The Leafs made NHL betting history — and showed the future of wagering in a dystopian post-privacy world
Do not let the Toronto Maple Leafs' inability to hit the net keep us from getting through the looking glass, people. Also, a passionate plea for Canadian football's European expansion.
Half of this is satire.
Global pandemics come and go, maybe. The Toronto Maple Leafs being hockey’s Patient Zero for stepondickitis is forever, and as limitless as the possiblities for new sports betting markets.
Sunday, Toronto lost in overtime against the Vancouver Canucks, even though it was the latter’s first game in three weeks since almost all of their players contracted the coronavirus P-1 variant. The pace noticeably slowed in the last 10 minutes of each period. It was a farce on ice that probably created a few new Brian Tuohys. The Canucks winning definitely worked in favour of everyone — such as the franchise’s proprietor, Francesco Aquilini; the NHL head office and the players’ association — who played fast and loose with the players’ welfare last week.
Vancouver captain Bo Horvat scoring the overtime winning goal two days after delivering strong words to the portion of the public who refuses to take COVID19 seriously has an air of the too-good-to-be-true. And it appeared Toronto wing Mitch Marner scored a potential winning goal in the final half-minute of the third period, but video evidence was wanting.
Of course, there are no conspiracies, just Toronto’s Jack Campbell letting in a soft goal in a game-deciding situation. The Leafs have had plenty of unreliable goaltending since they let Bernie Parent get away in 1972, because he was a damn French.1 They have had a lot of games where they had a season high in power-play scoring chances and scored only one power-play goal. They have lost a lot of games where MoneyPuck did, or would have before the advent of analytics, credited them with at least 2.00 more expected goals. They very well might do it all again in about 36 hours. Another problem is that teams have figured out they only have to defend against the three forwards (or four on power plays), since Toronto’s defencemen almost never score goals.
It was an NHL betting record
OddsShark has the moneyline history2 for every NHL game since the start of the 1999-2000. No game in these last twenty-one seasons has ever had the away team as heavily favored and the home team as such a heavy underdog in a game that the home team won. I even got up early and made a spreadsheet to show you.
Toronto had almost no betting value on the moneyline, so taking them was a nearly no-win proposition. There was ample warning not to make a wuss bet and focus more on the totals, since Toronto’s away games in Vancouver are almost always low-scoring. Of course, in 2021 Ontario we are not much for listening to ample warnings.
The real betting action, of course, would have been on how the Toronto players actually felt about contributing to the ridiculous situation. What was the over/under on how many of the 20 Toronto players felt bad for their Canucks counterparts, and underperformed accordingly? About 10½? Maybe 11½?
The tech for this new sports betting market might be closer than one contemplates. Through the liquidified chip that China, Bill Gates, George Soros and the saucer people surely had stirred into the COVID19 vaccines and undoubtedly forthcoming legislation that will smash the last antiquated vestiges of personal privacy, soon we will be able to know what every player really felt about playing a game in adverse circumstances. If that seems to come out of the dankest timeline, well we are already there anyway, and it might be the only way to get 5G internet across Canada.
The leagues are insistent on playing through pandemics and climate catastrophe, and the players are conditioned to give boilerplate quotes that mask what they think about those situations as people who do have opinions about the state of society … Look, ideally you wouldn’t play after a mudslide took out half the stadium, but I’m proud that our group made the adjustment. So swing with the times, especially if it is the only way to get 5G internet in Canada outside of the major cities.
This is needed. It takes the guesswork out of trying to figure out who did have some Cal Naughton Jr.-like moral conflict about playing a “pointless” game, who was in-between, and who gave no effs since some people want to watch the world burn. This tech could even be named after Harry Neale, the long-ago Hockey Night in Canada commentator who always seemed to know what every player was thinking in a given situation, usually to the irritance of my father.3
Felt bad for the Canucks
Start with Jack Campbell, the goaltender. How else to explain letting in the winning goal go in off the inside his flippin’ blocker? Justin Holl is generally considered a good dude — maybe too good, and he was on the ice when Vancouver’s Nils Höglander tied the game in the third period, although he was left to cover two forwards at the time time. Morgan Rielly is suspect since he is from Vancouver. Captain John Tavares’s spouse used to work in a hospital, which might explain why he shot the puck directly right into Holtby’s chest with 1:18 left in the third period. . Rookie wing Nick Robertson, as is mentioned in every feature story about him, was born prematurely on 9/11. It sounds like that experience has given him far too much empathy to be a truly seasoned pro.
