This Tom Wilson NHL rant is 850 words long, the maximum allowable under the CBA
The NHL is doing a massive, passive-aggressive push to blame the NHLPA over the on-ice violence it refuses to address out of fear of alienating the #pleaselikemysport crowd.
Starting at bloodlust wing, Tom Wilson
Six simple words reveal how the NHL’s arse is showing when it comes to not wishing to curb the violence that sometimes drags hockey through the mud.
On the surface, it might seem baffling that Tom Wilson only got a fine and not a suspension after he deliberately attempted to injure Pavel Buchnevich and Artemi Panarin during a Washington-New York Rangers tilt on May 3. Wilson has been suspended five times by the league, but sucker-punching Buchnevich and throwing Panarin to the ice by his hair was only a US$5,000 fine.
But then one looks at the subordinate clause that appears in every NHL Department of Player Safety tweet when it announces, Mayor Quimby-style, that there will be no suspension to a player for a dirty play. Here is March 1 to 31 of this year:
As The Office character Toby Flenderson would put it, is that enough? Do you need me to do April 1 up until Tuesday?
It should not take a writer from Bleacher Report to be unbaffled by the game the National Hockey League is running. It is implying, much the same way a retail politician tells you they want to fix an intractable social problem but secretly does not want to because lobbyists would cut off their campaign donations, that it would love to suspend Tom Wilson for life and make him live in semi-seclusion in Northern Québec, in André (Poodle) Lussier’s old house.
Just not today. The NHL’s has had its jersey pulled over its head by that darned players’ association. It is the fault of the union, every time, even though, at last check, Panarin is a higher-paid player than Wilson.
Would that not mean that his dues are higher? Math is hard.
That “the maximum allowable under the CBA” clause is pure grade-A bullflop. It offers cover for a core belief that the potential for on-ice violence is necessary for North American pro hockey to be commercially viable. The Department of Player Safety is like a human resources department; it is there to protect the company. It is also Toby — in the episode where Dunder Mifflin’s resident redheaded sad-sack mumbles, “HR is a joke.”
Body checking is essential to the sport, when it is done to affect the flow of play. Fighting has a limited place since the sport is too fast to be perfectly refereed.
The NHL believes, deep-down, that taking on-ice violence seriously would alienate the bloodlust wing of its fanbase. It counts on support from the bloodlust wing; it is analogous to how a political party might rely on a certain wackadoodle group for votes while knowing full well that the politcies they want would be electoral suicide.
Political leanings intersect here since the NHL, per TSN’s Rick Westhead, “has the whitest, most Republican-leaning U.S. fan base of the four major pro sports leagues.” Sports leagues being constantly tested on both their wokeness and their pandering to right-wing regressiveness is, pardon the privilege, getting as tedious as a baseball game. I just want to go to a sports event and not have to care how the person sitting next to me voted.
The NHL wants to expand that Republican-leaning market and siphon off the fans who believe football and basketball are too soft, which is code for Too Black (and also too European in the NBA’s case). It is possible to hold two parallel ideas at the same time, so it can do this while proclaiming ‘hockey is for everyone.’
(As an aside, I am a little sick of the media articles and tweets that drag hockey for being racist, misogynist and elitist. Society is all of those things, and it shows up in hockey. Fix the problem upstream.)
The league could expel Wilson. It could make teams play with one fewer skater when a player is suspended. That would try to edit the game’s Code so that players would hold their teammates more accountable since there would be greater consequences for a suspension.
The most mindful action is a shrug when Tom Wilson, or any NHL player, takes a liberty with an opponent. The gatekeepers should care, but ultimately they stand to benefit from the enforcement of the rule book and the penal code being hazier than a week, maybe a month spent in Amsterdam.
The only hard line is calling BS on the notion that hockey is exalted since the competitors have more respect for each other. The rhetoric is refuted by reality.
