Musing's musings

Blackhawks win the Cup!

For the first time in my lifetime (and then some), Lord Stanley's Cup will be calling Chicago home for the next year:

And there was much rejoicing!

This does not compute

A week ago Friday, the National Hockey League suspended Dallas Stars forward Sean Avery for a total of six games. That suspension was to end tomorrow, but yesterday the team announced that Avery will not be returning to Dallas.

To which my reply is to scratch my head and say, "Wha-huh?"

The league suspended Avery for "behavior detrimental to the league or game of hockey." What was his transgression? Trash-talking a former girlfriend on television after she (apparently) dumped him for another player.

I'm with The Hockey News's columnist Ken Campbell on this one. Avery's suspension by the league was self-serving, hypocritical, and completely overblown. Yes, absolutely, Avery's behavior was rude, crude, bizarre, and inappropriate. As I'm sure legions of women will make very clear to him now and well into the future--and not a few men. But how, exactly, does being uncouth in public translate into "behavior detrimental to the league or game of hockey"? It seems to me that the NHL has rather a lot invested in players being uncouth in public, considering the number of players it has slapped on the wrist for things a lot more serious than a bit of trash-talking.

As Ken Campbell pointed out in his linked column, four years ago, Todd Bertuzzi blindsided Steve Moore on the ice during a game, and Moore wound up in the hospital--and has never played a game since. He probably won't suit up ever again. Bertuzzi was suspended indefinitely for that infraction--but since it occurred near the end of the season before the lockout, Gary Bettman reinstated Bertuzzi after the lockout was over, meaning that the true length of Bertuzzi's suspension was something like 19 games. For ending another player's career. It seems self-evident to me that taking someone out of the NHL permanently is detrimental to both the league and the game of hockey--yet Bertuzzi continues to draw a salary.

Guys like George Parros, Derek Boogaard, and Georges Laraque (to name but a few) draw paychecks primarily to intimidate players on the opposing team--usually by dropping the gloves and attempting to pretend they're boxers who just happen to be wearing ice skates at the time. Their existence is defended by some as necessary to prevent opposing teams from taking advantage of younger, inexperienced, or smaller players on their team. (Never mind that there are rules in the game that already do that, and that those rules are being enforced quite consistently and strongly these days.) Rarely does anyone in the category "enforcer" get suspended, though he may spend more of his time warming the bench (frequently in the penalty box) than on the ice--and no one ever claims that their existence or their tactics constitutes "behavior detrimental to the league or the game of hockey," despite the fact that their primary purpose is to put opposing players out of commission. Indeed, if you ask some hard-core hockey fans, suggesting that enforcers and fights ought to go the way of the dodo and the passenger pigeon is "behavior detrimental to the game of hockey."

Me, I just don't get it. You can go on international television and try to beat another guy's brains out--and not only not get suspended, but get paid for doing it, at the price of racking up a few more PIMs. But step up to a microphone off the ice and say something bad about another player's girlfriend--and not all that bad, in comparison to some of the same sorts of remarks that are apparently quite common on the ice and during games--for that, the league hands down a six-day suspension, insists on anger management training as a condition for reinstatement, and the team that owns your contract decides to renege on it. This makes about as much sense to me as shooting one's dog so as to prevent his being able to dig up the flower patch you haven't yet planted.

Oh, not again!

Fans of the Saint Louis Blues should be very, very afraid. The Blues will be playing at home tonight against the Los Angeles Kings. They've had a pretty good start to their season (they're 4-1 right now). But Sarah Palin will be dropping the ceremonial puck at the start of this game, just as she did October 11 in Philadelphia at the Flyers' opener. The Flyers lost that game to New York. And they've lost every game they've played since then. Fans in Philadelphia are already calling it "Sarah's Curse."

