Wayne Gretzky's Ghost (29 page)

It was a week in which one elite player, Marc Savard, packed it in for the season due to concussion, a week in which rumours spread concerning the game's most elite player, Sidney Crosby, possibly losing the remainder of what should have been his greatest season to concussion.

And it was a week in which one sensible player, Boston's Andrew Ference, was attacked on
Hockey Night in Canada
for daring to say a headshot delivered by teammate Daniel Paille on the Dallas Stars' Raymond Sawada was “a bad hit.” A wonderful week, indeed, to head into the CBC's
Hockey Day in Canada
, in which the national game will be sentimentalized, lionized, glorified and worshipped.

It is a great game, but it surely needs some work. The problem is that headshots have become the global warming of hockey, a polarizing issue that pits the disbelievers against the believers, with no results to show for all the braying back and forth.
Hockey Night in Canada
, with its vast array of old-school thinkers, has become Fox News. The mainstream media, with their editorials demanding action against headshots, have become Al Gore. So nothing ever seems to get done.

The loudest shouting has come from the naysayers. Mike Milbury has groaned about the “pansification” of the game and dismissed those who disagree with him as “soccer moms.” Don Cherry—who began his media career with
Rock'em, Sock'em
videos—blows a gasket over Ference speaking his mind,
suggesting it breaks some imagined “code” of the sacred hockey dressing room.

The quieter voices are more numerous, but have gained little. The NHL did bring in a specific rule against blatant headhunting, but still lags far behind other team sports when it comes to offering protection for vulnerable brains. For weeks the debate has been about what happened to Sidney Crosby's head, whether the concussive blow was delivered, perhaps by accident, by Washington's David Steckel during the New Year's Winter Classic or by intent when Tampa Bay's Victor Hedman crushed him into the boards a few days later.

No longer. Instead of looking back, the hockey world now looks ahead: When will Sidney Crosby come back? Will he come back at all this year? He himself says he expects to, but can offer no date. “There's no timetable,” he said on Thursday. “I hope I'm back.”

So should the league. Crosby was in the midst of a seminal year. He was running away with the scoring race. He had just come off a twenty-five-game scoring streak when the first blow landed at the Winter Classic. His only serious rival over the past few years, Alexander Ovechkin, had been reduced to star status from superstar—of which hockey now had only one.

While hockey is a team game and golf an individual sport, comparing Sidney Crosby's impact on hockey in 2010–11 is not that much of a stretch from Tiger Woods's impact on golf in the years leading up to his self-inflicted blow to his image. When Woods departed the golf scene for a significant time, the PGA went into freefall in terms of interest and TV viewership. The falloff would not be so dramatic if Crosby were lost for the season, but it would be significant. The Crosby–Ovechkin storyline had been compelling for years; that storyline is, for the moment, lost.

It is no stretch at all, however, to compare Crosby's concussion problems to those of earlier players such as Paul Kariya and Eric Lindros. Kariya, it will be recalled, was on the cusp of
NHL superstardom when he was struck down. Lindros had reached NHL superstardom when he suffered the first of several concussions. Neither was ever to reach those heights again.

It could be, before all this is over, that Sidney Crosby's greatest contribution to the game will not be the Olympic gold medal–winning goal of a year ago, but his sad situation forcing the NHL—the braying naysayers included—to wake up to what hits to the head have done and are doing to hockey.

It's not a man's game at all. It's a child's game. And it is what has become dysfunctional.

“H
ockey Night in Canada
has become a program about itself.” There is nothing new to this statement—apart from the fact, perhaps, that it has now been typed and printed—as it has been said now for some time by those who were once part of the CBC's flagship sports program and is often said by those still involved with it.

Think of the recent
HNIC
as the
Seinfeld
of TV sports, a program that, in the final analysis, is really about very little, at times nothing, but the characters, often outrageous, who come and go between commercials—or, in this case, between periods. If only it were as funny. It has become a program about itself, when it should be about the game.

No one—apart, perhaps, from nostalgic Toronto Maple Leafs fans—is asking the program to happily motor back to the era of Murray Westgate and Ward Cornell, but just as the iconic hockey show evolved over the years from 9 p.m. starts and the dreaded telestrator, it is time to rethink a program that is vitally important to Canadians but has clearly lost its way.

While the production values of the broadcast, including much of the play-by-play work, remain world-class, the package has become not only predictable but seems, at times, barely aware that viewers have tuned in to see a game. For some time now, the TSN package has been far more informative and, most significantly, far more on topic.

It is difficult to say what happened to such a once-venerable show, but something undeniably has over the past few years. The game invariably takes a back seat to the Don Cherry–Ron MacLean grand entry, to the ramblings of the Coach's Corner segment in the first intermission and to the views of new additions to the show who often seem so stuck in the game's past that, unbelievably, Cherry at times emerges as the voice of reason.

Cherry is a most difficult subject to address. His national popularity is undeniable, his humour, and that of his gifted partner MacLean, often quick. But he seems only vaguely interested in today's game and, despite the endless “I told you so's,” has largely lost sight of how today's game is played. His sermons on kids getting themselves and their sticks out of the way of shots are now ancient strategy; today's defensive game is all about shot blocking, the goaltender often the last to see the puck. The program no longer reflects public taste when it comes to officiating.
HNIC
seems to hate the new rules, while polls have claimed 85 percent of fans embrace the crackdown on obstruction.

The listing of military and police tragedies on Coach's Corner is seen by some as an honest tribute by a sentimentalist who truly cares (my own view) and by some as a sly trick to ensure invulnerability from criticism. This facet of the show cannot possibly be addressed, deciphered and fairly dealt with in such short space, but it is still fair to say it is a reach from the show's mandate to bring the national game to a national audience.

