Canadian sports postponement power ratings! Where do the CEBL, CFL, CPL, OHL and IIHF rank?
Some leagues rate better than others at telling their public they will have to wait to play in 2021. Meantime, know what game is afoot when word spreads that Doug Ford cannot use a laptop.
The phrase ‘there’s no playbook for this’ is code taken straight outta the Wonderful World of Abdicating Responsibility seminar that almost all of our executive class in business, politics and sports attended in the Before Times. It is meant to make the critics look like second-guessers. No one could have possibly seen the storm on the horizon, even though there are almost always learned studies that have been gathering virtual dust in inboxes for months and years!
A year into Big Rona is a sufficient time for sports leagues to learn how to a postpone a season or a major championship. A power ranking of how various postponements have been handled across Canada seems like an adequate answer to a question no one asked.
1. Canadian Elite Basketball League — 2021 season (shorter and later)
With all apologies to Montel Jordan, this is how you do it. The third-year hoops league stated Wednesday that it is pushing back its already-trimmed regular season by almost three weeks. The CEBL plans to tip off on June 24. Their serving of word salad was more digestible since commissioner Mike Morreale and his team led with stating that the decision was made “out of respect for the gravity of the coronavirus situation in many parts of Canada and in order to play a greater role in lifting up the communities in which its teams play.” They put others first instead of going on about how hard they worked. The CEBL — Gretchen, stop trying to make Cee-ball happen; it’s not going to happen — seems to get it.
Sports can be a mood stabilizer, but the behemoths’ insistence in playing through a pandemic has been a mood inhibitor. It is understandable to be queasy about the games going on amid Big Rona. Here is one league saying it doe not wish want to get in the way of people feeling better. They are saying they are hopeful about having a role there, and that, to borrow a line from Kevin Kennedy of the Waking The Red soccer blog, they get that “(s)porting narratives mirror the challenges of real life.”
As a Canadian hoopshead, the CEBL was extremely helpful to me when it returned to play midway through the summer of 2020 with a bubble season. One of my off-brand sports loves is Canadian university basketball. It punches well above its weight at helping Canadian players go on to play professionally in Europe. Having alumni that you saw develop in Ontario University Athletics such as Caleb Agada or Johnny Berhanemeskel come back for the summer with a more refined game is a joy.
2. Golf Canada — RBC Canadian Open (cancelled)
The overseers of the PGA Tour’s Canadian event placed a pin in the ’21 event some nine weeks before it would have been held during the second week of June. And its release played up “being respectful to the health leaders.” Good to know someone in Ontario with power still believes in doing that.
Now, the drop-off from two of three is so steep it could be the new ride at Canada’s Wonderland.
3. Canadian Football League — ’21 season (shorter, later)
A time-count violation can be a major foul instead of a five-yard penalty. The CFL has finally set a loose date for an August-to-December ’21 season. The CFL left this too long, though. Their calendar starts Feb. 15 when the free agency period begins. Holding off for over two months created room for fans’ minds to run wild and meant their emotions could be played with through XFL merger talk that might have been mostly ginned up by the league’s media right holder and the one team ownership group that has a stake in the media rights holder.
4. Ontario Hockey League — ’20-21 season (cancelled)
The OHL gets a minor penalty that could have been a major. It is always playing defence against a 4-on-1: teenage hockey players who all believe they are headed to the NHL, the parents of teenage hockey players, the agents of teenage hockey players, and fans who all believe commissioner David Branch has it out for their favorite team. So one can give the OHL a little leniency for for stretching out their cancellation to April 20, even if was evident by Nov. 20, 2020 that the pandemic management in Ontario was not going to improve quickly enough for the league to return to play.
As Elwood Blues said, “I took the liberty of bullshitting you.”
It should get dragged a little for emphasizing how it “worked tirelessly” with the authorities. You had one job, OHL, which was to work tirelessly, and anyone suggesting you did not do so probably needs a new hobby.
The OHL might extend an extra season of eligibility to players who have aged out of the league since the shutdown. It might out having more physically mature players improves their product.
5. Canadian Premier League soccer — uh, who knows?
The CPL said in January that it is intending to start the season on Victoria Day weekend, with a full a 28-match schedule. An eight-team league with teams spread from Halifax on the east coast to Victoria on the west coast is probably not going to get to start play with full travel in 30 days’ time, so enough with the radio silence. A more connected soccer insider probably knows better, but it seems weird that a league that prides itself on strong grassroots relationships is not acknowledging that it will likely have to adapt again.
To be fairrrrrrrr, the CPL has been running a FIFA tournament to pass the time. Maybe that is a hint of what it might have to do for the actual season.
6. International Ice Hockey Federation — World Women’s Hockey Championship (cancelled / postponed)
Please do not be that guy who thinks that noting the women’s worlds has been called off while men’s championships wins you any feminist-ally points. It is quite the opposite.
Feminism beats the patriarchy hands down at intersecting extensively with the social justice values that are reflected in Nova Scotia’s health authorities putting the well-being of the public ahead of a luxury good such as an international sports event. Nova Scotia has earned infinitely more benefit of the doubt for COVID-19 containment strategies than either Alberta, which hosted the men’s under-20 championship, or Texas, which is hosting the men’s under-18s.
