Gratitude on ice

Why we're lucky the NHL is around.

The woman at church on Sunday morning said that gratitude “is what happens when you love the life you’re living.”

Sports fans have more reason than ever to love theirs.

Two weeks ago Minnesota’s Justin Jefferson made an anatomically-defiant catch in Buffalo, one that activated thousands of Twitter thumbs. Forty years ago you might never see that catch, unless you happened to be the market that showed the Bills and Vikings. Now, of course, you could barely have avoided it, the day after it happened. The fact is that you can see almost every home run, touchdown pass, 3-pointer and 340-yard drive whenever you want to.

Not only that, the athletes themselves are motivated to talk back on social media, to cultivate their own fan base. A fan who wanted to correspond directly with Dick Butkus or Carl Yastrzemski was out of luck. Sure, we’ve learned that athletes can be silly and sophomoric as anybody else, but that’s sort of refreshing.

Over the course of 2022 we’ve had all kinds of reasons for gratitude. There were the two North Carolina-Duke basketball games that brought resolution to The Rivalry. There were the Golden State Warriors, coming all the way back from obscurity and various operating rooms to win another world championship. There was Flightline, bringing back all the where-is-everybody images from the days of Secretariat.

There was Aaron Judge bashing 62 home runs on one coast, most of them crucial, and there was Shohei Ohtani pitching and hitting at an All-Star level on the other coast, just as in 2021. And there was the unfettered joy of Dusty Baker, 74, finally winning the World Series in his 25th year of managing and finishing his cleanse of the Houston Astros’ franchise.

But the object of my gratitude is the National Hockey League: 

-– Through Tuesday, the Edmonton Oilers had played 19 games and Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl had played all 17. The Colorado Avalanche had played 17 games and Nathan MacKinnon, Mikko Rantanen and Cale Makar had played all 17. The San Jose Sharks had played 21 games and Erik Karlsson had played all 21. Obviously they all are wearing bruises the size of pancakes this time of year, and they play frequent back-to-back games. The difference is that NHL players do not look at the schedule as an elective. They look at it as a contract, one that they signed with the other players in their room. If a fan buys a ticket to see a particular NHL player, the odds are overwhelming that the player will actually show up. These players actually show up for work when they don’t feel like singing Zip-a-dee-do-dah.

– Last summer, the leading NHL free agent was Johnny Gaudreau, after establishing himself with the Calgary Flames. Given salary cap restrictions, he could have signed anywhere, and since he is from Carneys Point Township, N.J., he seemed likely to play in one of the East Coast markets. But they were all approaching the cap limit or were unsure how Gaudreau would fit in. So he signed with …. The Columbus Blue Jackets. They got his signature for seven years and $9.75 per. Small markets can survive when when the league has a firm cap, one that commissioner Gary Bettman demanded at the price of vaporizing the entire 2004-05 season.

– The Next Great Player is Connor Bedard, of the Regina Pats. At 15 he was the youngest player in Western Hockey League history. He scored 100 points in 62 games last year, and, at 17, has 48 points in 22 games. He’ll lead off the 2023 draft. The NHL has a draft lottery as the other sports do, to resist tanking as much as possible, and the draft is supposed to be bountiful throughout. Nevertheless, you’d think the Arizona Coyotes would be in the process of “Dishonor For Connor,” since they’re now reduced to playing in a 4,800-seat arena at Arizona State and only stay in the desert because of Bettman’s determination to make the whole thing work. Instead, the Coyotes have played hard and are 7-9-2. That could still get them within Bedard range, but there’s no sign of surrender there. In fact, there’s no team that brought more preseason excitement than Ottawa, which thought it had the moves to re-enter the playoffs, and now the Senators have only 13 points, a league-low (with Anaheim).. Tanking is difficult to do when you have a salary floor as well as a cap, which the NHL has, and which baseball, a sport in which maybe a third of the membership has no interest in winning,  has resisted.

– The NHL once suspended Sean Avery for general jerkiness. It wasn’t about to drop its guard and let Mitchell Miller into the league. At 14, Miller and a friend abused a Black classmate, Isaiah Meyers-Crothers, feeding him a candy bar that had been sitting in a urinal. He did community service for that. The Coyotes drafted him in the fourth round but then renounced his contract, and Miller went on to become Defenseman of the Year in the U.S. Hockey League. Then Boston signed Miller, a decision it rescinded within a week. The outcry, even among those in the Bruins’ locker room, was profound, but the league obviously pressed hard on the Bruins, with Bettman saying, “Nobody should think at this point that he is or may ever be NHL eligible. And the Bruins understand that now.” In other words, it probably wouldn’t have taken eight days for the NHL to suspend Kyrie Irving.

– Oh, and the No. 1 reason to offer thanks: After all these years, teams still get only one time out.