Great Scott, just what is the NHL selling?
Of all the things you could expect from the National Hockey League this season, John Scott as Spartacus was low on the list. He has long been a caricature of the goon, outsized and ogre-ish, the guy who chased Phil Kessel like he was a chicken. Even as he was being voted an all-star in a prank campaign, there were still some people giggling at him.
Look at the dinosaur, vote for the dinosaur, har har har.
The NHL has changed that, and Scott has changed that. He had already given several thoughtful interviews after being named an all-star captain, and after being traded — hmmm — from Arizona to Montreal, which intended on stranding the ogre on a rock in the North Atlantic.
And then came Scott’s piece in The Players’ Tribune Thursday, in which he talked about the stresses on his pregnant wife, and his young daughters. And the key part of the story was this:
If the league thought this was an embarrassment, pretty much all of the players I’ve encountered have thought otherwise. I’ve gotten texts from so many guys saying the same thing: “You should go.” . . . And that means a lot to me. It means a lot to my family. So when someone from the NHL calls me and says, “Do you think this is something your kids would be proud of ?” . . . That’s when they lost me. That was it, right there. That was the moment.
Because, while I may not deserve to be an NHL all-star, I know I deserve to be the judge of what my kids will — and won’t — be proud of me for.
Look, the world is run in cold and nasty ways behind closed doors, when nobody’s listening. We all know that.
But what an embarrassment for the NHL that this became public. The whole thing has been a cavalcade of incompetence: not limiting the list of vote-eligible players after previous near-miss pranks, not releasing voting numbers as the campaign mounted. Oh, and the league kept fighting around long enough that John Scott, goon, could stay in the league.
And this is how they tried to resolve it? It reeks of desperation, and it will loom over this all-star weekend. He’s now the league’s anti-hero, and probably the best thing to happen to this misbegotten weekend in a long, long time.
At least Scott overshadowed a few things. He overshadowed Alexander Ovechkin pulling out of the weekend with a lower-body injury, and Jonathan Toews pulling out of the game with an “illness,” and the fact that both were given one-game suspensions for doing so.
Even Calgary’s Dennis Wideman was overshadowed, and all he did Wednesday night was get his head stapled to the boards by Nashville’s Miikka Salomaki, then skate about 125 feet and crosscheck a linesman on the way to the bench, sending him to hospital. Maybe Wideman was concussed, and therefore was operating in a deep fog; maybe he was just mad he got hit, and took it out on a striped shirt.
Wideman stayed in the game, though, which makes either outcome unsavoury. He has been suspended indefinitely. And, frankly, it was the most interesting thing to happen in the NHL in weeks.
This has truly been the year the NHL froze. Do you like goal scoring? Well, nuts to you, pally. This year teams are scoring 2.63 goals per game, a drop from 2.73 last year, tied for the third-lowest scoring season since 1956. Save percentage has reached another all-time high, though. Super.
Oh, but they added three-on-three overtime, a longtime project of Detroit general manager Ken Holland, which was terrific. It was pure hockey adrenalin and for the first few months of the season you’d change the channel to watch it. It was a reminder that between wrestling matches, these guys are good at hockey. Well, as the Star’s Dave Feschuk noted earlier this week, coaches are slowly strangling threeon-three, because coaches strangle everything.
Hey, hockey’s not just scoring. What about trades? Well, there was one big trade day in the NHL this season, and the rest has been dust on an office phone, because the parity wrought by a hard salary cap plus hockey’s natural conservatism have created a deep freeze.
Do you like advanced stats? Well, the NHL website has made marshmallow mashed potatoes out of them, as independent stats analysts vanished into the dark embrace of front offices. Fighting? It’s down, and disappearing, which is a good thing for brains but a bad thing for people who like to watch the John Scotts of the world bash other people’s brains.
Personality? Well, you get Ovechkin, P.K. Subban and Jaromir Jagr, and a lot of guys hiding whatever personality they have, especially if they play in bigger markets.
There are good and smart and creative people at the league and in the league, trying to make hockey better. Goaltending supervisor Kay Whitmore is starting a war on goalie pads, against what has been heavy opposition. It’s a little beacon of hope.
But as scoring and stars are embraced in the NFL and the NBA, the NHL remains the league vision forgot. It caters to its hardcore fans above all, and even they get abused. They come back after lockouts, stick around as the goal-scoring dies, watch even when the game doesn’t anger up the blood. I keep trying to figure out what the NHL is selling, really. They’re selling hockey, as bland as it can be, to people who will never go and watch anything else.
Well, they get John Scott this weekend. I hope he’s great.