From the headlines
We got a look inside the NHL world this week when ESPN published their annual players’ poll. As always, the results ranged from dull to mildly surprising to jaw-dropping to enraging. So today, let’s rank the responses from the least infuriating to the most.
No. 8 + 9: The two questions about visitors’ locker rooms.
It’s an interesting question, although I’m not sure any of the answers are all that shocking. Finding out that Washington has prison showers is neat, I guess. It’s a mild surprise to see that players seem to like Vegas room, since I doubt any of them have ever been sober enough to know they were in it.
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No. 7: Do you have a burner Twitter account?
An intriguing 32 percent say they do. But from the sounds of it they only use it for boring stuff like golf scores, as opposed to slagging their own team. A special shoutout to the one player who said “I’ve never logged on to Twitter in my life.” And they say pro athletes can’t be role models.
No. 6: The road cities they dread most.
This is just a polite way of asking players where they’d least like to play, and I’m all for it. We get the usual suspects like Winnipeg, Buffalo, Edmonton and Ottawa, although Calgary is a mild surprise. Otherwise, the answers here are pretty standard, although bonus points to the player who hates Winnipeg because “you walk around the city and feel like you need to wash your face after you go outside.” Wow. If you live in Winnipeg, feel free to move this one all the way up to No. 1, because I’m pretty sure that’s a way worse putdown than knocking the parks or the WiFi.
No. 5: Would you play for Seattle in Year 1?
Only 60 percent of the players said yes, and it’s kind of adorable that most of them think they’ll have any choice.
No. 3 + 4: The two questions about recreational drug use.
The players are largely indifferent on punishment, and don’t seem to think there’s a widespread problem. Or maybe more accurately, they’re smart enough to say that publicly. As Katie Strang reported this week, the drug story goes deeper than the players might like to admit.
No. 2: Do you have Gritty fatigue?
A stunning 28 percent say yes. Look guys, I thought I’d be right there with you. As I wrote a few weeks ago, Gritty still being funny after a year is a bigger upset than the Blues’ Cup run. But he absolutely is – I mean, come on – and I will not stand for NHL players giving him anything less than a 100 percent approval rating.
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And that brings us to the worst answer of the survey …
No. 1: Would you feel comfortable doing a national ad campaign?
Oh you delicate little babies. A full 36 percent of players said no to this question. Note that it’s not even asking if they’d want to be in a campaign, just if they would be comfortable. And we still have over a third of these guys saying no, because they want to fly under the radar or avoid being chirped or, as one player put it, “I don’t really want to put myself out there like that.” Good lord. You’re in the entertainment business, gentlemen. We all criticize the NHL for its awful marketing, but maybe it’s not entirely the league’s fault.
The week’s three stars of comedy, Capitals/Nationals edition
Yeah, we’re doing this.
Remember how much fun we had last year with Drunk Alexander Ovechkin and friends, and how it felt like we’d never truly be able to recapture that because even if the Caps won another Cup, it’s never quite like the first time? Apparently we forgot about the possibility of another Washington team winning their first title and turning to Ovie and friends for guidance. And then it happened. And it was spectacular.
The third star: The Capitals and Nationals – When your pre-gaming is literal pre-gaming.
they did it
(🎥: @Nationals)pic.twitter.com/VFgnjHgtcT
— Post Sports (@PostSports) November 4, 2019
The second star: The Capitals and Nationals – I like this one partly because it reminds us that Ovechkin has those weird back tattoos.
Gonna riiiiiiiiiide ’til I can’t no more.@ovi8 // #FIGHTFINISHED pic.twitter.com/Qalw8q1uEN
— Washington Nationals (@Nationals) November 4, 2019
The first star: The Capitals and Nationals – These two teams need to be best friends forever.
Parra: what is that?
Turner: it’s called a puck.
Parra: that’s a baseball for the hockey! pic.twitter.com/PkaseTkyfE
— Danny (@recordsANDradio) November 4, 2019
Maybe we can get a third part of this ongoing series someday when the city’s next championship is earned by the NFL’s Washington ha ha ha OK let’s get serious.