Hours after Wilson escaped a suspension and a misdemeanor charge, playoff-bound Pittsburgh and mathematically-eliminated Philadelphia renewed their rivalry for the final time this season. Philadelphia’s Shayne Gostisbehere took a cheap shot at Pittsburgh’s Mark Friedman, an ex-teammate, cross-checking him from behind after Friedman slid in an empty-net goal.
That reads like a cheap shot taken by a player who knows the league will not suspend him and that he will not be facing that team again this season. It is the hockey equivalent of ratfucking — sabotaging an opponent who is carrying on in the playoffs. The NHL has passively-aggressively signalled that this is allowable.
There is no mystery why Tom Wilson is not suspended. Follow the marketing and the union-baiting.
MLB’s ghost runner rule, the Mandela Effect, and you
Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer does not actually resemble Jimmy Wichard from King of The Hill, the greatest documentary series ever made about rural life. It is just that one cannot avoid Mandela Effect-ing themselves after doing the above juxtaposition. And it provides a setup.
The Los Angeles-Chicago Cubs game that Bauer pitched in on May 4 was a snapshot of baseball’s gameplay problems. It was actually a standard 2021 MLB game, and that is the problem. Bauer, whom everyone knows has been doing something shady to increase the spin rate on his pitches since late 2019, attained seven of his 13 outs via strikeout. The defending World Series champions Dodgers did not drive in a baserunner during the regulation seven innings. They forced extras after, what else, a solo home run in the seventh.
Five of the game’s seven runs came once the ghostrunner rule kicked in for the extra innings, but I had tapped out by that point. I was tired, and the competitive balance between batters and pitchers was tilted too far in one direction.
Maybe it is time to increase the pitching distance. Baseball Historian says batters need more milliseconds of reaction time to do something with their bats other than swing for the fences.
I actually do not mind the seven-inning doubleheader contests or the ‘ghost runner’ rule in extra innings. They are cosmetic changes that can stand in until MLB takes more decisive action to fix the pace-of-play and dead-time problems.
These are actual sentences about an actual upcoming Olympics
These are nervous times for anyone whose livelihood is tied to the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics happening this summer, and I dis-dis-like adding to their real-life anxieties. However, one has to run back this sentence from The Guardian about the recent Olympic half marathon test event in Sapporo.
Spectators were encouraged to stay off the streets of Sapporo during the race and told not to watch the race in person. To try and discourage people, security officials held signs that read: “Please refrain from watching the event from here.” (The Guardian, 5 May)
Peak Pandemic Olympics: hiring people to tell the locals not to watch sports going on in their city. Welp, there is already a lengthy history of clearing out undesirables from the areas around the Olympic venues during the lead-up to the Games.
The Olympics start in seventy-eight days. Only 2 percent of Japan’s population is vaccinated against coronavirus.
Lastly, but not least of all
Only two offensive linemen were chosen in the first round of the Canadian Football League draft was on Tuesday. The over-under on OLs taken in the first nine picks is usually about 4½. And 3 Down Nation laid out every possible conspiracy theory for the draft lottery almost six months ago, so wondering about 2021 Grey Cup host (and 2019 runner-up) Hamilton having the No. 1 pick, and four of the first 19 selections, was covered long ago. The Tiger-Cats chose tight end Jake Burt No. 1 overall. The tight end position vanished from the CFL in the 1980s, but that’s the decade most of the league’s fanbase loved the most, so yayyyyy synergy!
Society, assuming that is still a thing, has issues with misogyny, racism and inclusion. Start there, and the problems downstream in one particular sport might be alleviated.
I do not use the word “hero” very often, but you, sir …
That is more than enough for today. Thank you for allowing these words on your screen, please stay safe, and be kind.
It's worth noting that in polling, it's always plus or minus three percent, 19 times out of 20. Therefore, those political differences between three of the four major sports are very small, and in fact fall within the margin of error. I would argue that the most noteworthy numbers are those of the NBA - they are clearly different from the other three, although again they aren't as wildly different as one might have first thought.