Shame in diving, but not in tanking?
NHL SAYS THEY’RE TRYING: It appears stripping a team of talent doesn’t qualify as trying to lose on purpose
It would be wrong to suggest the National Hockey League is a sports league without shame.
It’s just that the league’s capacity for shame sometimes is revealed in curious and contradictory ways.
For example, the league is hoping public shaming — along with ingame penalties and monetary fines — will help rid the NHL of the supposed scourge of embellishment, diving, play-acting during games to try to draw penalties.
Montreal Canadiens defenceman P.K. Subban was fined $3,000 last week for embellishment. If he incurs another warning this season, the league will hit him with a $4,000 fine and nick Canadiens head coach Michel Therrien for $2,000.
You can see why diving gives NHL people the heebie-jeebies. It’s unmanly and it embarrasses the referees, particularly those who struggle to differentiate between a legitimate trip and the arc of a diver.
Diving is one of a variety of forms of deception that hockey players have employed to gain a competitive edge since the game began.
A personal favourite deception remains Toronto Maple Leafs defenceman Carl Brewer cutting the palms from his hockey gloves, the better to clutch and grab an opponent. It was certainly a form of cheating and the officials eventually put a stop to that.
Diving has proven a harder form of cheating to eliminate. Outing the players, fining them and the coaches are the best ideas the NHL has come up with so far to keep the antics to a minimum.
Come to think of it, the league’s attempts reduce diving are going about as well as efforts to discourage tanking — the practice of organizations jerry-rigging rosters to pile up losses instead of wins when finishing last may mean drafting a generational player like Connor McDavid of the OHL Erie Otters.
The NHL’s ‘the-last-shall-draft-first’ system makes plenty of sense, except when teams abandon their dignity and make finishing last the seasonal objective.
In the early 1990s, the expansion Ottawa Senators baked it into their organizational plan — finish last, or nearly there, for three to five years, harvest top picks, manage those assets well and ride their development to sustained success.
Except Senators ownership got sloppy about it. So, the NHL brought in some heavy artillery in the persons of Yves Fortier, Canada’s onetime ambassador to the United Nations, and Arnold Burns, a former deputy attorney-general of the United States, to investigate.
The result was the first iteration of a draft lottery, which meant finishing last did not necessarily guarantee the first pick. That was the theory.
With McDavid and Boston University star centre Jack Eichel on offer, the Buffalo Sabres, the Arizona Coyotes, the Oilers, the Maple Leafs and, for a while, the Carolina Hurricanes all have seemingly jockeyed for position at the back of the NHL pack.
It hit bottom last week in Buffalo when Sabres fans cheered goals scored by the Coyotes and groaned at goals scored by their players.
NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly recently said while chatter about tanking among fans and others was louder and more wide spread this season, the league believes the players and coaches are trying their best.
Denuding rosters of talent, apparently, doesn’t qualify as trying to lose on purpose, so far as the NHL head office is concerned.
As well, thanks to yet another tweak to the lottery system, the odds for the last-place team to win the top draft pick have been dialed down to 20 per cent, so the NHL reckons its protocols are sufficient to discourage teams from doing the cannonball to the league basement.
Evidently, Sabres fans aren’t hip to the protocols.
They remain convinced that dead last shall select first in the draft and that this will be a great thing in the long run.
I mean, it’s not as if their players are diving, is it?