Darcy's new Leaf

Darcy Tucker has lost 10 pounds and gained -- well, we'll have to wait and see. For now, as the phony war continues leading up to the dawning of what's being called the "new NHL", Tucker is dreaming of something quite new: a 30-goal season.

Gary Bettman can talk all he wants about the league moving more toward skill, more red lights and less violence (excepting when it comes to Todd Bertuzzi's suspension, that is -- and as Denial noted in a comment here yesterday, when did this guy ever talk about anything being wrong with the NHL's version of hockey before last year's nuclear winter hit, or before they decided to expand faster than Kirstie Alley?). If this renaissance is half what it's cracked up to be, Tucker may well be a a guy whose signal lights flip over from red to green.

And if that is indeed the way it works out -- the goals, and the flow -- should we be surprised? Not really. Tucker scored 64 goals in his final junior season, and 93 points as a freshman pro with AHL Fredericton. The door is open for wingers to partner Mats Sundin, and he's among the first in line, if he can just keep his head:

"I probably shot myself in the foot at times with overzealous physical play. This year there's an opportunity maybe not to bang around so much, but to be a factor physically and make room for my teammates."

The flipside, given all these stars apparently in alignment, is that if Tucker doesn't show any improvement offensively or in terms of brainlocks -- his career high in four full seasons in Toronto is a humdrum 59 points -- there'll be some kind of pressure come February and March.

Elsewhere on a typically slim late-August filing, the best of the rest is Monica's lovely farewell to Alex Mogilny, one of the guys whose shoes Tucker is trying to fill (it's sort of like replacing a Lexus with a hanging strap on the 501 King car), on the TMLfans website. Okay, I'm not the best guy to ask for a Mogilny tribute -- one of my Alex memories involves paying way too much money for my once-a-season ACC treat a couple of years back, and watching him sleepwalk through a snoreworthy 1-0 loss to Montreal -- but he is/was the kind of scarily skilled player the Leafs never seem to have, and Monica gives him a heartfelt farewell. (Perhaps I missed something, but the boo-hoos surrounding the departure of Mogilny seemed much cooler compared to the sky-is-falling hysteria around Roberts and Nieuwendyk leaving).

Hey, and going around the league, can we never get enough news about 40something defencemen? Chris Chelios signed a while back. Now it's Al McInnis, c'mon down! Tommy Albelin, there could be a spot for you (registration required for this one)! Somewhere amid this madness, Danny Syvret, one of our favourites from last year's splendid OHL Knights squad and Team Canada, has signed with the Oilers. Kid's only 20, for pete's sake.

   

Comments

[denial]

hello toronto star. thanks for your reference in today's thingy -- if you want, you can pay me via PayPal and I'll post here 27 times a day, each less sensible than the one before. You can get back to me.

I have a sad insight to share with my fellow bloggers: Gary doesn't WANT the NHL to become less violent. I realize how preachy this is going to sound, but i will say it anyway and go outside and vomit afterwards: VIOLENCE SELLS. Why? Because violence, or conflict, is the essence of drama (as Squiggy from The Simpson's was so apt to point out). Wrestling, Reality TV, you name it: they are not inventing anything. They're just tapping into what's already there and people are lapping it up. Gary doesn't want the NHL to become anti-violence; violence sells. Have you SEEN what happens to an arena when a fight breaks loose? Even the self-described pacifists fist clench and vicariously hope that the "bad guy" gets his.

Gary doesn't want to be anti-violent in the NHL. He wants a circus style freakshow, like wrestling, and like the NFL, and now, like the NBA (a flagrant foul gets you teed-up and the other team gets to get 1/50th of their points via 2 free throws with nobody standing near the basket...oooooooooooOOO....go easy there, David...that's harsh! Why not give them center-court counseling for anger management while 20,000 in the seats hold hands and sing the sun will come out tomorrow?).

What Gary wants is -- and hold on to your moose -- for the NHL to become NON-CANADIAN.

Canadians are VERY tolerant of boring things. We just are. Nothing wrong with this; in fact, it's a very mature thing to be. Yes, hockey has moments of action -- one-timers, breakaways, 2-on-1s, but if you really break it down -- I mean really take a pencil and a piece of paper and analyze the game -- you'll notice that the moments of action compared to the moments of general inaction or in-between action is about 1:50. Yet Canadians have, for GENERATIONS, tolerated this because we are an intelligent viewing audience. We don't simply watch the game. We understand the depth of the game, and don't resent the 15 minutes per period of "playmaking". In fact, part of the joy of being a real hockey fan is understanding that those 15 mintues aren't "broken plays"; they're part of an intricate chess game, or if you like to get really mental, a dance.

