Connor McDavid, an end to NHL tanking, and rooting out unearned privilege everywhere
McDavid hitting 100 points is as good a time as any to affirm that Edmonton did zero to get him. In the interest of playing nice, let's revisit some of sports' greatest short-season achievements.
All drafts are immoral, just as all property as theft. Is that too high-concept for a Monday morning in the fourteenth month of a global pandemic?
Everyone deserves to get an assist for helping the concept of tanking in sports get over with the public. It never should have become acceptable, let alone seen as smart, to deliberately fall bassackwards into the unearned privilege of drafting Connor McDavid or Auston Matthews. Since they are likely to go head-to-head in the Stanley Cup pandemic playoffs in a few weeks, let’s get out front of this.
The shame is on the leagues, and the elaborate access-media culture around them, for convincing the public to accept that too many teams are not trying to compete every season. Any team that leans into the tank is affecting the Hyman Roth take in the Godfather II: this is the business we’ve chosen.
A true fan of the game should reject this nauseatingly cynical strategy. You deserve a structure where every team has to try, especially with what ticket prices cost before Big Rona came along. Winning the draft lottery is an unearned privilege, and recent times have shown what happens when people attain positions they did not fully earn.
Edmonton foundered and floundered for years on end before lucking into McDavid, who is exhausting the sportswriter thesaurus by scoring 100 points (and counting) in a shortened NHL season.
Short of the NHL doing something very un-NHL such as letting every team into the playoffs like some dunderhead recently suggested, what is a better system? One rough idea that has earwormed came from Ian Mendes in the late aughts when he was a reporter for Sportsnet who wrote a column in the Ottawa Citizen, before it was engulfed by an American hedge fund. Mendes’ suggestion, going by memory, was to base the NHL draft order on how many points teams earned after being mathematically eliminated.
That is not bad, but it means a real shitacular team — hello, Buffalo Sabres — would gain a head start on other also-rans. So what is the Big Idea with how to reform a sports league where one does not hold influence or equity?
Draft position could be based on non-playoff teams’ performance from a set point late in the season to the end of the regular season.
For argument’s sake, the (Insert Wunderkind Here) Derby would start immediately after the trade deadline. Teams that were on the outside looking in at the playoff pack at the deadline would be eligible. The non-playoff team with the highest point percentage during that period would draft first, and so on.
Since the NHL trade deadline four weeks ago, the Ottawa Senators have paced the also-rans with a .731 point percentage. That is actually seventh-best in the NHL over that span, while Buffalo’s record is 28th. Sure, organizationally, the Ottawa Melnyks can go tire fire to tire fire with the Buffalo Pegulas on any day ending in Y, but at least the Senators are winning some games.
With the right kind of edibles, one can imagine McDavid in a puck precinct that actually did something to deserve him. It was not so long ago that Canada’s foremost sportswriter declared that he was “trapped in hockey hell.”
The Columbus Blue Jackets would have won the McDavid Derby in 2015. Columbus went on an .825 tear after the deadline, all in service of missing the playoffs by nine points in the Metropolitan Division. (Consider Columbus as the NHL’s noble turtle.)
Toronto, Buffalo and Arizona all tanked really hard in the 2014-15 season to try to get McDavid. Edmonton only had the sixth-worst post-deadline record among the also-rans. In the revised system, the Oilers would have chosen No. 9 overall.
Mathew Barzal would likely have been available at that slot, and he was a skilled forward from the Western Hockey League. (Three guesses what would have counted for more in Edmonton.) Edmonton still could have had McDavid and Barzal. The latter went to the New York Islanders with the No. 16 pick that Edmonton coughed up for Wyatt Russell lookalike Griffin Reinhart, who lasted 29 games in Edmonton.
What about 2016, when Toronto bottomed out to draft Matthews? The Buffalo Sabres played .632 hockey after the deadline while missing the playoffs. Toronto, with the second-worst post-deadline record, would have picked 13th. So, in another timeline, Auston Matthews would have started his NHL career in Buffalo. One can only imagine where he would have requested to go in a trade.
