One painful loss and one dire warning for the national game

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This article was published 20/10/2017 (3247 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There was a lot of talk this week about hockey and it’s place on the Canadian landscape.

Between the release of a new book by Ken Dryden that calls for the sport to — finally — get serious about concussions and the death of one of the game’s most prominent and hardcore supporters in Gord Downie of the Tragically Hip, we spent much of the week engaged in the twin pillars of Canadian citizenship — gazing at our national navel in self-doubt and waxing poetic about what hockey means to us.

If you weren’t uncomfortable this week, you weren’t paying attention as Dryden made the rounds of a very high-profile book tour, telling anyone who would listen that the dirty secret of hockey is that it makes hockey players very sick and mumbling all kinds of crazy talk about entirely removing head shots from a game that still treats fist-fighting as just another part of the show.

Remember how Dryden used to rest with his wrists on the top of his goal stick during breaks in play when he was the goaltender for the Montreal Canadiens back in the ’70’s? He’s going to need something more durable than a hockey stick to lean on if he’s waiting for NHL commissioner Gary Bettman to finally get honest about a link between hockey and chronic traumatic encephalopathy that just about everyone but Bettman and the NHL’s lawyers agree exists.

Dryden has always been one of the hockey’s deepest thinkers. His 1983 book, The Game, is a brilliant meditation on hockey, family and life and was once heralded by the New York Times “as the best book written about the sport, and perhaps any sport, in the English language.“

A man who once interrupted his hall of fame NHL career for a year as he completed the requirements of his law degree has a sense of perspective that is sorely lacking today in a hockey industrial complex that produces billions in annual revenue with very little regard for its actual human costs.

And so it came as a badly needed respite that in the midst of being lectured by Dryden this week, we got a chance to wrap ourselves back up in the flag and feel all warm and fuzzy again about our national game in the wake of Downie’s death.

Downie loved hockey and hockey loved Downie right back, judging by the outpouring of tributes that emerged this week from seemingly every arena, dressing room and national sports network.

And why not? In the world Downie painted for us in song, desperate hockey players don’t die alone, depressed and in the throes of CTE, like Steve Montador, who is featured in Dryden’s book; they die spectacularly and somewhat mysteriously in plane crashes, like former Toronto Maple Leafs defenceman Bill Barilko, whose “last goal he ever scored,” Downie reminded us, “won the Leafs the Cup.”

Now, that’s the kind of hockey tragedy to which we can hoist a Molson Canadian — and one that makes us feel a lot more comfortable than trying to reconcile our role in the lonely overdose of a 35-year-old man who spent 571 games in the NHL as an enforcer getting his brains bashed in for our entertainment.

Try writing a pop hit on that subject matter. It just doesn’t quite, well… sing the same way, does it?

In some ways, the contrasting flavours of this week captured what is already very much a “best of times, worst of times” moment for Canadian hockey.

The best of times? Well, as of Friday morning, the Toronto Maple Leafs are officially the odds-on favourite to win the Stanley Cup, according to one online oddsmaker, while both the Ottawa Senators and Calgary Flames are off to respectable starts in the new season.

If you believe both the Montreal Canadiens and Edmonton Oilers are going to, sooner or later, turn around dreadful starts and also re-emerge as the Stanley Cup contenders many thought they would be before the season started, that’s five out of seven Canadian teams once again in the playoffs at season’s end for the second straight year.

Add the Winnipeg Jets — potentially — to that mix (and potential is all the Jets are until they figure out how to keep the puck out of their net) and this could be a banner season for Canada in a world that hasn’t seen a Canadian team hoist the Stanley Cup since, good Lord this is almost unbelievable, 1993.

So yeah, lots to like about teams Canada on the ice. So what’s the problem?

They’re myriad, actually. In Calgary, the Flames just got their asses handed to them in a civic election that saw the team’s billionaire ownership throw everything they could — including Bettman — at defeating an incumbent mayor, only to see Naheed Nenshi re-elected Monday to a third term.

It was a humiliating defeat for the Flames, who made the gross miscalculation that there is any public appetite in economically depressed Calgary to throw huge amounts of public money at a new arena for a team that is owned by — repeating here — a billionaire.

While there were a couple sops in the Calgary media this week trying to paint Nenshi’s seven-point win over challenger Bill Smith as some sort of warning sign to Nenshi that he needs to get back to the bargaining table with the Flames, don’t buy it.

While that’s a much narrower victory margin than Nenshi won the last election, anyone getting elected to a third term right now in this political climate, amidst a world-wide populist movement that is throwing the bums out from Christchurch to Vienna to Washington, has an impressive mandate to keep right on doing exactly what he’s been doing which, in the case of the Flames, is telling them they’re going to have to pay for most of a new arena on their own.

And then there’s Ottawa, where the Senators have followed up last spring’s embarrassing failure to sell out the Canadian Tire Centre during an electrifying playoff run with a struggle this month to even sell out their home-opener, despite tarping over 1,500 seats during the off-season in an effort to make their cavernous building look less — well — cavernous.

With an average of just 14,671 fans through four home dates this season, the Sens are playing to just 76 per cent capacity, which is the second-lowest percentage in the entire NHL and ahead of just the hockey wasteland that is the home of the Carolina Hurricanes.

And while you’re pondering what the developments in Calgary and Ottawa say about the continuing desire of Canadians to be separated from huge amounts of money in support of our national game, ponder this: just a few hours before game time earlier this month, there were still a smattering of good seats available to attend the Habs’ home-opener.

The prospect that the Habs were potentially on the verge of seeing their 541-game sellout streak come to an end — and in their home opener, no less — led to some short-lived screaming headlines on Sportsnet about what it all means when even Nos Glorieux cannot sell out their opener..

In the end, the tickets sold and the building was full, but a brewing fan revolt that began in Montreal in the summer when the team announced season ticket-holders would have to pay an extra $150 this year to — wait for it — get their tickets printed has reached full-throat now that the season has started and the Habs are winners of just one of their first seven games.

Look, hockey isn’t going to disappear anytime in our lifetimes, which is more than you can confidently say about football.

And it says a lot about the depth of our game in Canada that even without the participation of our best players, bookmakers still have Canada as the second favourite to win men’s Olympic gold in South Korea this winter, behind only the Russians.

But it is also increasingly clear hockey is seeing the first signs of the same problems that have been roiling the NFL for a while now, from CTE, to empty seats across the league to a 7.5 per cent plunge in TV ratings this year, following an even-bigger plunge last season.

Downie once sang about New Orleans sinking. It hasn’t come to that yet, not nearly.

But it is taking on water, people are beginning to jump overboard and Dryden was a lonely voice this week in suggesting it might be long past time to start getting serious about bailing.

email: paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @PaulWiecek