Nothing to see here with Bundchen, DraftKings and Brady, and the NHL might want to create a domestic violence policy

Happy Monday here in the darkest timeline, but at least there is sports.

Giselle Bundchen, Tom Brady, and a plaintive hope that this newsletter can be right 52 per cent of the time.

Over the weekend

• The Toronto Raptors maintained their 5 per cent chance of making the NBA playoffs.

• You do you, but an English Premier League game being called off over protests against the team’s proprietors is awesome, even if there’s a goodly chance some of those Manchester United fans also voted for LEAVE in 2016.

• In terms of things coming in threes … I have thoughts on Toronto Blue Jays luminary Roberto Alomar being cast out of Major League Baseball for sexual misconduct, Vancouver Canucks wing Jake Virtanen facing misconduct allegations, and the attempt to make political hay out of a similar issue in Canada’s military (all while American legislators are actually doing something about their military justice system). It will take another day to pull those thought threads together.

Gisele Bundchen is an adviser to a sportsbook, while Tom Brady is an active NFL quarterback. This is fine.

There are two camps with Tom Brady: Greatest Of All Time or He Must Be A Member of the Illuminati. I honestly belong to neither. His durability and decision-making has allowed him to stick around beyond the normal NFL quarterback lifespan of age 37 to 38¹ and continue leading Super Bowl-winning teams in an era where the league has become all about conveniently packaged narratives, concern for player safety (read: marketable talents’ safety) and ginned-up offences for casual-fan consumption and fantasy sports reasons.

It is less about ‘the wild heart of football’ and the best team winning. Like Peter Gent warned us four decades ago, it is all about the “new rules for new fans (and the) constant search for an audience, counted every 15 minutes,”² only that has probably been sped up to every 30 seconds.

These days, that involves being really, really cozy with the gambling industry. As you no doubt have read, all of the North American big-four leagues are eager to get that gambling industry dollar.

Any way, just ahead of the NFL draft, Gisele Bundchen, Brady’s spouse, became an advisor to DraftKings. She will “help DraftKings with its ‘environmental and social objectives,’ one of which is a daily fantasy sports contest for charity with the goal of raising money to plant 1 million trees by Earth Day 2022.” Sure, there is a chance this is on the level. But the spouse of the most popular player in the sport working as an advisor to a gambling company is far more offside than Kansas City’s Dee Ford was before his penalty erased a late-game Brady interception in the 2018 AFC championship game. The lines get blurrier every day.

David Payne Purdum @DavidPurdum

DraftKings adds Gisele Bundchen as a special adviser to the Board of Directors, which also features Michael Jordan and Cal Ripken Jr.

There are two major problems with MLB, the NBA, NHL and NFL being cozy with the gambling industry and turning arenas into stadiums into glorified sportsbooks with a playing surface in the middle.

The first is a lack of independent regulation. The games are still seen as a public trust, to co-opt a phrase teams usually break out when they want a new publicly funded stadium or a tax break. That means there is an expectation the outcomes are not predetermined.

I do not believe, outside of a few weak moments, that NFL results are predetermined. A former player intimating as much is thin gruel. But there is nothing in place to stop the leagues from rigging games. In the NFL’s case, their job is keeping attention on the league and they get more if the popular teams with the best-known quarterbacks stay in contention for the Super Bowl.

The second is the amount of gambling content that is creeping into game telecasts. This is not some Helen Lovejoy ‘think of the children’ concern troll, but it is irritating to a loyal sports fan to have the portions of the telecast that used to be dedicated to news, narrative or colour hijacked by thinly veiled discussions of gambling props.

I have doubts about whether the best way of keeping long-term fans is to imply that gambling is their only reason for watching sports. Eventually, if they have no emotional equity in the teams and the players, they will go gamble on something else.

Like every other public institution, sports leagues have to convince the public that they are important and are truthful. Otherwise, people won’t believe what they are seeing. That is kind of what happened to legacy media, come to think of it.

It is also possible that the NFL has figured out that skepticism sells. The most obvious Want To See The World Burn outcome entering last season’s playoffs involved Tampa Bay and Brady, a wild-card team with a devastating defensive pass rush, making the Super Bowl in their home stadium against reigning champion Kansas City and Patrick Mahomes. That is exactly what happened, of course, and Tampa Bay earned it, although there is a speck of wonder-why about Green Bay kicking that field goal when it needed a touchdown and a two-point conversion.

There is your out clause in case Tampa Bay wins another Super Bowl next season.

Tom Brady was renovicted from inside my ginger-horseshoed chrome dome about three Super Bowl wins ago. By the normal NFL quarterback timeline, his last game should have been in the 2014 or ’15 season, leaving him with New England’s four Super Bowl victories. The three since then are just part of the darkest timeline that began on or around Nov. 8, 2016, to pick a date at random.

Besides, Brady’s teams have never won more than two Super Bowls in a row. Edmonton won five Grey Cups in a row when Warren Moon played in Canada since the NFL refused to give him an opportunity because he was Black.

Hey, NHL? You need an intimate-partner violence policy like yesterday. Also, let Dr. Wick pick where to play the women’s hockey worlds.

One theory of mind that seems to reduce stress involves having low expectations of individuals and institutions, beyond their stated goals. The way, then, that Hockey Night in Canada addressed the serious sexual misconduct allegations against Virtanen the rescheduling of the women’s world championship and on Saturday was pre-dilly-ictable.³ At least one good suggestion no one asked for has come out of it.