Palin may or may not have a deleterious effect on a team's performance after appearing in their barn. But as far as I'm concerned, she has no business being there except as a fan. As Adam Proteau observed on his blog for The Hockey News, hockey shouldn't be used as a political backdrop. And, like Adam, I'd be saying the same thing if it were Joe Biden or Barack Obama dropping the ceremonial puck:

Philadelphia Flyers owner Ed Snider makes it very difficult to root for his team. And I’m the guy who picked them to win the Eastern Conference this season.

Listen, I don’t give a tinker’s damn if he supports Sarah Palin on his own time. Stars owner Tom Hicks did just that, and that’s well within his rights. But for Snider to foist his views on his fan base the way he did Saturday night, to openly bang the drum of politicians while they’re still running for office, to associate the NHL with one particular ideology, is beyond nauseating and will go down in history as a black mark on his ownership for the rest of time.

Even as a business decision, it makes no sense. Does Snider and the NHL wish to completely alienate the millions of people who think the current Republican ticket is an affront to the intelligence level of women and voters? And what about his and the league’s employees who aren’t for creationism in schools or endless war or the erosion of the constitution or forcing rape victims to pay for their rape kits?

I wonder if Proteau will write a similar column excoriating Blues owner Dave Checketts? He should. And throw Gary Bettman, the NHL commissioner, a brickbat or two as well. Anybody that wants to can buy a ticket (assuming one's available) and watch a hockey game from the arena. But politicians, at least when the campaign is still ongoing, have no business being associated with hockey (or any other sport) in any other way.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaugh!

There goes the neighborhood! The Chicago Blackhawks are reportedly close to bringing back long-time play-by-play announcer Pat Foley. Long-time readers of this blog (and a few Googlers) know that I was quite pleased by the news that Foley was leaving in May 2006, because I found his voice even more annoying than the noise made by fingernails scraping down a chalkboard.

In retrospect, and faced anew with the prospect of having to endure listening to that voice for the better part of two hours on some 80 occasions over the next 18 months, I'm not sure that was a proper comparison. I would rather listen to, I don't know, pigs being slaughtered, or endless repetitions of Roseanne Barr mangling the "Star-Spangled Banner," than have to listen to Pat Foley call a Hawks game. I'd even willingly sit through every last one of the Boy Who Won't Be King Much Longer's speeches over the last eight years if it meant I wouldn't have to listen to Pat Foley ruin the resurgence of my hometown team.

Dammit, I was so looking forward to next season. And while I'll continue to hope the Hawks keep right on improving as they have done this past year and more, it's looking like I may have to cut back on my viewing of their games--even though for the first time in history all of their 82 regular-season games (plus playoff games) will be televised. That, or else I'm going to be watching with the sound off, and maybe catching a simulcast on the NHL radio feed.

Let's try this one more time

I wrote this post (or one similar to it) last night. However, the new posting interface on TypePad is proving a little tricky to navigate. I finished the post, hit "Preview," read through it, corrected a couple of typos and changed a couple of words, hit "Preview" again, and then hit "Save"--just like I've done hundreds of times. But then the post disappeared into the ether. If that sounds a little too much like "The dog ate my homework" to you, perhaps the fact that it also happened to Wil Wheaton might incline you to be a little less cynical.

Anyway, I started to write about what a day of endings and beginnings yesterday was. I was at the end of a very long day, in which I'd gotten up at the usual time, gone to the office, slogged through a morning's work (and then some), gotten on a train, gone to Chicago to audition for Jeopardy!, come home, watched what turned out to be the last game of the 2008 Stanley Cup playoffs (Go Red Wings!), and was looking forward to schlepping off to bed for a well-deserved rest when I stopped in to check e-mail one last time and decided to grab a quick look around the blogosphere, when I learned that Senator Clinton had announced her intention of conceding the primary election to Senator Obama this Saturday, and throwing her support behind his candidacy for president. A great way to end the day--until TypePad ate my post.

