Corey Perry, NHL do not rate a pass on degen acts ’cause it’s the Cup
Why are hockey media and many fans quick to cover for Perry's shitheel behaviour that the NHL and a complicit players' association enables? An episode of 'BoJack Horseman' might explain why.
You can blame Corey Perry.
Corey Perry has always shown the hockey world who he is, and it still refuses to believe him.
His nomination for a Forgivie1 was pretty much written before John Tavares was even borne off the ice on a stretcher after — whoopsy-doodle — the left knee of Perry just happened to be in the path of the Toronto Maple Leafs captain’s head and neck after he was knocked down from a clean bodycheck from Montréal Canadiens defenceman Ben Chiarot on May 20. (I assume if you are here, you have already seen the play multiple times.)
This is not about accusing Perry of headhunting Tavares. It is just about keeping what kind of hockey player Corey Perry has always been in the conservation, since that is necessary for understanding why the NHL so often plays out as a farce. Throwing out Perry’s reputation seemed like part of the con from the second it was cued by Sportsnet play-by-player Chris Cuthbert calling the play “inadvertent.”
A lack of provable deliberate intent does not mean something can be called an accident where no one is to blame. That point is as obvious as the fact that it was Corey Perry. The veteran winger’s long-running shitheelery has inspired countless YouTube compilations of his greatest cheap shots (here and here). Perry is a habitual line-stepper, going back to his days at Hunter Hockey School in London, Ont., and he is also smart enough to do the crude calculus about how the NHL, with an assist from the NHLPA, runs their games. Corey Perry is capable of the poor intent to be in position to get a piece of the defenceless Tavares, since a degen is gonna degen.
The NHL, its media and labour partners will not talk about that, with fans parroting the apologism.
The league tacitly allows a second-man-in pile-on. They will say that game is just too fast for players to move in time to avoid colliding with a defenceless player who is down or off-balance.2
The pile-on will look inadvertent at full speed, but sometimes it is not. Players, as we are so often told by the learned ex-pro analysts, know where the line is drawn. Even one of the NHL’s designated white hats, Washington’s Alex Ovechkin, got crunched twice by Boston’s David Pastrnak and Brad Marchand in a span of a few seconds in a game on May 21 without a penalty call. There was no need for Marchand to slam into a player who was down long after the puck had moved to another part of the ice, but he did it any way.
On the Perry-Tavares play, Perry was in the Toronto zone as Tavares received a breakout pass at the Toronto blue line. It looks like, sorry to go Harry Neale here, like he was skated full-bore toward the area of the collision. At this stage, there was the option of cutting toward the boards to give a teammate who picked up the loose puck access to a pass.
The best analogy is the motorist who follows the driver in front of them too closely and/or drives too fast to have enough reaction time in case the unexpected happens. Perry might as well be trying to take away his own time and space, since he digs into the ice and skates right into the path of Tavares:
And then his left knee smacks Tavares in the head, perhaps accidentally on purpose. Because it’s the Cup. And because it’s Corey Perry.
By this point, one almost half-wonders whether the subsequent fight between Perry and Toronto’s Nick Foligno was a deliberate distraction from any serious discussion of Perry’s poor intent. The pearls were clutched about the fight, and not the knee to the head. Either way, it helped Hockey Dumb supplant Baseball Dumb as the main ingredient in the sports week’s Dumdum Salad.
Corey Perry has always been a shady player. As his skills have declined with age, it probably helps keep him in the NHL since it can be filed under bits of coachspeak such as ‘compete level’ and ‘doing what it takes to win.’ Then he just happens to be in a scenario which causes an injury to an opponent.
The passionate plea here is not to give established shitheels such as Perry the benefit of the doubt. It is understandable coming that people who have a client relationship with the NHL will give it, but a true fan of the sport is under no obligation to accept it. It’s about realizing what the league and its helpers want to normalize in order to silence complex questions.
This all calls to mind the BoJack Horseman episode, “BoJack The Feminist” where the entertainment industry re-embrace a toxic actor named Vance Waggoner, pretty much at face value. The industry has come to the latter point of a cycle that the feminist-writer character Diane Nguyen describes thusly: “they act all shocked that one of their favourite stars turns out to be a dirtbag, but they can’t wait to give a comeback to all the dirtbags we already know about.” Later in the episode, she gives a great explanation of how normalizing works.
Immediately framing the play as an accident where Corey Perry could not get out of the way is normalizing something for the worse. He knows how to do the contrite routine, like every hockey player ever.
Ignoring poor intent plays into almost everyone’s hustle, at every level. The NHL knows a goodly portion of the fanbase buys into the rulebook being just a suggestion since true fans know a penalty when they see it. The players’ association knows that playing by prison rules in the playoffs might make some games unwatchable, but it also means a depth player might get a big free-agent contract if he contributes a few timely goals and some sketchy plays to a Stanley Cup run. No one is ever a dirty player, unless there’s a euphemism for it.
Other sports do not do this. They have strict rules that are at least intended to not make player safety sound like a two-word punchline.
In the media, there is a phalanx of ex-players, on TV, on the radio and on podcasts, who have the platform to explain What The NHL Is Like to every Nerd Who Probably Played House League. Their gig revolves around making sure people do not understand that every players no that there will be no penalty for being reckless about skating toward a collision.
An attempt to injure and poor intent are not one and the same. Automatically ignoring the latter, of course, ensures the hockey world will not acknowledge the truth and won’t learn a thing, which sounds like something that is intentional.
Wrapping up another week that felt like a lifetime
What else was bothersome this week?
Ontario’s premier-for-now will not do something that he really wanted to do
Ontario Premier Doug Ford is pretty regular with Friday afternoon news dumps. This time around, it was one that might actually be well-received, but only as long as you forget why in hell something called Canada Christian College was anywhere close to becoming an accredited university (in a province that is letting Laurentian University go to rot).
That ‘major sticky problem’ is entirely self-made. It got to this point since Ford made a lot of promises to McVety and so-called social conservatives in 2018 in order to become his party’s leader and become premier. Secondly, 52 members of provincial Parliament were in support of McVety’s university, effectively signing off on an endorsement of bigotry and hate.
The mass media is out to lunch on the reality that the person who is elected leader of the rightmost party in Canada and most provinces is the one who overpromises the most to Christian dominists about bringing back social policies that would be electoral suicide. The end result is that the parties end up with weak leaders whose only play is running against the 21st century. That is not good for anybody.
What we do not talk about when wetalk about all the no-hitters
Of all the collected theories about why there have already been six no-hitters in MLB this season, tanking seems underdiscussed.
Cleveland, Seattle and Texas have each been no-hit twice. Cleveland has the lowest payroll in the sport and the second-youngest group of batters. Seattle is sixth from the bottom in both their batters’ average age and their payroll. Texas has the third-youngest batters and 10th-lowest payroll.
Good one, hockey gods
Write a post that plays off the accelerated development of National Hockey League talent, and what happens? The winning goal in that Montréal-Toronto game came from the Canadiens’ Paul Byron, who was once cut from an under-14 AA team when he was a young teenager in Ottawa. It feels like there is a lesson there.
That is more than enough for today. Please stay safe, and be kind.
If you are not familiar with the term, visit the wiki of the BoJack Horseman episode, “BoJack The Feminist.”
If this indirectly acknowledges that the league should have lengthened the ice surface during the arena building boom of the 1990s and aughts, fine by me.