It was shabby, vicious and indefensible.
Unfortunately, the National Hockey League does shabby, vicious and indefensible really well. All the major men’s professional leagues do, to varying degrees. We may be well into the 21st century with women’s leagues expanding by leaps and bounds, but toxic male culture still rules.
Rewind to Monday night in Columbus. A Blue Jackets team still reeling from the tragic death of Johnny Gaudreau during the off-season was about to face a Canadiens team with former Jacket Patrik Laine on a streak for the ages, having scored eight power-play goals in nine games.
Before the game, Laine granted an interview to the Columbus hockey writer Aaron Portzline, explaining why he had asked for the trade that brought him to Montreal. Laine was honest, a quality that is not permitted in the NHL, where witless buzz words and strings of clichés are the standard response to any question. “Bobsy got the puck to Jiggsy and Jiggsy one-timed it through the five-hole.” Zzzzzzz.
Laine not only thinks, he says what he thinks. Such honesty is part of the program for dealing with mental health issues such as Laine has suffered, but that honest approach hits players like the Blue Jackets’ Zach Werenski right in the toxic males.
In case you were spending Christmas week in Irkutsk, here’s what Laine actually said:
“Obviously, things happened, and that was kind of it for me. I feel like we were just doing the same thing year after year. I was tired of losing and just giving up when it’s December to start focusing on next year. I’m not going to do that.
“They (the Blue Jackets) are a little too satisfied and too comfortable where they’re at. It wasn’t really a fit for me anymore. But here (in Montreal) it doesn’t matter if we’re winning or losing, we’re always trying our best.”
Laine’s comments tallied precisely with what former Carolina GM Don Waddell said after taking over in Columbus during the off-season: “The one thing is,” Waddell told NHL Network Radio, “I’m not saying it was everybody but losing was acceptable and losing is not acceptable.
“It’s a mindset. I believe what happened last year … things didn’t go well and they had a lot of injuries and fell out of the race pretty quick. Then they just kind of played out the season and we have to change that.”
So if the new GM says it, and an elite sniper who spent four years with your team says almost exactly the same thing, you might think that players would take a look at themselves in the mirror and ask whether Waddell and Laine were saying was true.
Instead, veteran Columbus defenceman Werenski chose to shoot the messenger. “For him to come in and say all that, that’s bulls—,” Werenski said. “Definitely not happy about it and none of us in this room are happy about it. That speaks more about him than it does about us.”
Actually, it doesn’t — but the issue isn’t what Werenski said so much as what happened after. Instead of doing a little introspection, Columbus decided to enforce Chapter 13 of hockey’s infernal code, which says: “Thou shalt never say anything about anything that matters.”
The Jackets went after Laine, who had suffered a badly broken clavicle while playing for Columbus. The hits they managed to deliver didn’t look like all that much, but they were plainly trying to run the guy.
After six minutes of that, Laine was out of the game with an upper-body injury. There was no further update, but he did not return to the ice. Eventually, he was listed as day-to-day but as of this writing, the Canadiens have said nothing to clarify the injury, leading to speculation they had decided to err on the side of caution and get their prize sniper out of harm’s way.
If that’s what happened, we’re behind the decision 100 per cent. There was absolutely no point leaving Laine out there to take his lumps from a bunch of thin-skinned players behaving like adolescents.
After the game, Werenski said “I hope he’s all right.” Well, if you hope a guy is alright, don’t try to injure him. Laine was only trying to explain his own decision, not going after Columbus players by name. If anything, the excessive reaction of the Blue Jackets to his relatively innocuous comments would suggest that he hit the target dead on.
The real issue is not that Laine was critical of his former team but that he let down the veil and failed to act according to the dictates of the code, hadn’t bowed to the rule of toxic masculinity. The first rule of hockey is that you don’t talk about hockey, not the things that matter. Omerta applies everywhere when it comes to comments that transcend the usual clichés and that includes the hockey media, which was not kind to Laine.
The streak was bound to end. It’s unfortunate that it had to end this way — and that so many individuals connected with this great game simply refuse to grow up.
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