Two nights ago I saw highlights of a disgusting play by Carolina forward Scott Walker. He punched Bruins defenceman Aaron Ward in the face, even though Ward hadn’t dropped his gloves and still had his hands by his sides. Here’s the video:
Almost as disgusting, though, was the NHL’s punishment. Walker wasn’t suspended, even for a game. He wasn’t even given the automatic 1-game suspension for taking an instigator penalty in the final five minutes of a game. That was rescinded. He was fined a token $2,500. The league’s explanation was that Ward could have defended himself but didn’t, and he could see the punch coming. Psychologists refer to this as blaming the victim.
Far be it from me to defend the Bruins — I hate them with a fiery passion, and want badly for Carolina to knock them out of the playoffs — but one thing they did masterfully well on their way to eliminating the Canadiens was not take penalties. The same discipline that should be an admirable trait for a team may have cost Aaron Ward his orbital bone.
I’ll never stop loving hockey, but with every incident like this my hatred for hockey’s so-called “fighting culture” grows. Nobody could look at this incident impartially and think it was anything but patently absurd.
As I write this Boston is running away with game four against Montreal, and is about to sweep the Canadiens out of the playoffs. This isn’t unexpected — the Bruins finished first in the east, Montreal eighth — but it’s certainly disappointing.
Had Montreal been healthy and played well they might’ve stood a chance against Boston, but they weren’t and they didn’t. Tonight Montreal was missing Andrei Markov — their best defenseman, leading scorer and best player overall — and three more top-seven defensemen: Mathieu Schneider, Francis Buillon and Patrice Brisebois. They were also missing top-line winger Alex Tanguay and #2 center Robert Lang, who’s been out for months. With a roster full of spare-part defensemen and discombobulated lines, they stood no chance. Boston rolled four lines at Montreal who just couldn’t keep up, couldn’t get to loose pucks, couldn’t get the puck out of their own end. Part of this was due to Montreal not consisting of, or playing like, a playoff-worthy lineup of late, but some of it was also due to the kind of systemic breakdown that a good team like Boston can grind you into.
And so Montreal will slip into the postseason with a whimper, and tomorrow the Montreal dailies and sports blogs will cry that this is not how the famed centennial season was supposed to go. A season which started with so much promise and faded so badly in the second half, which hosted an amazing all-star game but saw the coach fired shortly after, which ended with a team virtually unrecognizable from the potent weapon that began the season. I remember watching an exhibition game against Detroit when the Canadiens and Wings looked like sure locks to meet in the Stanley Cup final. How things change.
Beginning Thursday night, for the 32nd time in their history, the Montreal Canadiens and Boston Bruins will face each other in the Stanley Cup playoffs. This is as storied a rivalry as exists in sports — TSN recently listed some of the more memorable meetings over the past forty years — and I’m more than a little bit excited about it.
That said, I give Montreal almost no chance to win. Boston finished first in the east, miles ahead of the Canadiens. The Habs sucked after the all-star break, and seemed to turn it around before struggling down the stretch when the Leafs cheap-shotted their leading scorer and best defenseman Andrei Markov, knocking him out of the lineup. The Bruins owned the Canadiens this year.
But…when these two teams meet, it can always get crazy. Last year the roles were reversed — Montreal #1, Boston #8 — and it took Montreal all seven games to finish them off. Their final regular season game, last Thursday, was a classic and went to overtime before Boston won. In the past few years Montreal beat Boston as both an 8 seed (2002) and a 7 seed (2004). So I think the odds are against them, but if Alex Kovalev and Carey Price can turn it on, Montreal could pull off the shocker.
Final note, courtesy of Joe: the Bruins have some awesome tv ads:
Habs won woo. Duke and Memphis lost, so my bracket’s dead, long live Nellie’s bracket.
Slaughterhouse-Five is done. Next up: Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, since it’s been on my shelf for, oh, nine years.
Life my be a carnival, but work is a circus. (Workus!) Exercise and proper nutrition have taken a back seat (for example: I would punch a nun right now for a Wendy’s spicy chicken sandwich), as has coherent thought and interestingness.
BSG is over, but Kings has started. Not a fair trade, but it has King Swearengen, so that’s something.
This day’s gone on too long. This’d better be the best 5 hours of sleep ever.
My apologies for the poor blogging lately. I have once again re-entered the annual period at work which, well, turns my brain to butternut squash puree. I quite literally go to sleep picturing spreadsheets and wake up calculating revenue projections in my head these days. I have another week or so of this delightful experience, including this weekend I think, and then should return to some sense of normalcy.
In between all this I did manage to make my pics for Hot Docs, finish Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and bear witness to my Montreal Canadiens recent swoon. Hopefully last night’s thumping of Atlanta was the turning of the corner.