Analysis, partly because of these heart-wrenching interludes, now falls to others. Recent additions such as Mike Milbury—Don
Cherry on training wheels—and the excitable P.J. Stock seem more out of the last century than this one. While regular panellist Pierre LeBrun brings superb reporting to the grouping—and the brief new media section offers welcome insight—too often the talk disintegrates into the tired “It's a man's game” chatter and National Hockey League Players' Association minutia rather than the striking and fundamental shifts the game has undergone since the lockout and the salary cap.

Where, many of us ask, is the analyst—imagine such articulate world players as Anders Hedberg or Igor Larionov—who can speak to the creative wonders that delight the imagination of all those youngsters who both play and dream the game: Ovechkin, Crosby, Kane … ?
HNIC
often doesn't even seem to like such young stars.

Where is the coaching voice—Ken Hitchcock, for example—who can articulate how it is that today's coaches seem more university lecturers than fire-and-brimstone preachers? Where is the calm voice of reason—such as my
Globe and Mail
colleague Eric Duhatschek—who is both knowledgeable and sensible and might take issue with those who, like Milbury, will speak of a head hit “as a thing of beauty?”

“If you don't like it,” he once said, “change the channel.” Unfortunately, we cannot. So please change the show.

In early 2011, in the midst of a public outcry against violence in hockey, Mike Milbury dramatically came out against fighting during a
Hotstove
panel discussion. Milbury called for a full ban on fisticuffs and, very candidly, stated: “The only reason we have fighting in the game is because we like it.”

T
his is a perfect time to bell a hockey cat that has had far more lives than can ever be justified. The fourth line.

They try not to call them that anymore. Perhaps it's just not considered politically correct these days. Broadcasters tend to refer to the three forwards on the bottom rung of the team as “the energy line.” This may be because the lesser lines, especially the fourth, tend to have the most media-friendly players on them, players sharp enough and experienced enough to know—and certainly with enough time on their hands eventually to realize, if it's not readily apparent—that their careers are as fragile as a solution to the Phoenix Coyotes.

Coaches being asked questions about their roster will say they do not have a “third” or a “fourth” line, as if they are somehow indecipherable from each other. If that were so—and it isn't—then how much better would “third” lines in NHL hockey be if the three players on it were chosen from the best of the six to eight roster spots currently available to make up the final two lines of a team?

The reality is that the typical fourth-liner in the NHL could be replaced with any one of, say, a thousand other professional hockey players around the world who had neither the contract nor the luck to land such a position. Or, if the sport would only do so, they could be replaced with … nothing.

If the modern exhibition season proves anything, it is that today's NHL players are in remarkable shape. They leap straight from summer into winter. And yet, as the pre-season games drag on, the central question (beyond goaltending) in the era of the salary cap almost invariably boils down to which single player, perhaps two, is going to crack the lineup—and usually so far down the lineup that those covering training camp have to check the media guide to find out where he came from and how his name is spelled.

This often amounts to more attention being paid to a player who will be on the ice for a handful of minutes or so a game than he will receive in a season of regular play. Think about it: Given that the players are in such good shape, how can it possibly be that a line that takes up three to six minutes of ice time a night is in any way a necessity? The three other lines would, and could, happily consume those rare shifts.

And even if an argument, however moot, can be made that spreading the ice time out among four lines keeps the other three lines stronger, what exactly is wrong with having periodically tired players on the ice? As the new rule on icing has shown, having a faceoff with fresh players on one side and gasping players on the side that iced the puck adds an intriguing element of possibility to games. If hockey is indeed, as they love to say, a game of mistakes, why not give us more mistakes that can become scoring opportunities?

The NHL roster is set at eighteen skaters and two goaltenders. We know from fluke experience—the Calgary Flames' problems with the salary cap and injury as the 2008–09 season wound down—that a team can get by with as few as fifteen skaters against eighteen, as the Flames actually won a couple of games with that shrunken bench. The ECHL sets rosters at a limit that eliminates the need for a fourth line. The American Hockey League had slightly smaller rosters but is at NHL numbers in order to have consistency between the mother club and the affiliate.

There are, as well, other advantages to shaving off that final line. Team payrolls would come down, in several cases by millions of dollars. The cap could be reduced, although experience tells us it would more likely result in even more money being made available to the Ilya Kovalchuks and other unrestricted free agents of the game.

Still, team costs would come down, not just in salaries, but in the care and feeding and travel of that unnecessary fourth line—perhaps even come down enough to cause a drop, however slight,
in ticket prices. And finally, it would help clean up the game. Most fourth lines are merely support groups for the team enforcer. Someone has to skate out with the player on his way to the penalty box, so two healthy bodies are kept on the bench simply to skate out for the necessary faceoff before the fisticuffs begin.

All this is fanciful thinking. The National Hockey League Players' Association would never stand for the elimination of so many jobs: ninety if you simply lopped off the fourth line, but in effect far more as each team maintains plugs for their lower lines both in the press box and in the minors. If that many players retired at once, TSN would have to extend its sports panel to twice the length of an NHL bench.

However, it is a question often raised in morning-skate corridors and late-night bars. Some in the game say that the only possible modern rationale for a fourth line is to make it specialize in penalty killing, but this is a role easily transferable to other, higher lines. Recent champions—the Chicago Blackhawks, Pittsburgh Penguins, Detroit Red Wings—have all illustrated the benefit in having players who can actually play form the fourth line. But this equally argues in favour of dispensing with that fourth line in favour of creating a superior third line out of the multiple players otherwise available for two bottom lines.