Idiotic antics by Marchand and Drake
Marchand, Drake aren’t doing their teams any favours with their childish behaviour
There is much to admire about Brad Marchand.
He’s a third-round draft choice, 71st overall. He is 5-foot-9 in skates, with a face that only a mother could love. Like Brendan Gallagher, he makes his living in the dirty areas of the game — and he’s good at it.
After Marchand licked his way to the wrong kind of attention over the weekend, Boston Globe columnist Kevin Paul DuPont unearthed the fact Marchand is the third- highest goal-scorer in his 2006 draft class, just behind a couple of pretty fair hockey players named Phil Kessel and Jonathan Toews — and ahead of both in goals per game.
The guy Michael Farber dubbed “Oral B” will turn 30 on Friday and he’s already scored 226 goals and added 233 assists in 602 regularseason games. He boasts a gaudy plus-181 for his career and he doesn’t disappear come playoff time: he has 21 post-season goals, 39 assists and is a plus-25 when it matters most. He also has a Stanley Cup ring, which most of us don’t.
If you want a study in contrasts, compare Marchand with Rick Nash, whom the Bruins acquired at the trade deadline for no apparent reason. Nash has it all: size, speed, the works. He’ll go into the books as a career underachiever.
Marchand? Again, like Gallagher, he overachieves every time he steps on the ice.
Unfortunately, Brad Marchand is also a complete, unalloyed idiot. I’m a good deal more disturbed by what led to the difficulties with the Bolts’ Ryan Callahan: Yet another submarine attack from Marchand that could have taken out one or both of Callahan’s knees.
That stuff: the slew-foots, the submarines, the spears to the ribs, pounding the face of a noncombatant Swedish star simply because he can — that’s Marchand. The lick, in the wider scheme of things, is simply the tip of the tongue.
Part of the blame has to go to Don Cherry, hockey’s increasingly disconnected old man yelling incoherently at the clouds, for telling Marchand it was cute after he did it to Leo Komarov: Cherry still has a disproportionate influence with guys who grew up watching him, and it’s a statistical fact he is directly responsible for 88.6 per cent of the idiocy in the NHL today.
Still, Marchand deserved more than the tongue-lashing he got from the league. (Far more significant, no doubt, was the quick talking to he got on the bench from Zdeno Chara — I mean, who are you going to listen to? Chara or Colin Campbell?)
But the real question is why? Why does a player with the talent to have 226 career goals (and counting ) feel like he has to behave like the baddest boy on the playground? In a sense, it’s the question of the age, this ceaseless quest for attention. The U.S. is afflicted with a catastrophic president simply because of his unquenchable thirst for the spotlight: it’s a global disease.
I have a great deal more respect for Marchand, who leads with his nose in a tough and dangerous game, than I have for Drake, the self-immersed fathead whose antics on the sideline of Toronto Raptors games finally drew a warning from the NBA. That came after Drake got into a sideline fracas with Cleveland Cavaliers centre Kendrick Perkins, who is a mere 6-foot-10 and 270 pounds. Personally, I wish Perkins had just slamdunked Drake once and for all.
The thing with celebrities and NBA teams has been going on for 30 years, from Jack Nicholson and the Los Angeles Lakers to Spike Lee and the New York Knicks and, finally, to Drake and the Raptors — but no celebrity has ever taken it down to the Raptors’ level. Like the inane slogan “We the North,” Drake is actually part of the team’s publicity drive.
Drake is deluded. At some level, he appears to believe he plays for the team, to the point he was probably shocked he didn’t make the All-Star team. It all clicked when we happened to catch his turn as the least-funny host in the history of Saturday Night Live: among other things, Drake lacks that selfmocking dimension that made Lee and Nicholson both funny and bearable.
Ultimately, like Marchand, Drake accomplished nothing with his ceaseless posturing for the cameras except to act as a distraction.
These things can be handled by the league or by the teams involved. Drake should have been banished from the Raptors’ bench area long ago. Had the referees simply dealt with Marchand’s first licking offence with an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty, we wouldn’t be talking about this today.
The NBA has a rip-roaring playoffs going. It doesn’t need Drake. It’s even better in the NHL, where playoff teams have rediscovered scoring. The league doesn’t need the garbage side of Brad Marchand.
But the guy does need hockey, much more than the game needs him. One of these days, maybe he’ll figure that out. Now that his Bruins have been sent to the golf course by the Lightning, he’ll have plenty of time.
Drake is deluded. At some level, he appears to believe he plays for the team.