings have a goal differential of -35. Bondy told the league’s website earlier in the season that shaping the young team was a work in progress. “Young players are learning on the fly and while the results aren’t exactly where we’d like them to be, we’re seeing progress each and every day through practice and learning the junior hockey game,” Bondy said. Kelli Copse, the head coach of the London Nationals, told CTV last month that the Legionnaires are doing a lot of things right. “The record aside, if you really sit down and watch video on them, they’re very strong in their own zone and they never quit. We played them the other night, and we didn’t deserve the win.” Copse, perhaps laying it on a little thick, continued: “They outworked us and we were fortunate to get a couple a couple good bounces, but they’ve done a good job over there.” It is also worth noting that it’s not unusual for junior hockey to have uneven talent as good players agree to move to the best teams. The GOHL’s Cambridge Redhawks are 44-5 this season while the St. Catharines Falcons are 41-6-2. At the other end of the Eastern Conference, the Caledon Bombers are 5-44. Parity is evidently not one of the goals of the GOHL. The Legionnaires play their penultimate game on Saturday night at home against the St. Thomas Stars (22-23-2-1). That matchup looks like their best chance at a win, or even a point, because they finish on the road against the Elmira Sugar Kings (35-10-2-1). Perhaps Elmira will rest some of their best players as they get ready for the playoffs. But then again, no team would want to be the one that hands the Legionnaires their only point.

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