Irish hurler throws the Canucks a changeup
They aren’t kids, but they aren’t a bunch of drunks either, Jason Botchford writes.
VANCOUVER It’s so outrageous, it’s got to be true — right?
Just picture Vancouver Canucks winger Loui Eriksson. He’s from Sweden, married and a father of four young children. He’s in a slump — this year, many of them. As a way to bust out, he’s instructed to visit a bar, drink 20 pints of beer and then bed multiple women.
If true, Eriksson’s probably consumed 500 litres of beer in six months. Sure hope they were Michelob Ultras.
Who could make up a story like this? Well, it seems Lee Chin can. He is an Irish hurler who recently visited the Canucks as part of a television-produced job swap, only to be blown away by the National Hockey League team’s drinking culture.
There’s just one problem. Chin spent very little time with current Canucks and a whole bunch of time with the team’s alumni.
He skated with Canucks alumni as part of their Wednesday ritual in nearby Burnaby. After, they had pizzas and beer. He skated with alumni before the Canucks skills competition. Guess what happened? Pizzas and beer. He went to an alumni luncheon. Again, lots of beer. Enough to shock an Irishman, it seems. Now, that’s something.
He probably heard a lot of old stories, some slightly exaggerated. In fact, I’m sure of it. Dave Babych and Jyrki Lumme love to talk, and quite loudly.
Chin did skate once with the actual team. If he had checked, he would have seen carefully crafted recovery drinks in each stall, specifically designed for each player’s DNA and needs. Maybe he missed those. Chin returned to Ireland after about a week and shared some wild stories with the local media. His most explosive was his tale of the “changeup.”
“When a player is not on form, not scoring, the manager will call a changeup,” Chin told the Irish Times newspaper. “Basically that player has to go out and ruin himself for the night, then come back the next day, with the attitude of you just don’t care.
“So they send him out, drink 20 pints, go off with a couple of women, whatever he wants, and come back the next day. That’s the way they live.”
Yeah, that’s not how the Canucks live. Generally, their bodies are independent, money-making, finely tuned machines. That’s not to say they don’t consume alcohol. I mean, some don’t, but others will have a beer — gasp — the day before a game without concern.
“The changeup?” Henrik Sedin said.
“I’ve never had one in 20 years. I’ve had 20 beers in my life, combined, but never in a single night and never any the night before a game.
“I don’t know where he got those stories. Maybe it used to happen before.”
Slump-buster legends involving alcohol are just about as old as the NHL itself. There have absolutely been team-mandated binge sessions in this league in the past. Things like that are more rare now, but you’d be naive to believe it never happens.
What doesn’t happen? Coaches directing players to a table filled with 20 pints like it was some challenge off a show called Man Versus Booze.
The Canucks’ front office turned down an interview request and instead released a strongly worded statement.
“The assumptions made by Lee Chin on hockey culture and reported by the Irish Times are baseless and categorically false,” Canucks president of hockey operations Trevor Linden said in the statement.
“They do not reflect our players, their conduct or the culture of our game in any way.”
It’s not clear, however, that everything Chin said was false. He told a story about the alumni luncheon on Feb. 23, a day before the Canucks played the Detroit Red Wings. He said he was with Erik Gudbranson and drank water (sure he did).
He said there was an unnamed current Canuck with him who had a beer. Multiple people have said this did happen. But if you’re incredulous that a grown man had a beer more than 24 hours before a hockey game, you’re definitively clueless — about as clueless as someone who gets a chance of a lifetime to spend a week with an NHL team only to later rat out the team with some partial truths and some fake news.