NHL puts on a happy face as uncertainty looms — for now
OTTAWA / As the National Hockey League’s all-star weekend unfolded, plenty seemed to happen.
The all-star draft was full of unguarded juvenilia — Patrick Kane was caught on TSN calling a young blond lady “unbelievable,” while Scott Hartnell explained his simultaneous bathroom break with Joffrey Lupul during a commercial break by saying, “everyone likes to play swords, I guess.” People talked about Alexander Ovechkin’s self-imposed exile, and Tim Thomas’s White House caper, and Sidney Crosby’s sudden new medical diagnosis.
On Saturday, Zdeno Chara blasted a puck at 108.8 m.p.h., and Kane scored a shootout goal worthy of his Superman cape and Clark Kent glasses. Come Sunday, the game itself was the usual frictionless scoring binge, with one lonely hit credited, surely by accident, to Hartnell.
But just as all those goals were the equivalent of so many empty calories, so too were the events of the weekend — Crosby excepted — a way to fill the time before the real stuff arrives. The NHL right now is waiting, in just about every way. This is the quiet before the shelling starts again.
“( All- star weekend) is a lot more relaxed than the day-to-day schedule of the NHL,” Toronto Maple Leafs defenceman Dion Phaneuf said. “You’re not … it’s a tough word to find.”
“(Now) you can kind of see the finish line,” Lupul said. “You’ve got closer to 30 games left and the games really start picking up in intensity, and it’s more meaningful.”
That last bit is true in ways both big and small. In the bigger picture, the pending expiration of the collective bargaining agreement looms over everything. Realignment will not be re-addressed because it will be on the table anyway; the two sides almost certainly won’t begin to seriously negotiate until well after the season ends.
It’s the same in Phoenix, which commissioner Gary Bettman still describes as “a work in progress.” When asked on the status of the league’s most famously bleeding franchise, Bettman said the NHL had yet to hold discussions regarding a new lease with the City of Glendale, and as for possible relocation — “Plan B,” he called it — Bettman said there was no reason to talk about that yet, either. No rush, apparently.
His deputy, Bill Daly, pointed out the NHL has been trying to sell the Coyotes to a local owner for two years and went as far as to say “at some point, if you’re not successful, you have to turn the page and move on. And I think there’s a growing sense that we’re getting there.”
But they’re not there yet, which means all the eager reporters from the province of Quebec will have to wait a little longer, too. The new public-money palace in Quebec City is scheduled to be erected in the summer of 2015, and the hunger for an NHL team is palpable.
When asked about a timeline on a Phoenix solution, Bettman mentioned that the Atlanta-to-win- nipeg move did not begin until May, but Daly admitted there is no relocation possibility that is as ready — owner, staff, building, and so forth — as Winnipeg was last year.
While it seems unlikely, Daly refused to rule out landing spots should Phoenix have to relocate.
On concussions and fighting, the league is in no hurry for anything to change — Bettman explained away an undisclosed rise in concussions this season by citing an improvement in awareness and therefore diagnosis, and reiterated the league’s boilerplate on fighting. As for the seemingly inevitable soft- ening of pads, NHL vice-president of player safety Brendan Shanahan said, “I know there are manufacturers coming out with shoulder pads where there is no hard plastic on any of the projection points; a smaller profile so that players don’t have great big giant bulging shoulders. It’s not something that can be done quickly, because the science has to show that any pad has to perform.”
And then, of course, there is Crosby. When the news broke Saturday that he had an undiagnosed injury in the C1 and C2 vertebrae, Pittsburgh GM Ray Shero ducked the press, and Crosby’s agent Pat Brisson responded to the question of whether he or Crosby were unhappy with the medical treatment provided by the Pens with a damning no comment.
As for what the diagnosis actually means to Crosby’s yearlong recovery from at least one concussion, that remains as unsettled an issue as Crosby himself. The results of Crosby’s tests will be examined by independent doctors in the next few days, and will remain a mystery.
And that’s not even counting the return of meaningful games, the trade deadline on Feb. 27, the drive down the stretch, and the playoffs. The only part of hockey that is skipping ahead is the New Jersey Devils, who have essentially been advanced future paycheques by the league to keep the operation solvent.