I do think it's a good thing that Senator Clinton is getting behind Senator Obama's candidacy. John McCain may be running for George W. Bush's third term, but that doesn't mean he's just going to roll over and play dead. The more ammunition we have against him, the less likely it is that we're going to wake up in McSame's World in two hundred thirty-odd days. Moreover, despite what I'm sure will be howls of anguished protest from Very Serious People all over the blogosphere and the punditocracy, I'm in agreement with the Metra employees I heard quite animatedly discussing the reasons why it would be a good idea for Obama to seriously consider Clinton as his number two.

What are some of those reasons, you ask? Well, as one of the conductors said yesterday, Clinton has a lot more foreign policy experience than Obama does--and given the way the Hedgemony has flushed our diplomatic standing down the toilet for the last eight years, we absolutely cannot afford to be falling down on that front any longer. Just remember what happened to the Boy Who Won't Be King Much Longer the last two times he went to Saudi Arabia to ask the oil sheikhs pretty please with a cherry on top could we have some more oil if you doubt me on that front. An argument the train men didn't make, but one which makes sense to me, is that Clinton and Obama are each strong in places, and with constituencies, where the other is not--or at least is not as strong. Again, the Republicans may be sliding down the razor blade of life (to borrow a phrase from Tom Lehrer), but they're not out of the game yet. The more votes we can bring, the more money we can collect, the more voters we can excite and energize, the harder the other side has to fight. And we don't want to give them even half an inch--or they'll steal this election, too.

And then there were two

The Detroit Red Wings and the Pittsburgh Penguins will face each other for the 2008 Stanley Cup finals starting Saturday night at 8 p.m. My problem is going to be deciding which team to cheer on: I like them both, and there's plenty to like about both teams.

This was not the matchup many people expected. Case in point: The Hockey News, in its playoff preview issue, picked the defending champion Anaheim Ducks as the most likely winners this year at 4-1. (The Ducks, in case you weren't watching, were excused in six games by Dallas--who just lost to Detroit in six games tonight--in the first round back in April.) Their second most-likely pick? The San Jose Sharks at 5-1. (The Sharks were sent packing in the second round, also in six games, again by Dallas.) The Wings were THN's third pick at 6-1. Their highest Eastern Conference pick was the New Jersey Devils at 7-1, but the Devils only managed to win a single game in the first round against the Rangers. Just behind the Devils were the Ottawa Senators at 8-1, but Pittsburgh swept them out in the first round. The Penguins were THN's sixth pick, at 10-1, to go all the way.

The Wings have a bit of an edge, given that they've been to this dance a time or three before. (The Red Wings already appear on Lord Stanley's cup 10 times--in third place behind Les Habitants (24 appearances) of Montréal and the Maple Leafs (11 appearances) of Toronto. Detroit last appeared in the finals (and won the cup) in 2002, whereas Pittsburgh hasn't done either since 1992. They have, on the other hand, had a slightly less bumpy road to the finals (Pittsburgh has played 14 games in the first three rounds of the playoffs, to Detroit's 16.) Both teams are well-stocked with young players and seasoned with veterans. Pittsburgh has two absolutely phenomenal stars having breakout years, in Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin; Detroit can count on plenty of scoring from all of its lines. The top five point-getters in the playoffs? All on either Pittsburgh or Detroit: Henrik Zetterberg and Sidney Crosby are tied with 21 apiece, followed by Marion Hossa (Pittsburgh), Pavel Datsyuk (Detroit), and Evgeni Malkin (Pittsburgh), each with 19. Detroit has three of the top five goal-scorers in the playoffs in Johan Franzen (12), Zetterberg (11), and Datsyuk (9). Pittsburgh's only representation in that category is Hossa, who is tied with Datsyuk. Crosby has the most assists of anyone in the playoffs with 17, with Detroit's Niklas Kronwall (12) and Zetterberg (11) in fourth and fifth place.