The rest of the world feels this way about soccer (and us to, to some extent, since we're fortunately populated by so much of the rest of the world).

Americans, culturally, CANNOT STAND THE TEDIOUSNESS OF HOCKEY. They can't. Just like they can't understand soccer. They want action and they want sensory-stimulation. They want drama and conflict.

And so Gary Bettman has been selected to be the person to do this. The game is being transformed to suit an american audience -- an audience that is weaned, from birth, on action-oriented sensory overload.

The overtime shootout is a perfect -- I mean PERFECT -- example of this. Did we really have a problem with ties? Really? Think about it. Sure, we liked to have a winner; but there was an accomplishment in a tie. It was fair; it often penalized a team that "should have won", and rewarded one for "hanging on for dear life". Now we're going to have a freakshow after the end of (my God) 3 on 3 overtime hockey.

Call me an alarmist -- I would -- but just wait and see. The American public's insatiable need -- and by insatiable, I mean UNQUENCHABLE need -- for sensory input and drama/conflict will "convince" Gary and the BOG to start making more changes that will ostensibly let "skilled players become skilled players". This is a LIE.

Wake up Canada. Go into your old hockey cards. And you don't have to go further back than 1980. You'll find an AMAZING collection of skilled players who were able to demonstrate that skill on the ice DESPITE a red line, DESPITE card-carrying goons, and DESPITE an INSANE amount of clutcyhing and grabbing (just watch an old hockey game -- they used to literally MAUL each other without a penalty, it's hillarious). They were skilled because the Canadian tolerance for perceived, superficial "ianctivity" was present. We didn't demand that our atheletes become performers. We tolerated the game, and we TOLERATED its imperfections.

Now we want a perfect game. We want a video game that delights us for 60 straight minutes of play, interspersed with an obnoxious announcer and ludicrious jumbotron images -- anything to keep us stimulated.

And it's just going to get worse. Bettman (not just him, but he's the leader) is eroding this game, and mark my words: it will NEVER improve. Because it doesn't actually need to be improved. The problem isn't with the game, it's with us. We're expecting something from it that it can't give.

Eventually, as far as I'm concerned, NHL hockey is going to "break" -- because it will one day become so disfigured, and so removed from its roots, that it will just go too far. And THEN it will rebuild, in an all-Canadian league (maybe with 5 or 6 US teams), where players make a few hundred thousand dollars, and fans pay $30 a seat to watch boring hockey. And they'll love it, just like we all did before we started becoming brainwashed and focused on fixing something that wasn't really all that broken.

[Andrew Spencer]

Denial, you ought to be a columnist but I'm afraid I disagree with your anti-Bettman diatribe. You're giving the guy way too much credit.

First, Gary doesn't have a plan. Gary rides the waves both high and low. Second, if Americans can't tolerate the lulls in hockey or what have you, how the heck do you explain baseball and golf? Both are more popular in the States than our beloved hockey and both are infinitely more boring to watch.

Bettman reacts to situations he can't wiggle out of or hide from. The recent idiotic hockey fight-fest thingy held in Prince George, BC only stirred up more anti-Bettman criticism, hence he comes out and claims the NHL values a less-violent game.

I do agree with Denial on one thing for sure ... Bettman has been and will continue to do all he can to ensure the National Hockey League is exactly that, "national". But not this nation's league. We should be grateful the Americans don't care about ice hockey. If they did, the game would be ruined forever (case in point: Fox Sports and its' stupid glowing pucks on the telly, and a franchise called "The Mighty Ducks").

As for Sideshow Tucker, once an ass, always an ass. Darcy sure can talk the talk but when it comes to putting up numbers, forget it. I like the guy, but c'mon. If Darcy scores 30 goals or more, I'll buy a jersey with his name on it, and none of that cheap semi-pro, replica crap either. That's how confident I am the guy can't do it.

[denial]

I appreciate your view that Bettman is kind of flailing in the public opinion poll wind (or BOG wind, or David Stern's nod of approval wind, whatever). Yet I still believe, just from watching the crafty little guy for a while now, that he did have a very good plan that went like this:

- expand like crazy into the states WHEREVER possible, including places where hockey has no roots. Finding billionaire crackhead owners with little man syndrome and egomaniac politicians to support franchises isn't hard, as long as its a positive news story (when it's not, they flee, like cockroaches).

now, in my opinion, this is where the plan really goes into high gear:

- if the franchises somehow, miraculously succeed, then Bettman is praised as a GENIUS. children will write songs about him; they'll rename streets about the "saviour of hockey". I know, I know, it's a weird scenario, but just 'pretend' that, somehow, hockey in Nashville et al really went through the roof. Gary would be viewed as not merely a pioneer, but a true visionary.

give that above scenario a 1 in a 100 chance of success.