Trivial annoyance of the week
When the NHL announced the rule changes for the 2019-20 season, most of the attention went to the ones about replay. That made sense – it had been a big issue during the playoffs, so people wanted to see how the league would address it. (As it turns out, the changes were fine but not as good as they could have been.)
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But there was another change that the league slipped in, and it’s one we highlighted at the time: The first tiebreaker would no longer be regulation and overtime wins (ROW). Instead, the league would go by regulation wins. That was a good idea, because it gave teams a small incentive to actually play for the win in regulation rather than shut it down and wait for the loser point fairy to visit.
The NHL got this one right. Should they move even further, maybe going to a 3-2-1-0 system someday? Sure, but we can still appreciate it when they make baby steps in the right direction. That’s what happened here. We said it at the time and we’ll say it again here: Good job, NHL.
So, uh … why do most of the standings pages out there still list ROW?
Go check the standings on your favorite site, and chances are you’ll still see ROW listed instead of the new RW tiebreaker. Sportsnet still has it. So does TSN. You Americans aren’t doing any better with ESPN. For what it’s worth, The Athletic’s standings page doesn’t get into tiebreakers at all, so we’re kind of off the hook, if only because we didn’t even try. But the major sites that do list them are all currently using the wrong one. That’s weird, right?
Stranger still, even the official NHL site didn’t have it right when the season started. They’ve been listing ROW all season long, and only added a new “RW” column over the last few days. It’s there now, but here’s what the standings looked like a week ago.
I’m not sure if I should be glad the league got it right ahead of everyone else or criticize them for having their own standings page wrong for a month and then trying to sneak in a fix without anyone noticing. Maybe it’s both.
In the end, none of this is a big deal – it’s not like the tiebreaker matters right now, and as best I can tell the actual standings were always being calculated correctly. It’s just kind of amusing that the NHL made a smart rule change, then everyone kind of forgot about it over the course of the summer.
Obscure former player of the week
We had some fun with nicknames this week, including one of my all-time favorites: Red Light Racicot. It’s just such a devastating name for a goaltender, and I still think the fact that it stuck was a big reason why Racicot didn’t last in the NHL. There’s no coming back from that.
And it led to a reader question: Is “Red Light” Racicot the most brutal nickname ever slapped on a player? I think it might be. But he’ll get some competition from this week’s obscure player: Steve “The Puck Goes-in-ski” Buzinski.
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Buzinski was a tiny goaltender, listed at just 140 pounds, who plied his trade in the ’30s and ’40s, including playing the better part of a decade with the Swift Current Indians in the SJHL senior league. He wasn’t really good enough to crack an NHL lineup back then, as the dawn of the Original Six era (and lack of full-time backups) meant that jobs for goalies were exceedingly scarce. But that changed, briefly, in 1942 when the Rangers came calling. Their roster, which won a Cup just a few years earlier, had been torn apart by the war, with several players enlisting in the military including starting goalie “Sugar” Jim Henry. So they called Steve Buzinski.
That 1942-43 Rangers team wasn’t the worst they’ve ever had; that came the next year, when the 1943-44 squad became quite possibly the worst team in NHL history. But the 1942-43 version certainly wasn’t good. And Buzinski didn’t help matters much, as he appeared in nine games and was lit up to the tune of a 5.89 goals-against average. To this day, that remains the third worst career GAA for any NHL goaltender who played at least nine games.
So you can see where he got the nickname from. There’s some dispute over whether anyone actually called him “Puck Goes-in-ski” during his career; it doesn’t really feel like a 1940s moniker, and one version of the story says that Stan Fischler came up with it decades later. That might be for the best, since the poor kid had a tough enough time playing behind that Rangers team. But despite his lackluster NHL career, Buzinski did get to make some history alongside another famous nickname – on Nov. 8, 1942, one of the pucks that went-in-ski was the first goal of Rocket Richard’s career.
Classic YouTube clip breakdown
A few weeks ago I wrote about how disorienting it can feel for modern-day fans to watch old 1980s and ’90s NHL clips on YouTube. If you’re a regular reader of this section, I’m guessing most of that didn’t apply to you. You’re a veteran of the old-school clip game.
That said, I included a video in that post that I’ve always meant to break down in this section. This seems like as good a week as any to do it.