I'm leaning, with The Hockey News, toward giving Detroit the edge to win it all, based on a combination of youth, skill, and veteran experience. But it will not, in all likelihood, be a quick or easy victory. Pittsburgh has yet to lose a playoff game in its home arena, and Detroit, who looked to be on a roll when they want up 3-0 against Dallas in the Western Conference final, fell asleep at the wheel thereafter and only woke up tonight--after dropping two straight games in which it looked as if the steam had well and truly gone out of their juggernaut. It doesn't help that the Wings' leading scorer, Johan Franzen, has missed the last five games with concussion symptoms after scoring the game-winner in the first contest against Dallas in the finals.

And I definitely like the venerable hockey playoff tradition that, never mind the fact that ten minutes previously they were trying to crush one another into the boards or body-check one another off the puck, when a team has been eliminated from contention, everybody lines up down the middle of the ice and shakes hands with the winning team. Often, players will pause and say a few words of condolence or praise as well. Maybe we could introduce that tradition into our politics as well, eh?

Better luck next year, guys

The Chicago Blackhawks' season officially came to an end today. (Well, technically, they just played their final game today; their season effectively ended late last week when they were mathematically eliminated from playoff contention.) It was a 4-1 loss to divisional and Original Six rival the Detroit Red Wings, and the score doesn't really reflect the way the Hawks played. For that matter, neither does the season result.

There was a lot of buzz around the Hawks at the start of the year, thanks to a phenomenal crop of young players that held out the first promise in quite a long time that the Blackhawks might play deeper into the year than early April. They started out well, going .500 in the first month of the season, and finished strongly, winning six of their last 10 games. At one point last week they were only three points out of the eighth and final playoff spot in the Western Conference. Considering that the Hawks finished 10 games under .500 last season, and 17 games under the mediocre mark the year before, winding up in ninth place and just out of playoff contention, but seven games above .500, is not a bad way to end the year. Not the ending that the team and its fans would have liked, to be sure: but certainly a good effort and a positive sign for what may happen next season.

Боже мой

I have just one thing to say to all the nay-sayers who have griped, these last few years, about how hockey is getting duller and duller every season, it's too boring to watch, nobody scores goals anymore, yada, yada, yada. And that one thing is this: Bull.

Hockey fans got a real treat tonight when the Boston Bruins came to the nation's capital to play the Washington Capitols--and damn, do I wish I'd been in the building for this game, instead of the one I caught at the Verizon Center a year ago around this time. (Not that I minded that game, mind you.) The Caps scored their first goal 32 seconds into the first period. Nineteen minutes and 28 seconds later, the Caps had put another five on the board--including a natural hat trick from Wunderkind Alexander Ovechkin. (Which goals, by the by, represented his 50th, 51st, and 52nd on the season.)

It was truly a joy to behold. Anybody who could watch the tape of that 20 minutes and still claim that hockey isn't interesting to watch anymore seriously needs to have his or her head examined. That was 20 minutes of hockey as it was meant to be played. And now I'm going to go back and watch some more of that game, thanks to the wonders of TiVo. And try to do at least a little reading.

Yawn

I found in my morning newsletter today from The Hockey News an item entitled "Leafs forward Jiri Tlusty releases statement regarding photographs on Internet." My first thought was that it must have involved nudity, or group sex, or something similar. Imagine my surprise, on doing a quick Google search (and no, I'm not going to link to the photo I found, because I don't want to perpetuate the foofooraw over it), when the photos in question were snaps of a couple of fully dressed apparently teen-aged men, arms casually draped over each other's shoulders, mugging for the camera. And one shot appeared to show their tongues touching.

Have we really come to this? Why on earth should a professional hockey player feel a need to apologize for that--or a teen-ager apologize for acting like, well, a teen-ager? I'm sure that if we were to dig into the past histories of the people spreading this story we would find nothing risqué, nothing scandalous, nothing stupid. Not.

