There is, of course, context when attaching shame to the Blackhawks organization, but the roster construction around the generational 18-year-old Connor Bedard is, in fact, shameful. If this does not represent a second straight tank from the league’s favorite-son, revenue-generating machine of a major-market franchise, it is the best imitation of all time.
Management has surrounded Bedard with journeymen and older, faded enforcer-types instead of talent with whom he can connect. Yes, there was the free-agent signing of Taylor Hall, who has had the most disappointing post-Hart career since Jose Theodore won it in 2002, but when the winger went down with a season-ending knee injury in late November, that was that.
And all that protection around Bedard did the teen angel about as much good on Friday when he met up with Brendan Smith at the Rock as the crooked cop McCluskey did for Sollozzo when they met up with Michael at that restaurant in The Bronx.
There was, of course, the requisite response after Smith punished Bedard in the high slot when No. 98 looked down for a mini-second, fishing for the puck after weaving into the zone with some speed and eluding Dawson Mercer. The textbook, open-ice, booming hit that was delivered to the upper body secondarily caught Bedard in the jaw and forced him to miss the final 49 minutes of the game with what has been diagnosed as a fracture that will sideline him for a spell.
Smith, who bleeds the colors he represents and is one of the league’s great teammates, took on all comers in the aftermath as the game took a turn to yesteryear and had Mr. Devil, Ken Daneyko, desperate to get out of the broadcast booth and back onto the ice so he could stand up for the boys.
Of course a response was required in this case, even if players who deliver legal hits should not have to drop the gloves to defend themselves in the normal course of business. But this was Bedard, so this was not the normal course of business. Everyone including Smith — who had a long second-period bout with Nick Foligno — understood that.
Chicago did the right thing. (There are exceptions to every rule, you know.) But doing the right thing in this case did not safeguard the organizational jewel. This was after the fact. And this serves as another example that regardless of how a club loads up, there is no such thing these days — if ever — as owning a weapon of deterrence. Dave Semenko, he was an exception, right?
While Friday’s second period devolved into a heaping of the bad old days, the building became electric with emotion and intensity ratcheted up to a unusual high temperature. There was a type of tension that is exceptionally rare in regular-season matches. Do I expose myself to attack on social media by telling you it was fun and wildly entertaining?
Sorry, but it was.
Yes, you can tell me there was probably electricity and intensity in the audience when gladiators fought to the death. I’m not for a moment suggesting the league or the sport would be better off by going back to the days of bench-clearing brawls and the ethos of the Broad Street Bullies.
But physicality adds a dimension to the game that enflames the competition. A conflagration every now and then is a welcome departure from the incredibly high-skilled, yet relatively vanilla game that is the norm across a schedule that limits divisional play and tamps down rivalries.
Pete Stemkowski’s triple-overtime winner in Game 6 of the semis is the singular hockey highlight from the 1971 playoffs, but there was nothing, and I mean nothing, like the bench-clearing brawls in Game 2 of the first round at the Garden against Toronto in which Vic Hadfield tossed Bernie Parent’s mask into the crowd, which smuggled it out of the building, thus forcing the future double Conn Smythe winner to leave the game because he had no replacement. Thirty seconds later, there was another full-scale riot on the ice.
We are never going back to those days, and of course this is for the better. I was chatting the other day with a former All-Star whose heyday was in the ’90s and the topic of the Michigan and the hyper-skill that is on display not only from the new generation in the NHL but from the next generations that includes my 12-year-old grandson Scott, who scored the Michigan in a game the other day even as it was waved off by a referee for no discernible reason.
“When practice was over, we stayed on the ice to play-wrestle and play-fight,” the All-Star said, whose name I am omitting because it was just a casual conversation. “Now when practice is over, they work on skills.”
Kids watch Trevor Zegras on YouTube. They watch Jack Hughes’ highlights. They wake up to Connor McDavid. Then they go out on the ice and try to duplicate what they saw. They work on it endlessly, though they don’t see it as work. There is no turning back from this. The game is going to continue to get exponentially faster and more skilled.
Physicality, though, is always going to be part of it. Keeping your head up is always a tenet that must be respected. And teammates are always going to have each other’s backs, or at least they’d better.
When those doctrines go, so does hockey.
I don’t get worked up at all about All-Star selections and snubs under this format that highlights — what’s that word again? — skill, and I guess the East needs goaltenders.
But tabbing Igor Shesterkin rather than Vincent Trocheck as the Rangers’ initial representative — after Artemi Panarin opted out for the happiest of reasons — is tone deaf.
Finally, after Team USA defeated Team Sweden to capture the World Junior championship Friday in Gothenburg, Sweden, I could have sworn I saw Lias Andersson throw Jonathan Lekkerimaki’s silver medal into the stands.