This is a short piece to explain my somewhat unusual reaction to all these “It’s good to ask for help ❤️” PR things sprouting around the Habs like mushrooms on cow dung.
Professional hockey players trade their liberty in exchange for the medium-bucks. While in European Football players can dictate how and where they transfer, in the North American professional sports leagues they’re contracted to the league directly and can be shifted from one franchise to another, or the franchise itself can move from one city to another. And if the players don’t like it, tough.
So I have a lot of sympathy for players who have to smile broadly when they get traded to another team, oftentimes I doubt they want to be traded (or if they do, I doubt their trade counterpart wanted to be traded) but it’s simply a fact of life in the NHL. Along with concussion coverups, rampant thuggery, and underwhelming commercialization — the fourth Major Aspect of the NHL is player transactions. Fans are positively horny for trades, signings, buy-outs, offersheets, and anything that moves one “asset” for another.
A player is traded to Buffalo, what does he have to say other than “we’ve got a lot of good parts here and everybody’s working hard to instill a winning culture”? What can he say? Can he say he doesn’t want to be there? In 2011, mere days before his massive, career-length contract extension took effect, Jeff Carter was traded to Columbus and, understandably, he was livid. He played one disgruntled season in Columbus before being traded elsewhere.
Columbus fans hate him to this day for not embracing the trade, as if he intended to owe Columbus to play for their constantly bad club for the entirety of his career?
“Hey buddy, you signed the contract!”
— Some asshole, anywhere.
So when players praise their new or old hockey team I begin to have my doubts. It’s either than the NHL Standard Operating Procedures are so tight that nearly every club is excellent or that players are just not good judges of these things. Working in business, I’m inclined to think it is the latter. Players probably only notice things that affect them directly. If the food is good and warm, the rooms on the road comfortable, and the physios readily available I doubt a player would have any complaints.
This brings me to the Montreal Canadiens. How is it that this club is constantly praised by NHL insiders when it has so many serious issues propping up? How can a club that drafts a player who didn’t want to be drafted on account of the fallout of sexual assault he committed be considered well-run?
The Habs’ best paid forward, Jonathan Drouin, disappeared for months during the most pivotal and consequential time in the club’s past twenty years. So bad was his condition that not one person in the media chose to investigate and report on it. Months later, Drouin would reveal in a tightly managed pair of interviews that he suffered from anxiety and insomnia and now he’s all better. The Habs and Drouin’s agent followed up with praise and PR for mental health awareness.
What awareness? — When he suffered from his mental health crisis everybody involved was mum and rumours were abound! It was the fan pressure, it was gambling, it was a suicide attempt, it was a drug overdose. The speculation was relentless and fans turned on each other for not respecting Drouin’s privacy (as if it’s unusual for hockey fans to wonder where their best paid player has disappeared to?) So today, how does boasting that he’s all better now help raise awareness for the millions of sufferers who haven’t surpassed their issues and aren’t given praise for overcoming their troubles?
Carey Price, the superstar of the Habs, was suddenly announced to have joined the NHL Player Assistance Program. I have no idea what this program is meant to accomplish and what purpose it serves. It seems it supports players when they’re “in need”. Carey is in need of what and for what reason, your guess is as good as mine. Most commentators have converged on, you guessed it, “mental health”.
And now the Habs organization is pimping out “mental health awareness” once again.
If you recall that Shea Weber was secretly playing with a career-threatening injury too, so that makes the three most prominent players, one of each a Forward, Defenseman, and Goaltender, who are troubled and whose troubles have been kept from the fans and league until it literally takes them out of the game for an indefinite period. How’s that for awareness and BellLetsTalk?
Can someone tell me why this club’s best players all happen to fall apart and why everybody involved waits until the very last moment to only partially reveal the issues?
Wouldn’t it be more respectable, and more awareness-raising to say what the issue is at the onset? “Jonathan Drouin has taken a leave of absence to recover from issues relating to mental health.”, “Carey Price has taken a leave of absence to treat a condition relating to his mental well-being.” Is that so hard?
I think it’s hard because these issues aren’t exactly relating to mental health, at least not entirely. But that’s just my guess.
This past off-season hasn’t been normal and it’s been so far from normal that as a Habs fan I’m worried the fallout will be severe. There are a lot of bad contract commitments (Josh Anderson and Brendan Gallagher, for instance) and very few tradable assets on hand, all while the club has effectively imploded. GM Marc Bergevin claims he’s concerned about Carey the person not Carey the player. That’s nice and all, and obviously the right thing to prioritize, but as GM he should be concerned about his players getting one year older, one year more injured, and one year more exposed to whatever radioactive material it is that has been destroying this mediocre but cap-maxed core from within.
And as a Habs fan I am most concerned this will be yet another write-off year and everybody will be glad-handing and back-patting each other despite not accomplishing a damn thing.
I know because it happened multiple times in the past few years. But hey, this year we kinda raised awareness (but not really).
Let’s see what twists and turns the season holds.
I respect Carey Price’s privacy as much as anybody does but the Habs organization cannot maneuver in any direction this year, or in the coming years, with so many question marks. Is Drouin really cured? Is Price broken-for-good? Is Weber going to come back (and if not: why not name a replacement captain)? That’s about 25% of the Habs’ salary cap space tied up in question marks. When can we talk about it?