- So it’s Oct. 27, 1991, and the Hawks are in Boston to face the Bruins. It’s been a tight game, one that saw Chicago take a 3-0 lead early in the third, only to have the Bruins storm back to take a 5-4 lead on the strength of three unanswered goals in the final minutes. Well, maybe unanswered. I’ll explain.
- We join our clip in the immediate aftermath of what seems to be the Hawks scoring the tying goal. Dirk Graham has pounced on a loose puck and shoveled it into the net with just a few seconds remaining. Or were there? The officials have huddled up and they’ve ruled that time had expired.
- We immediately get a replay that shows that no, time hadn’t expired, and it wasn’t even all that close – there seem to be about three seconds left when the puck goes in. Damn those coulombs, they’ll get you every time.
- The referee is Andy Van Hellemond, and he’s saying that he saw the green light that signaled the end of regulation go off before the red light signaling a goal. That’s basically the goal judge’s call, since he’s the one who triggers the red light, although the timekeeper has a say in this too. They’re all ruling it no goal.
- Gee, I wonder if Mike Keenan will handle this situation with patience and grace, said no hockey fan ever.
- Yep, as our replay ends we cut to a shot of Keenan reacting to the situation the way any rational person would: By charging across the ice to fight the timekeeper. His players are restraining him, but at one point he gets some decent height on an attempt to scale the glass. I did not see Keenan being a guy with a pro-level vertical leap. Life is full of surprises.
- The best part of all of this is that the main guys holding Keenan back, and thereby keeping him from getting a lifetime suspension and/or going to jail, are Keith Brown and Stu Grimson. You know a situation is bad when a guy called The Grim Reaper is playing peacemaker.
- By the way, Grimson does a much better job of holding Keenan back than the coach could do with the roles reversed a year later.
- There was no replay back then, so this call actually ended up standing and the Bruins won the game. You guys know my stance on replay – it almost always sucks – but I think we can all agree that “Did the puck cross the line before time expired?” is a pretty good use of it. Especially when the answer is “Uh, yeah, by like three seconds, what are we even doing here?”
- As impressive as Keenan’s meltdown is here, he was in even better form immediately after the game. That’s when he delivered quotes like: “(The timekeeper) should be fired. They cheated here tonight. I don’t like people who cheat,” as well as “I’m going to have the whole group of off-ice officials hired by Harry Sinden investigated.” Angry coach Mike Keenan was the best. Look, it’s not too late to hire the guy for one more run. Come on, San Jose, what do you have to lose?
- He also traded insults with Bruins coach Mike Milbury. I’m not sure who won the exchange, but it was Mike Keenan and Mike Milbury trading something, so I’m going to assume they both lost.
- Van Hellemond tries to take the blame in that same article, which is notable only because it’s a reminder that NHL referees used to talk to the media when they screwed up. Sure glad we got rid of that, and now we just get a tweet from the league that everything is fine and no mistakes were made.
- By the way, this might not even have been the worst call of Andy Van Hellemond’s career. Also, he once threatened to a libel suit when a comic strip called him evil. And that wasn’t even the strangest thing he was ever slandered in. The guy had an interesting career.
- As far as I can tell, there was no further fallout over this incident. I don’t think Keenan was fined for either his charge across the ice or his postgame comments. He did demand an investigation, claiming that “the NHL is a laughingstock for this,” but it doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere. But the controversy probably did push the NHL toward adopting replay review for time disputes, which came in shortly after.
- And that’s it for today’s clip. Lessons were learned, everyone vowed to do better in the future, and nobody in Boston screwed up the timing of the end of something by several seconds ever again right up until Brad Marchand got tired in this year’s final.
Have a question, suggestion, old YouTube clip, or anything else you’d like to see included in this column? Email Sean at nhlgrabbag@gmail.com.
(Photo: Andre Ringuette / NHLI via Getty Images)
Sean McIndoe has been a senior NHL writer with The Athletic since 2018. He launched Down Goes Brown in 2008 and has been writing about hockey ever since, with stops including Grantland, Sportsnet and Vice Sports. His book, "The Down Goes Brown History of the NHL," is available in book stores now. Follow Sean on Twitter @DownGoesBrown