Hours before the game, Jason Spezza thought to himself, “Self, what if we lose this game?” and his enusing giggle fit trashed not only his pregame prep, but also threw off linemates Wayne Simmonds and Joe Thornton.
And backup goalie David Rittich knew that a loss would increase his chance of starting the next game.
Wild cards
Well, one never knows which William Nylander is showing up on a given night. On one hand, he knows the seriousness of Big Rona since he had just come out of quarantine. On the other, a Calgary-born Swede such as Nylander is connected to two places that have lost coronavrius containment. Forwards Alex Kerfoot and Ilya Mikheyev go here since they are enigmas in the first place.
Zach Hyman’s tryhard nature puts him in the No Effs category. But Hyman is also a sentimental sort who wrote a children’s book — yeah, let’s call this after his knee was injured on a dirty play.
Gave no effs
Mitch Marner played for the London Knights, so you know he can only adapt so much to an adult society. Auston Matthews had his brush with coronavirus, but he is also trying to win the Rocket Richard Trophy, y’awl. Alex Galchenyuk was pulled along as a proxy. The fancy stats suggest that defencemen Zach Bogosian, T.J. Brodie, Travis Dermott and Jake Muzzin all did what was asked of them.
Clearly, we need the tech, people. Think of it from the point of view of the NHL’s official gambling partners.
Third down and a hill to die on
Monday being federal budget day is a launch point for working through one’s feelings in favour of Canadian three-down football.
Whether the Canadian Football League should receive the same governmental support other cultural industries, even if it reverse-engineers a takeover by RedBird Capital Partners and the XFL, might miss the larger point. That is too emotionally overwrought to be discussed rationally.
Rather, what needs to be shouted as loudly as possibly is that Canadian football has vast potential to become a cultural export. Around the time that the league adopted its (initially unpopular) logo, I began wondering if the long game was to create some form of European or Mexican division. That was nearly a year before Randy Ambrosie came on as commissioner in mid-2017.
Why is the CFL more exportable outside the North American anglosphere? Two reasons: superior game design and being neither distinctly American or British, but with cultural influences from both, since Canadian football has origins in rugby league.
Three-down football is a faster, freer-flowing game, which makes it more relatable to the regions of the world where sports senses are developed through soccer and rugby. Possession of the ball changes hands more frequently. It is a less specialized game than four-down football, or at least was until roster bloat began to occur within the last 20 years.
Funded and run properly, an international league that keeps the distinctiveness of three-down football has a chance. Switching to four downs is nonsensical when almost every four-down league that has offered an alternative to the NFL has failed.
We are all validating each other’s content now any way. A league that makes a place for European footballers and shows unfinished Canadians that our vision of football is valued elsewhere in the world is mutually beneficial. It is in the spirit of Maximum Canada. And, unlike NFL Europe, there are now better ways for marketers to find the cities with the right demographics that would warm up to our brand of ball. One reason NFL Europe did not work is it put teams in major cities that already had multiple top-flight soccer clubs. Instead, find the European equivalents of Hamilton or Regina.
In the spirit of that, whatever structure the league has when it plays again, it must be three-down football on the 65-yards-wide gridiron. Changing to the American rules on either would be insipid; it would create an inferior non-specific version of what is already available to watch four days out of seven between the NFL and college football.
It must keep unlimited motion for the offence, where all eligible pass receivers can move before the ball is snapped. The timing rules, 20 seconds between plays and fewer instances where the clock starts on the snap, should stay the same. (There is no greater instance of galaxy brain in sports than fans miming a spike when the quarterback needs to throw an intentional incomplete pass to stop the clock when a team is running out of time to score.) It was good to see that Rod Pedersen has said the plan is for the end zone to be 15 yards deep (five more than the U.S., five fewer than Canada.)
Secondly, jobs and opportunities for Canadian athletic talent and football know-how must be preserved. The league’s ratio rules are another third rail for an outsider since, again, both the pro and con sides are too prone to wishcasting. They might have to be reworked, but somehow, a culturally-American Canadian sensitivity needs to be retained. That is the winning formula with Canadian cultural products that have found a market outside the country.
Beyond that, I am easy. Play 11-a-side, 10-a-side, whatever. Start the season whenevers. Just start one eventually.
That is more than enough for today. Thank you for allowing these words on to your screen. The plan is to write at least twice more this week.
Not the actual reason.
Moneylines are written with either a minus or plus sign. Minus indicated the amount of money one would have to risk to make a $100 profit. A plus sign is the amount of profit one would gain from a successful $100 wager.
Overheard: "He’s just like you, Neate!”