Of course, the Sabres had help with playing out their 2016 string from Jack Eichel, the No. 2 overall pick after McDavid. Based on the modified Mendes proposal, the second pick in 2015 would have belonged to the Dallas Stars. Given the Dallas-Buffalo history in sports, it is a little funny. Ha-ha funny, not tragicomic like most of Eichel’s run in Buffalo and yes I auto-drafted him for a hockey pool this season.
Toronto, Buffalo and Arizona, in turn, would have held the Nos. 12, 13 and 14 selections. Let us presume one of them would have been wise enough to draft Barzal, or Thomas Chabot, or Kyle Connor, instead of, oh, Zach Senyshyn or Jakub Zboril.
Those post-deadline records cannot be taken as gospel. They came in a setting where tanking was encouraged. That is kind of the point. The bad behaviour is, forgive this nonword, incentivized. For the good of the sport and the good of the consumer, it is time to do it another way.
So is McDavid’s season in the CanCon Division canon?
Short answer: yes. McDavid has only played against the other six Canadian-based teams, three of which he torched for more than two points per game. When Wayne Gretzky had his record 215-point season in 1986, though, he averaged more than three points per game against Edmonton’s divisional opponents. That means he averaged ‘only’ 2.44 points per game against non-division opponents.
Take a hint: do not nickel-and-dime McJesus, and do not nickle-and-dime The Great One.
All fan rights are reserved with regard to accepting a shortened season as legit. McDavid hittin’ a hundred points in 53 games was a prompt to poke around for other unique seasons when leagues’ schedules were compacted by a lockout or strike. The 60-game pandemic season that baseball played in 2020 had too many anomalies to be included here.
Everything else counts though, with the possible exception of the lockout-shortened 66-game season that the NBA staged in 2011-12. Counting the Miami Heat and LeBron James’ 2012 title invites the wrath of a real-life Jane Kerkovich-Williams from Happy Endings.
Some notable short seasons to that are in the conversation with McDavid’s 100-in-53.
1981 MLB: Mike Schmidt nearly outhomered an entire team
A defensive strike by the players’ association over baseball’s gatekeepers trying to end free agency led to the regular season being shortened by roughly a third. Schmidt only played 102 games, but hit a MLB-most 31 home runs on his way to finishing first in on-base percentage, slugging percentage and WAR. The San Diego Padres hit only 32 home runs in their longer 110-game slate.
What in the Nate Colbert happened to the Padres’ power? They lost Dave Winfield to the Yankees after he signed a 10-season, US$23-million contract before the ’81 season, and lacking access to team facilities for eight weeks was bad for batters’ timing. Winfield’s replacement in right field, Joe Lefebvre, was the only one to hit more than five home runs. One of the bench players, Randy Bass, later went on to hit 54 home runs and win a traditional triple crown in Japan.
1982 NFL: Wes Chandler’s 2,000-yard pace
The early ’80s San Diego Chargers are one of the most romanticized NFL teams of that era, since their ‘Air Coryell’ attack that hall of fame quarterback Dan Fouts directed on the field was streets ahead with filling the sky with passes and lighting up scoreboards. The team’s legacy was well-captured in a NFL Films Missing Rings doc on the 1981 iteration. Owner Gene Smith sent away a disruptive force on each side of the ball, edge rusher Fred Dean and speedmeister John Jefferson, sewering the Chargers’ Super Bowl odds. They still reached the penultimate stage of the playoffs.
Chandler was acquired in ’81 to replace Jefferson. A year later, Chandler could not be covered, putting up a record 129 receiving yards per contest while playing in eight of San Diego’s nine games. That works out to 2,064 over 16 games.
Since the NFL regular season is now 17 games, one need not ding Chandler for missing a contest. He was ridiculous when he was not being kept off of the field by injuries or ass pains created by greedy NFL management.
A 2,000-yard receiving season is a holy grail in the NFL. Calvin Johnson set the mark of 1,964 with the Detroit Lions in 2012. One of the few upshots of the 17-game schedule is it that increases the possibility of a 2,000-yard year.