My Maple Leafs fan friends are misinformed. They all seem to think that Montreal Canadiens fans are brutal turncoats who will turn on players at the drop of a hat. I think they cling to this notion in the hopes of convincing themselves that they, Leafs fans, are the only true devotees, following their team no matter how bad.
Today’s game was a good example of how ridiculous that notion is. With the losses piling up the pressure was on Alex Kovalev, the Canadiens most talented player, to perform today after he was left home by the GM for the Canadiens’ recent road trip. Some media outlets were reporting that Kovalev wanted out, that he’d played his last game for the Habs. Legendary player Guy Lafleur claimed the Canadiens had embarrassed Kovalev by leaving him home. Turmoil surrounded the Canadiens all week as they drifted closer to falling out of a playoff spot. The Montreal fans described by Leafs devotees would focus their anger on Kovalev, running hit out of town on a rail. Surely today’s game against the Senators would be ugly for him.
Except it wasn’t.
When Kovalev’s face appeared on the scoreboard during the pre-game lineup announcements, the Montreal crowd cheered. They cheered louder than they did for any other player. When the game started and Montreal went to work on an early power play, Kovalev took a pass in the high slot, pulled two players to him and then fed a beautiful pass to Tomas Plekanec who scored. The crowd gave Kovalev a standing ovation. A few minutes later Kovalev stole the puck just inside the Ottawa blueline, swept in and scored. Another standing o. The crowd roared when, on the penalty kill, Kovalev dove to knock a puck out of the Canadiens’ zone. Later in the game, when he drew an assist on another goal, his name drew the loudest cheer during the scoring announcement. It was his night.
Kovalev had an all-star quality game, but the fans were cheering him even before the puck dropped. Those don’t sound like the usual description of Habs fans I hear living here in Toronto.
“A nation is a society united by delusions about its ancestry and by a common hatred of its neighbors.” –Dean Inge
Speaking of Toronto, Mats Sundin — the Leafs’ all-time leader in goals and points scored, long-time captain and almost certainly one of the best players in their history — made his first return visit to Toronto tonight after decamping for Vancouver. While most cheered him when he took the ice, a few Toronto fans actually booed him. That’s shameful. Apparently the Toronto fans’ delusion extends beyond the skill level of their team, and keeps them from seeing the kind of fans they really are.
So after yesterday’s sampling of NHL rosters, I decided to do a little more digging. And to be truer to the group of players that Gladwell used in Outliers I pulled the list of the top 211 draft picks in the 2008 NHL entry draft, courtesy of NHL.com. Of those, 33% were born between January and March. 66% were born between January and June.
More interesting, though, is when I cut that list down to the top 3 rounds of the draft (in other words, the top 91 players drafted): of that group, 43% were born in January, February or March. Under an even distribution you’d expect 25%, so that’s a significant difference.
The more I think about it, the more I think I was looking in the wrong place yesterday. I’d be surprised if NHL rosters were good representations of Gladwell’s hypotheses since developmental factors would be dampened over time by skill, resistance to injury, coaching systems, etc. It’s going to be hard not to waste my next few nights analyzing the last ten draft classes…
Those of you who’ve read Malcolm Gladwell‘s latest book Outliers know the chapter about hockey players, where he describes the disproportionate number of hockey players with birthdays in the first few months of the year. Gladwell’s theory is that, because of the Jan 1 age cutoff between levels of minor hockey, those born earlier in the year have a size and development advantage over others as they have an extra 6-11 months under their belt. That doesn’t sound like much, but the difference between 6 years old and almost 7 years old is substantial enough that the older players tend to move into accelerated programs, which gives them an advantage. Gladwell then shows several examples of teams whose rosters skew to the early months of the year.
Tonight, after watching my Canadiens blow a late lead, and lose in the shootout to drop the ninth of their last ten on the road, I wondered if their roster followed the same pattern as the elite teams Gladwell described. Based on the 20 players they dressed tonight, here’s how it breaks down:
That’s 55% in the first half of the year, 45% in the second half. Not exactly overwhelming. Even if I include the other six players who didn’t dress tonight, it’s 58% to 42%. Still nothing to write home about. So I’m faced with three hypotheses:
Gladwell is wrong
Gladwell is right, but my team is an abberation
Gladwell is right, and this explains why my team sucks
So I went looking for more data. My first stop: the Detroit Red Wings, defending Stanley Cup champs and by any measure an elite team. They’re also at 58% born between January and June, the same as Montreal. Then I checked the Boston Bruins, the top team in the NHL this season: also at 58%. Canada’s gold-medal winning major junior team, an all-star team for players in a very specific age range, clocked in at 64%, with 14 of the 22 players born before June 30, but even that isn’t exactly a drastic difference.
