Arthur: Uber slip shows players can be human when you let them,
Leak of players’ backseat rant reveals part of game fans are usually shut out of
Max Pacioretty’s face crinkled in a smile, but one of those semi-painful smiles, you know? A grim sort of grin. In hockey there are a lot of ways to experience discomfort, but seeing players speaking without any defensive barriers whatsoever: that can hit you in the gut.
“I think most of the guys on the team, if they did watch, they didn’t watch the whole thing because it was tough to watch,” said Pacioretty, before the Toronto Maple Leafs stole a 3-1 win from his Vegas Golden Knights, the day after some Ottawa Senators were caught talking crap about an assistant coach in an Uber.
“I would never expect a cab ride conversation to be made public, but that’s the world we live in right now,” said Vegas winger Ryan Reaves. “Everybody’s a snitch.”
That’s certainly one way to look at modern society, where everybody carries a video camera and your every misstep can become entertainment for millions, or even for the whole world, and celebrities more than most. In this case it was a vanload of Senators players in Arizona speaking unguardedly about assistant coach Martin Raymond and his special teams work. Pending free-agent Matt Duchene said, “We don’t change anything, ever. So why do we even have a meeting? I haven’t paid attention in three weeks.” The TMZ era has been upon us for a while. Smile, I guess.
“I think it’s no different than in your life. We’re all totally aware that any time someone says to you, ‘This is off the record,’ nothing is off the record in your life,” said Leafs coach Mike Babcock.
“So let’s get that straight. The second thing is everywhere you go, there’s someone taking your picture, or a camera is on. And you know that as well. You can call it an invasion of privacy, sure, but is that not what we live with every single day?”
Especially if you are a hockey player in Canada, where the merest hint of hockey controversy makes media and fans into a dog that sees a squirrel carrying a pound of bacon. Squirrel! Lars Eller once said the Edmonton Oilers played like a junior team, and he carried that accurate take around for years. Wayne Gretzky called New Jersey a Mickey Mouse franchise, and never courted controversy again.
Really, what the Senators were bantering about wasn’t that bad: it was carping about work, joking about life on a bad and often ridiculous team that is getting worse. They are professional hockey players in Canada, and play for a team owned by Eugene Melnyk. Imagine what they could have been talking about. Cracking on an assistant coach was almost the best-case scenario.
So of course the organization reacted like frightened groundhogs, keeping any of the players in the van from the media even though they claimed to have been prepared for the release of the tape, which was revealed by the Ottawa Citizen. Maybe they have another owner interview with Mark Borowiecki planned.
The Leafs have been very aware of the fishbowl in which they swim, and are careful not to court controversy. They haven’t had any big explosions lately, but they’re vigilant.
“Yeah, there’s certain things you don’t want to let out, whether it’s for personal reasons or strategy reasons, or you don’t want to give away certain things to the other team,” said winger Connor Brown.
“But just like everything, there’s few people who can live with their whole lives out on the table, and as athletes I don’t think that’s what they want.”
“We’re all supposed to be these perfect people that have never made a mistake, and everybody wants to say, ‘Hey, he made a mistake, they’re just like the rest of us,’ ” said Pacioretty, a sensitive and thoughtful soul who spent a lot of years in Montreal.
There’s that, sure. In this case, it was more about the truth of the team, as the players saw it. Ottawa has the second-worst penalty kill in hockey and had the fifth-worst power play last year, so players crack wise about it when they think they’re alone.
Still, the truth emerges on the ice, every night, even if it can take time to discern the pattern. Imagine what Leafs goaltender Frederik Andersen would say, unguarded, after the Leafs got territorially steamrolled by Vegas Tuesday night and he had to make 36 saves in a truly bad game for Toronto, which got an empty-netter at the end. He might have complaints to air, if he thought nobody could hear.
Pacioretty spoke about hockey’s conservative culture, and was asked if this will make hockey players stop the relatively recent process of coming out of their shells. He’s thoughtful, Max.
“You’re coming out of your shell and it’s on camera, I don’t know how genuine you’re able to be, you know?” said Max.
“Just naturally you want to make yourself look good and that’s what we’re doing as a team when we do interviews: we want to make our team look good, we want to be professional. So you can’t really come out of your shell when there’s a camera on, that’s the human nature of it, so I don’t know how it will affect others in the future. But it definitely makes you think twice when this happens.”
Great, we may have scared the hockey players back into their holes, guys. Six more years of winter.