Now the other way would be this:

- the franchises FAIL. nobody comes to the games and nobody watches on TV. corporate sponsors would rather advertise at swap meets than an NHL game.

Give this a 99 in 100 chance. And this is pretty much what happened.

In the 'real world' (back in university, i was promised that this type of world existed), Bettman would be seen as having led a VERY BADLY THOUGHT OUT EXPANSION -- and seeing 2 established franchises from Canada (Winnipeg and Quebec) leave under his watch.

But what happened? why wasn't Bettman run out of town and sent to exile in Alba or something? Because his plan was foolproof -- he blamed the failing franchises on the SALARIES. And so instead of being the architect of a flawed system, he positioned himself to be the saviour of it -- and he has done that by bringing in an inconceivably prohibitive (from the player's perspective) hard cap system. Let's not forget that NOBODY in this solar system would have bet that a very tough hard cap system could be implemented. Nobody. No bookie would take that bet -- it was not merely impossible, it was UNTHINKABLE. But it happened.

Let's recap.

So scenario 1: the retarded franchises in Carolina and Florida and everywhere else, somehow, strike a cord with the American public and Gary gets an ice cream flavour named after him.

Scenario 2: Everything goes absolutely WRONG, the new franchises SUCK worse than anyone could have believed, because the year after both Florida and Carolina make it to the finals, they can't even make the playoffs -- thereby ticking off a lot of "on the bubble" fans who were introduced to the game the year before. Yet BECAUSE of this failure of the whole expansion experiment, Gary is in a position to deliver the hard cap.

It was a no-lose situation. There was a built in contingency so that he would win, no matter what. And now, there is a clear balance of power in the states -- as the american "appetite" for NHL hockey goes, so does this league. This was a right -- call it a natural right, or a natural resource -- that idiot Canadians GAVE AWAY without knowing. And now this country is stuck watching the Carolina Hurricanes play the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, while you have millions of people in Winnipeg, Quebec, eastern Canada, and even Hamilton, who would give 5 years of their life to get a team in their town. Instead, they watch the Tampa Bay Lightning.

The only piece of Gary's plan that didn't really work out to perfection is that he was hoping that either Edmonton or Calgary would leave BEFORE the new CBA. The dollar was down below .70 cents for a while and it was very, very close. But now with the hard cap, no team is moving anywhere, and so Gary has this small inconvenience. But it's a minor loss in a sea of amazing success.

As for Tucker... in my view, Tucker will only succeed if the Toronto press doesn't give him a lot of attention. Some players, just like some people, are fringe players -- they live out in the thin air and have weird internal rituals and all that. Tucker is one of those players. But because Sundin is such a non-leader (hell of a nice guy, but not a leader of other people), the leader-desperate Toronto press gave Tucker way too much attention a couple of years ago. His picture was showing up on the front pages, he was getting lots of time on the scoreboard jumbotron thing. And it went to his head, and he went bananas (bananas!) because he couldn't handle the strange mantle of actually being the emotional leader of the toronto maple leafs. if he just stops reading newspapers, puts on some sensory deprivation blinkers (like the kind they give to horses), he should be fine.

But if the media starts giving him tons of airtime and all that, and tries to turn him into a superstar -- which he absolutely is not and will never be -- then expect the tantrum-per-game ratio to hit at least the 2:1 mark, probably higher.

[Tom Bearse]

I am an American, born in Detroit, and find myself in agreement with denial's observation that the beauty of hockey lies in its semi-inert state between breakaways and 2-on-1's, that ties in the regular season are a manufactured crisis, and that the character of the sport is being needlessly altered to satisfy some inauthentic element now forming part of the audience.

However, it's a revelation to find out this makes me Canadian, and that no Canadian feels the same way as the Americans to whom denial refers. If his or her point is that my example is an anomoly, than I may agree with that too.

[denial]

Tom, you can be an honourary canadian. I will send you a shipment of the letter U and an 8-track of Four Strong Winds.

I realize that I'm quite beyond the safety beads in a sea of anti-american rhetoric, and believe me (if you would) that my best criticism is saved for this country (one day, we're going to elect a cadaver to public office; just wait, it will happen).

I'm using Canadian and American as reference terms for an attitude or approach, and not a geographic distinction that is based on nothing aside from a line on a globe. In many ways I'm quite American; I haven't thanked an ATM machine in years, and for a whole year after seeing Sling Blade I said "shore nuff" whenever someone asked me if I wanted some maple syrup and a beer.

And if none of that makes sense, Detroit will always be part of any sane hockey league, as will anomolies like myself and perhaps you as well (if you're as lucky as I am to be born like this).