I am a bit disappointed that Jiri (or his manager, or his team's PR person, or both) felt the need, in a follow-up interview at the site posting the pictures in question, to be so dismissive of the possibility that he might be gay or bisexual. On the other hand, (a) there's no real reason to think that he might be either gay or bi; (b) he's 19 years old and living in a foreign country; (c) he's just started his professional career--and the stats and the pundits say he might well have what it takes to stay in the NHL for a good, long while; and (d) the NHL is, to the best of my knowledge, the only one of the major professional sports that has yet to have a player, either current or former, come out of the closet.

Strictly on a percentage basis, with some 800 players in the league at any one time, at least four or five of them should be gay or bisexual. Odds are there are gay and/or bi players in the NHL; we just may never know who they are. And that's a disappointment. Nobody should have to lie about his or her identity to keep a job, or to protect a prospective career. I'm not saying that's what Jiri Tlusty did with his statement, just saying that it would be a crying shame if it were in fact true.

Have we really gotten to the point where people are so desperate for celebrity gossip that they're willing to spend hours Googling and clicking through sites on the internet, just to find a potentially compromising photo that they can sell for profit or use to send their hit count through the roof? If we have, then there are apparently quite a few people in the world who simply don't have enough to do.

Update: According to Andy, there were nudes involved, but the site that had posted them was hit with a cease-and-desist letter from a law firm claiming to represent Tlusty, so they were pulled before I went to check the site. According to Andy's story, they were self-portraits that Jiri had taken of himself with a cell-phone camera.

Again, I fail to see why this should be anything that would surprise anyone, or anything that Tlusty had to apologize for. It's not the brightest move in the world for a young man in his position, to be sure, but not illegal nor even necessarily immoral, as long has he wasn't planning to circulate the photos--which I would argue is a reasonable conclusion, given his reaction upon finding out that they had been posted to the net.

The best and the worst of the hockey world

Toronto Maple Leafs forward Jason Blake was diagnosed with chronic myelogenous leukemia a week ago. During the third intermission of tonight's game between Toronto and the Buffalo Sabres on Versus, Christine Simpson sat down with Blake to talk about how his life has changed since making that announcement. To her surprise (and that of many of the viewers, doubtless), Blake said that he "felt lucky."

This is a man, just past his 34th birthday, who isn't sure he's going to live long enough to see his three children grow up, or walk his two daughters down the aisle. Six years ago, his wife had her own bout with cancer. And he thinks he's lucky because, in his words, he's been blessed to "have three kids and a beautiful wife, to play in the National Hockey League, to do things that people dream of doing." The sun, he says, is out 24 hours a day in his world.

Compare that reaction to the one that The Hockey News's editor-in-chief Jason Kay justifiably excoriated this past Saturday:

I’m not going to claim 10,000 or 12,000 or 18,000 people were wrong for booing the memory of the late Bill Wirtz at United Center during a pre-game ceremony on Oct. 6.

The disgruntled felt how they felt.

But this space is about how I feel – and it ranges from perplexed to troubled.

Let’s be clear, I’m not a Bill Wirtz booster. I understand why thousands of Chicago hockey fans have been disappointed/driven away by the way he mismanaged the franchise. No Cups in more than four decades; no home TV; feuds with several of the stars. It wasn’t a recipe for success.

At the same time, a human life is sacred. Unless we’re talking pure evil – and it my world, I’m thinking Saddam Hussein/rapist/pedophile/murderer evil – the appropriate behavior for me is to respect the departed and their families. That’s not a hypocritical stance, just decent.

I'm with Kay--say what you like about "Dollar" Bill Wirtz (and believe me, I've said plenty, and little of it good, about him), but there is a time and a place for expressing criticism--and at a memorial service is not that place or that time. Had I been at the United Center for the ceremony in question, although it would have rankled a bit, I'd have stood respectfully in silence while the team honored the passing of its longtime owner and president. Then, most likely, I'd have applauded lustily at the thought that his hand would no longer be at the reins, choking off the life of my hometown team that's been struggling to rediscover its fabled championship form for decades.