Veering Toward Rollerball

Bullies are Back in Town

This was not such a good week for the NHL, though you would never know it based on the response from both the league and their biggest broadcast rightsholder to this potential crisis.  On Wednesday the Colorado Avalanche's starting goalie Semyon Varlamov turned himself in to the Denver authorities for Domestic abuse and kidnapping.  The Avs truculent first year coach Patrick Roy gave a smiling press conference on Thursday saying he wished he knew more, and Friday he  announced he was starting Varlamov who was out on bail because, well, "Why Wait?"
"We're all aware of what happened, but we just feel that he's our guy. We have confidence in him and feel that it's good for him to play tonight."
Varlamov time line: jailed on Wednesday, bailed on Thursday, between the pipes on Friday.  

That same night, the latest version of the Philadelphia Flyers Broad Street Bullies found themselves trailing by a touchdown (7-0) in their game versus the Washington Capitals.  With fans in Philly's Wells Fargo Center loudly chanting for the firing of General Manager Paul Holmgren, the Flyers, who had been dormant all night, finally decided to change the course of events.  They staged a massive brawl that would have made their predecessors Hammer, Hound Dog and Hound Dog all proud.

The "highlight" was when goalie Ray Emery skated the length of the ice to bludgeon his Caps counterpart Braden Holtby, a clearly unwilling combatant. In an eery coincidence, this was all too reminiscent of Roy's two classic brawls with Detroit goalies Mike Vernon (decisive loss) and the rematch with Chris Osgood (decisive win over unwilling combatant) from the late 1990's. One of Friday's casualties was Flyers forward Steve Downie hospitalized for two days and counting with either a concussion, a broken orbital bone, a facial laceration or any combination thereof.  The Flyer fans, not coincidentally, stopped booing and gave their club a standing ovation.  Emery, who was lit up for 7 goals, was given the game's third star of the night. The NHL chose to hand out no suspensions, despite the fact that unwilling combatants were getting beaten senseless.

The referees failure to protect its players was the primary beef of
Hockey Hall of Fame sportswriter Kevin Paul Dupont.  He immediately took to Twitter to point out the obvious, that the NHL had achieved yet another black eye. When it comes to fighting, I am in the same camp of "Doves," (as opposed to "Hawks") feeling that such gratuitous cartoon violence places hockey in the sports netherworld alongside the WWE and MMA. Dupont spent the rest of Friday night and most of Saturday morning defending his logic and the fact that he never played pro hockey in 140 character bursts.

TV demigod Pat Sajak even weighed in:

Pat Sajak        ✔ @patsajak

Love hockey, but Flyers are part of reason it remains a niche sport. Shameful 

tonight (including Philly radio team.)

He, too, was besieged by angry fans.  So as Saturday night rolled in, I made it a point to tune into Hockey Night in Canada to make sense of it all.  I figured Don Cherry would take the "Hawk" position in his Coach's Corner segment, and the serious analysts would condemn the Clockwork Orange style violence in the second intermission.  Both segments have plenty of time, both were vastly disappointing.  It's official, hockey's greatest media force, Hockey Night in Canada, has fully abandoned even a pretense of journalism.  Cherry was the only person to mention the incident at all, in his final thoughts of an 8 minute segment, essentially applauding the Flyers. "They went down fighting, might do em some good... the fans were cheering."

Canadian Hockey TV Icons MacLean (L) and Cherry (R)

The next intermission with a panel including intrepid reporter Elliott Friedman, and thinking men former goalies Glenn Healy and Kevin Weekes never touched it.  Weekes and the oft-cartoonish P.J. Stock got out of their chairs to stage a lengthy justification of skates accidentally severing achilles tendons in corner collisions.  The showcase game between Toronto and Vancouver had become particularly nasty, and the entire panel all made a point of applauding the normally passive Toronto goal scorer Phil Kessel for "dropping his mitts" to fight the Canucks Alex Burrows. Not a word on the Flyers Wrestlemania.  Hawks defeat Doves, unanimously.

Oh, wait, there was a HNIC "reporter" in Denver, giving an exclusive interview with Patrick Roy.  Perhaps this was the opportunity for some real questions re the Affaire de' Varlamov.  Not a word. This nameless talking head (I'm sorry, I simply can't call him a reporter) merely teed up a couple of opportunities for Roy to explain why his team is doing so well, and the only conclusion we could draw is that it was because of good coaching (discipline and playing hard).

Some of the year's biggest news, the biggest story taking place within the past 24 hours, went virtually ignored by the media giant of hockey.  The fact that CBC's contract with the NHL expires at the end of the season has to be taken into account.  For the foreseeable future, you are going to have to get your journalism in 140 character chunks.