When that happens, I will remind everyone that Terry Greer of the 1983 Toronto Argonauts is the only pro receiver one to catch 2,000 yards in passes in 16 games.
1987 NFL: Touchdown, Jerry Rice!
Rice had 22 receiving touchdowns in only 12 games since he refused to cross the NFL Players’ Association picket line to play in scab games. One out of every three passes Rice caught from Joe Montana and Steve Young in ’87 went for a touchdown. Rice, as a receiver, was involved in as many touchdowns as Denver quarterback John Elway, whom the Associated Press selected as the league MVP.
Rice’s touchdown-reception record stood for 20 years before Randy Moss caught 23 in 2007, breaking the mark in the final quarter of the reg-season finale.
1994-95 MLB: Greg Maddux was ridiculous
There were a lot of pitchers in the 1990s MLB whose earned-run average started with a 1, but without the decimal point immediately following it. Maddux combined for a 1.60 earned-run average over the two seasons that were affected by the strike that led to MLB’s management cancelling the 1994 postseason. His ERA was more than a full run per game better than that of the second-best starter, some guy named Randy Johnson. And it was more than 2½ times better than the median. Maddux did it with guile and upsetting batters’ timing. Even if you are the type of fan who could just tell from a seat up in the stands that the umpires were stretching the strike zone for Maddux, it is quite the feat.
1994-95 NHL: Bondra’s shorty special
The first point of reference for Peter Bondra is that he led the NHL with 34 goals across a 48-game lockout schedule while having only nine assists. But the Washington wing also led the league with six shorthanded goals, putting him on a very short list of players who have pulled off that double. It is, quickly: Gretzky (five times), Mario Lemieux (three times), Phil Esposito, Bobby Hull and Ted Lindsay. Lemieux was the last to do it, in 1996.
Auston Matthews has never scored a shorthanded goal, but he has only been in the NHL for five seasons.
1998-99 NBA: Threes and Dee
Chances are, you likely associate Dee Brown with winning the NBA dunk contest in 1991 whilst blindfolded. By 1999, Brown evidently held an in-game three-point shootout whilst playing with a young Toronto Raptors franchise.
Brown never started a single game during the 50-game lockout season, but he led the NBA in threes made and threes attempted. Efficiency-wise, he was 26th in the league in three-point percentage, though. He attempted more threes than he ever did in an 82-game season, and going by the percentage, want to supply a few more bricks to finish off the construction of the new Air Canada Centre. Brown was not making anyone forget Dell Curry, who was the most accurate shooter from deep that season. Curry signed in Toronto that summer, and Brown soon became expendable.
2011-12 NBA: Serge Ibaka’s block party
Block percentage is an estimate of how many of opponents’ two-point shots were blocked by a player while he was on the court. Going back to 1973-74, when pro hoops started counting blocked shots, only the late Manute Bol has blocked more than 10 per cent of the opponents’ twos over an entire season. Bol, of course, was 7-foot-7.
The six-foot-10 Ibaka had a block percentage of 9.78 in 2011-12 while he played for the Oklahoma City Thunder, which is the highest on record by anyone who was not Manute Bol. Ibaka’s smarts with using his length was integral for the 2019 NBA champion Raptors, but that shows how elite he was early in his career
2012-13 NHL: The Hawks hit .800
That is right, one dares suggest an NHL team in recent times touched 1970s Montréal Canadiens and 1980s Oilers levels of dominance. It was a 48-game lockout season, but the Chicago team of Jonathan Toews, Dustin Keith and some other notables is the only NHL team of the last 40 years to crack .800 in points percentage. Those Hawks allowed the fewest goals in the league and scored the second-most. In the playoffs, they won their second Stanley Cup out of three in a six-season span, which counts as a dynasty in a salary-capped league that is twigged to produce parity.
Sure, Bettman points, lottery picks, and the shootout helped the Hawks finish at .802. Details! Never let facts slow your troll.
That is more than enough for today. Please stay safe, and be kind.