Taking the fresher story first, the HNIC approach to the Virtanen allegations involved reading the Vancouver Canucks’ this is “being treated very seriously by us” statement verbatim. There was no mention that the National Hockey League is the only one of North America’s big four leagues that has no specific policy for intimate-partner or sexual violence.

Obviously, it should have one, rather than just leaving it up to the commissioner’s office.

Georgia Twiss @georgiatwiss

"The NHL said it is aware of the allegations and is monitoring the situation. The NHL does not have a specific domestic violence policy, handling cases on an individual basis. Typically, rulings are made by commissioner Gary Bettman" via @emilymkaplan

espn.comCanucks put Virtanen on leave after allegationsCanucks forward Jake Virtanen has been placed on leave while facing allegations of sexual misconduct in 2017.

The broadcast did not note the allegations date from 2017. That probably should have been mentioned, so that no one in the wild formed the impression that this came since the pandemic started. You just know that would be turned against sexual violence survivors who have supported the accuser, since it always is.

Sebastian J @SebJackson90

Its sad that I've seen multiple (dozens) of woman lock their accounts today because they are being harassed by men for speaking out against that player. I have no words other than believe women.

Julie S. Lalonde @JulieSLalonde

May is Sexual Assault Awareness Month in Ontario. #SAAM2021 If you want to learn how to intervene if you witness sexual harassment in public spaces, I am hosting 5 free webinars this month. 1hr & open to anyone. Sign up before they fill up!

ottawa.ihollaback.orgStand Up! – Ottawa Hollaback!

That brings it back to keeping expectations low. The public-facing talent on HNIC breaks news about the nuts-and-bolts hockey deals that interest most of the audience. Sports networks made that concession to the leagues a long time ago, although Rick Westhead made it clear in his appearance on SportsLit in 2020 that it does not have to be that way.

On April 28, as noted in this space, HNIC offered zero editorial balance when Cassie Campbell-Pascall traded in some light disinformation about Nova Scotia’s pandemic leaders, Premier Iain Rankin and chief medical officer Dr. Robert Strang.

One or both men should have been offered a chance to have their say in a similarly prominent forum. Instead, International Ice Hockey Federation president Rene Fasel was a first intermission guest in the 7 p.m. ET window, in order to provide more revisionist history. (Campbell-Pascal was not on either intermission panels in the early game, and she was not on the colour for the 10 p.m. ET national game, but that could be a coincidence.)

Matt from Tall Can Audio @TallCanAudio

Literally all of Team Canada had to quarantine for 2 weeks during camp. Sweden played games short handed and Germany played games with like half a roster. For the love of God stop saying World Juniors was a success. The revisionist history here is baffling.

Matt from Tall Can Audio @TallCanAudio

@layinsmackdown It’s been ongoing for a week. The IIHF is passing the buck by saying “Nova Scotia should have done this cuz it went fine in Alberta”. Except it didn’t. And NS has been far more responsible and successful than Alberta all the way through this.

It is, of course, a positive to have a new target date to hold the women’s worlds in August, when it also has a better chance of having hockey watchers’ undivided attention. Alberta was thrown out as a possible host, which seems bizarre on its face when it has the most COVID-19 cases per-capita in North America. However, the real determining factor is intensive-care-unit beds, and Ontario is much, much worse off on that account since its government for the property developers loosened the restrictions (see below) much too soon after the second wave.

Perhaps they should give Dr. Hayley Wickenheiser the region-by-region scientific modelling and a rundown on arenas and hotel accommodations and let her decide where to stage the tournament. Who better to make that pick than a medical school graduate who is also a hall of fame player?

Just a thought.

Lastly, but not least of all

• Well, besides all this, name one specific thing that Ontario Premier Doug Ford has done.

  Dean from Winnipeg @Dean_Winnipeg

  Conservative Premiers: January-April: OMG vaccine shortage Also Conservative Premiers: January-April: we don’t really need strict measures to control the spread, vaccines will save us. #cdnpoli

  Ryan Imgrund @imgrund

  Imagine looking at this data from March 19th and concluding, “We need to loosen restrictions.” So YES: The blame is FULLY on @fordnation for where Ontario is right now.

  

  

  

• The New Yorker’s interview with John Swartzwelder was so great I am ready to forgive them for that rejection letter from their subscription department.

• “We should be wary of anyone who makes a living by stoking the flames of outrage.” At Medium, Steve QJ has a thought-provoking piece entitled, “The Rise of the Racism Industry.”

• One last thought:
  

  CeeJay Yellow Hawk @AdriftAlchemist

  The Blackfeet Nation in Montana gifted their surplus COVID-19 vaccines (750 doses) to nearby residents in Alberta, Canada. People drove for hours and lined up for miles on the highway to be vaccinated at a mobile clinic set up at the border crossing.

  

Meanwhile in Canada @MeanwhileinCana

That is more than enough for today. Thank you for allowing these words on your screen, please stay safe, and be kind. 

1. Great quarterbacks, no matter how resilient and resourceful, used to retire by their late 30s. Peyton Manning retired at age 39. John Elway, Dan Marino, Joe Montana, and Steve Young each retired at age 38. Bart Starr and Roger Staubach retired at 37. Dan Fouts and Jim Kelly, 36. You get the idea.

2. The quote is from Gent’s 1983 novel, The Franchise.

3. Most media accounts are referring to it as a “sexual misconduct allegation.” The final three paragraphs of a story from Postmedia’s Vancouver vertical, which presumably draws on the survivor’s Instagram posts, contains descriptions that make it clear this was not a case of Virtanen sending her a bajillion text messages. The semantics difference might come back to the apparent lack of a police complaint.