7. Canadian Olympic Committee, et al. — 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics
Hold up! The Olympics have not been cancelled or re-postponed. But who is kidding whom?
The synopsis of a recent Dave Zirin column is that Japan is big-time behind North America in vaccine confidence and uptake, while also being far ahead in mainstreaming the attitudes of anti-Olympics activists and reformers than North America. Japan is also at a three-month high in new coronavirus cases.
The imperious oligarchs who control international sport are not going to acknowledge that until absolutely forced to, and their thinking tends to ripple down to everyone else who is looped into the Olympic movement. However, the Canadian media will need to start informing people sooner rather than later about what is going on in Japan.
The Olympics are distant seventh. If this was a list of 27, it would be 27th.
If only there there was a CTRL-Z with Ford, eh? But that is a preamble to the next wave of fake populism
Pretty much everyone who is Chronically Online has joined in the pile-on about Ontario Premier Doug Ford needing a crash course in using a laptop. I did it too; I am a scumbag, after all, so I think scummy thoughts.
On Wednesday, Ford’s office was scrambling to get him a laptop computer and to teach him how to use it. (Toronto Star, April 21)
That info surely involved a source to confirming it to Star reporter Robert Benzie. Was someone in the premier’s office merely casual with their message control, or is signal-boosting Ford’s buffoonishness part of the great Hail Mary plan to replace him as party leader/premier before the 2022 general election?
Also, does anyone care that the 2014-vintage BlackBerry-loving premier was using “an outdated device to get sensitive information?” Nah, since is Ontario also out of effs to give.
Ford needed a laptop since he went into quarantine “on Tuesday night (April 20) after a young male staffer’s positive COVID-19 test.” He was already four days deep into a timeout that started after after his disastrous press conference on April 16. That train wreck was the media’s prompt, per Matt Gurney, to declare that Ontario has “no effective executive leadership.” Ontario subsequently lowered the age cutoff for the AstraZeneca vaccine against COVID19 from age 55 to 40, setting off a real-life Hunger Games with baked-in white privilege. That should probably be more of a story.
Staying on-point, being in quarantine does not mean an elected leader is unreachable. Also, on Monday, the premier’s Twitter account showed him working … in front of, wait for it, a laptop. Ford working from home also proved the exact political point that the Progressive Conservatives have been taking on water over for weeks.
The Fords lie when they, to quote Jim Lahey, can no longer get their shitbat around on the 101-mph shitballs they shit out into the world in the first place. Take that time a few years ago when the late Rob Ford claimed there was a bomb threat at Toronto City Hall, and there was not one.
The point of bringing that up is just a preamble, though. Ford being toast politically is barely news if you have long suspected his party would jettison him ahead of the ’22 election.
One coping technique in times of trouble and mounting stress is to picture a day in the future when it will have all gone away. Five years from now, Ford will be long gone from the elected office he never should have had. Part of being a skeptic and a progressive, though, is knowing the horizon is always farther away than you think. All of the anger among the young youth today… where will it be in 12 or 15 years?
Dunking on Ford is easy — fun, too — but Canada’s skyrocketing housing prices are a multiplier for receptiveness to fake populism. Not only are housing prices shooting up in Canada, but car prices are shooting up worldwide. That creates angst, and if American Democrats and the Liberals and NDP in Canada do not address it, then voters who expect to have those big shiny things will turn on them and turn to the guy who is just peddling easy answers, and how:
Home ownership is a form of social “buy-in.” Those who own real estate share a sense of having a stake in the system, a sense that their well-being is tied to that of broader society. If home ownership fails, that link will be weakened. Elected officials and regulators in Ottawa, the financial experts on Bay Street — those will be the people whose credibility will be undermined. We can expect to see far more people courting radicalism.
For years, historian and journalist Thomas Frank has been arguing that it’s a mistake to view the Donald Trump phenomenon as being primarily about racism and social conservatism, noting that Trump spoke endlessly about free trade in his stump speeches.
… Just as automation and the offshoring of jobs to Mexico and China pushed entire American communities into the arms of Donald Trump, so too could the prospect of renting for life from a wealthier neighbour push the next generation of adult Canadians into the arms of a populist leader who throws a Molotov cocktail through the country’s civil institutions.
That’s especially true if the policymakers in Ottawa and the chattering classes in the media dismiss these peoples’ concerns as ignorant, illegitimate or exhibiting some form of privilege. (Daniel Tencer, The Line, April 21)
I made my peace the reality that being a Xennial-era wordworker would mean going without a lot of the middle-class symbols of successful adulting. That is probably introverted loner privilege talking to itself.
Point being, the just-announced federal budget has been characterized as having only tepid support for fixing the housing crunch. That is a tad disappointing and possibly shortsighted, and one knows the next plastic hardman will prey on it when the opportunity presents itself. Just a thought.
Lastly, but not least of all
Hockey peeps: Is this bad?
If you read one piece today about the state of journalism in Canada, make it this:
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