Anyway, I know that’s only a sample of four, but I’d prefer to think that hypotheses #1 is correct rather than #3. I’m not holding my breath though.
Sanderson, a defenceman with the Whitby Dunlops, died early yesterday in Hamilton General Hospital. He had been in a coma and on life support since his head struck the ice during a fight in a AAA senior league game Dec. 12 in Brantford.
I’d held back on posting until the shock of the death had passed and the debate turned, as it naturally would, to whether fighting would be banned. I’ve been waiting, but the debate has not come. The lone discussion I’ve heard so far is whether the rules governing the tightness of helmet chin straps (which might have held Sanderson’s helmet on when he fell to the ice) should be more strictly enforced. This seems akin to enforcing seat belt laws for street racers, rather than trying to stop street racing itself.
Anyone calling for an end to fighting in hockey is met with ridicule (even Serge Savard), even deemed unpatriotic or lacking understanding of the game. Horseshit. Fighting proponents quote some circular argument about ‘the unwritten code’ of hockey, that fighters are there to ‘take care’ of a guy who breaks the rules, and respect each other, presumably as they punch one another in the face. Meanwhile referees, old hockey guys themselves, give out penalties for some infractions but look the other way for others if they think a team’s fighter will take care of things, thus perpetuating this myth of fighters being necessary for the game. This mutually supportive argument spins itself in a spiral, but in the face of logic eventually defaults to the tired plea that “it’s always been this way”, surely the silliest rule for why anything should continue.
The other argument, say fight fans, is that without fighting hockey won’t be entertaining. This is an easy one to dispel, as anyone who’s watched even a few minutes of a World Junior game, or any international tournament, can see.
It’s a difficult position to justify that hockey alone is the one league that requires fighting, or at the very least does not punish it (beyond a meaningless 5-minute penalty). In every other major sport, fighting is strongly discouraged (not tacitly allowed) and results in automatic suspensions. The only other sport where fighting is part of some kind of protective ‘code’ is baseball, surely the pussiest of the major sports. Football, on the other hand — which by any measure is as tough, smash-mouth and brutal as hockey, and almost certainly more so — does not allow fighting.
Staying with the NFL for a moment, imagine the absurdity of a scene where an offensive linesman, unhappy at the fact that his quarterback was tackled (clean though it might have been) grabs the opposing player by the jersey, rips off his helmet and starts punching him in the face. The other player starts punching back. No teammates try to break them up, and linesman (understandably) wait until they tire themselves out before interfering. The referee, knowing a teammate would come to the defense of the downed quarterback because of the unwritten code of football, doesn’t bother throwing the penalty flag. He knows these guys just need to let off a little steam. He also knows that if he doesn’t let these guys duke it out at midfield like this, that the other nasty penalties like clipping or face-masking will just happen more often. So goes the common wisdom, without much evidence to back it up.
Back to reality, and to hockey: there’s simply no logical argument for allowing fighting in the NHL, but as long as troglodytes like Don Cherry advocate for it, it’ll be around. If Gary Bettman wants to leave a legacy of actually improving the game, he should ban fighting and watch the rest of the world take his sport more seriously. So long as players in the world’s premier hockey league are allowed to beat each other bloody in the middle of the ice, and then do it again the following night (or even minutes later!), precious few outside of Canada will associate the game with skill, grit or speed. They’ll associate it with thuggish brutality.
Finally, I submit that fighting should be banned if only to prevent pathetic displays like this from ever again occurring:
Four days since I last blogged. The hell is wrong with me lately?
A good four days it’s been though. Thursday night was spent partaking in one of my favourite pastimes: watching the Habs beat up on the Leafs. Friday we had dinner at Fieramosca, and came home to find our Wii Fit waiting for us. We considered setting it up that night, but the wine and limoncello we’d just consumed made us think twice. Ironically.
Yesterday was our get-crap-done day (capped off by an excellent meal and very nice 2004 Cab Sauv from New Zealand), freeing up today for brunch with our friend Cyndy and entertaining CBGBLB, who I think were just using us for our Wii. But they brought us chocolates* and convinced us to order pizza, so we didn’t mind. We also finally put up our TTC wall decals, courtesy of Walloper, which we think look pretty sharp.
I’ll be honest with you: the idea of staying home tomorrow to play Wii Fit and lightsaber duel kind of appeals to me more than the idea of going to work tomorrow.
* The chocolates were from Eat My Words. Very cool idea in support of the Steven Lewis Foundation, and a great gift idea. Check it out.
Skirl | Dan Dickinson 