McCown's Law: The 100 Greatest Hockey Arguments - Softcover

McCown, Bob; Naylor, Dave

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385664656 ISBN 13: 9780385664653

Publisher: Doubleday Canada, 2007

Synopsis

Hockey’s most controversial authority gives you everything you need to know to be Canada’s best-informed armchair coach.

Sports talk-radio personality Bob McCown knows what he’s talking about, and he’s not afraid to say what’s on his mind. Depending on your own strongly held opinions, some of Bob’s will have you cheering in agreement while others will tempt you to throw the book out the window (if you weren’t enjoying the damn thing so much). McCown’s Law will be fuelling and informing heated discussions at the bar for years to come.
A sample of Chairman Bob’s opinions:

-The Leafs haven’t won the Stanley Cup in 40 years for a perfectly logical reason: they have the crappiest players.
-It’s time the law put hockey’s most violent offenders in something more restrictive than the penalty box.
-Let’s leave Olympic hockey to the men.
-Eric Lindros won’t end up in the Hockey Hall of Fame, but he still deserves to be mentioned right alongside the all-time greats.
-Slovakia, not Canada, may just be the greatest hockey nation
on Earth.
-The Ottawa Senators. Are these guys a bunch of chokers or what?

About this title

About the Author

Known for his take-no-prisoners debating style and dry wit, Bob McCown is host of The Fan’s “Prime Time Sports,” syndicated throughout Canada on radio and simulcast nationally on Rogers Sportsnet. Prime Time has been the number one sports radio program in Canada for 17 consecutive years. At the Sports Radio Conference in Arizona this March, Bob McCown was named “Air Talent of the Year.” He was born in Columbus, Ohio, but now resides in Toronto.

David Naylor has been a sportswriter for The Globe and Mail since 2000. He is also a regular guest on CBC radio and television and is frequently seen on TSN’s The Reporters with Dave Hodge.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1. Looking for an argument? Then let’s talk hockey. Bob explains why hockey is the ultimate sport to disagree over.

try this experiment the next time you watch a National Hockey League game.

Afterwards, listen to what they say about it on sports talk radio, to the opinions of your co-workers in the office the next day and to the views of the pundits on television or in the newspapers.

Chances are you’re going to encounter more opinions than you can count. And you’re going to think a good number of them are nonsense.

I mean, is there another sport where two fans can sit side by side, watching the exact same game, and then completely disagree about who played well, who didn’t and why one team won and the other didn’t?

No, there’s not. Only in hockey is so much of what occurs in the eye of the beholder.

It’s the same thing when fans talk about a particular team or a problem in the game and how they think it should be addressed. Everyone has a different solution, because everyone sees something different.

Heck, even the stakeholders in the National Hockey League can’t agree about what goes on in the game. One week late in the 2006—07 season, you had the league’s general managers voting to recommend an increase in the number of instigator penalties required for a suspension from three to five because the fighters need more room to do their jobs. Then, a few weeks later, the league’s director of hockey operations, Colin Campbell, says it’s time to look at taking fighting out of the game entirely.

And then the commissioner, Gary Bettman, comes out and disagrees with him!

Is it any wonder there is so little consensus in this sport?

Fans can’t even agree on how hockey should be played. Just think for a moment how much time and energy is spent discussing ways to improve hockey. Sometimes it’s the rules that must change, sometimes the officiating and at other times it’s the equipment or something else. It makes you wonder how in the world a sport can have any fans when it’s so imperfect that people are always trying to turn it into something else.

Football fans don’t sit around debating whether a field goal should be worth three points or four. You won’t hear baseball fans discussing whether a walk should be awarded after five balls or whether tie games should be settled with a home run contest. And the height of the rim in basketball is just fine where it is, thank you.

But in hockey, about the only thing everyone can agree on is that the game should be played on ice.

Part of hockey’s charm is that so little of it can be captured in a boxscore.

In baseball, basketball or football you can look at a box­score and get a pretty good idea of what happened. Get a more detailed summary of a game in any one of those sports and it becomes hard to argue over what took place.

But in hockey, there’s no such thing. You hear coaches talk about chances, but what’s a “chance”? Shots on goal are only one small measure of a team’s effectiveness. And as for hits and some of the other garbage statistics the NHL has come up with, they’re completely useless.

Sure, power-play and penalty-killing stats are helpful. And so are blocked shots. But beyond that, how do you statistically measure a hockey game?

Which is why you can pretty much argue anything you want in hockey. Who’s to say you’re wrong? The only thing you can be sure of is that someone is going to agree with you and someone is going to disagree.

And yet, hockey is enveloped by a culture that demands that everything be rationalized or explained.

Just consider what gets said to the media after a game. After a loss, players usually mumble something about “not skating” or “forgetting to keep their feet moving” or not “playing as a team” or “working hard”–which, frankly, could mean anything. And when they win, it’s because they “got pucks on net” or “moved the puck real well” or “got some big saves” from the goaltender.

All of those things could pretty much describe any hockey game at any time, anywhere, at any level from peewee to the pros.

And it’s hilarious the way fans react when their team loses a close game. You’d swear the players couldn’t do anything right. And yet, when the same team wins a game by a one-goal margin, it’s showered in platitudes.
So here’s an experiment I’d love to perform sometime.

Let’s take the tape of a five-year-old NHL game–any game–in which the score ended 3—1. Now, let’s edit out the goals and leave all the rest, so that about 59 of the 60 minutes are there to watch.
Now show it to an audience of hockey fans and see if they can guess who won.

I bet they couldn’t, because aside from the moments in which the goals are scored, an awful lot of hockey games are nothing but back-and-forth flow, the trading of chances and puck luck.

To have some fun, let’s try the same experiment with a bunch of reporters. Then let’s show them the stories they wrote about that exact game.

Most nights in hockey, both teams skate hard, check hard and go to the net. They both create traffic in front, are tough on the penalty kill and forecheck like mad. And one of them has a puck hit the post and bounce into the net. And the other hits a post and watches it bounce wide. On more nights than you’d believe, the difference is as simple as that.

You’d be hard pressed to find that analysis in the newspapers the next day or expressed by the many pundits who cover the sport. But it is the truth in far more hockey games than is ever acknowledged.

In fact, I would say that puck luck, as it is often called, decides roughly half of the close games in the National Hockey League. That’s right: a bounce here, a deflection there, a puck that skids off a post and away from the net at one end of the rink, then catches the corner of the top shelf a few moments later.

Look, hockey isn’t football. It’s not the coaches who win individual hockey games–it’s the players. Hockey is a game of flow, of action and reaction, far more than it is of programmed plays and tactics like post patterns and wheel routes. In hockey, nearly every play is a broken play. In fact, the game is kind of like one long broken play during which players must constantly adapt.

But we rarely acknowledge that, among all the skill and decision making, a good portion of what occurs isn’t anyone’s fault or the result of anyone’s genius. It’s just the spontaneous bounces of a frozen rubber disc on ice.
But that kind of analysis doesn’t make for good copy. And if writers wrote the truth every time a game came down to dumb luck, we’d all tune out.

I know that the next time the Stanley Cup final is on, someone will be able to explain that the team emerging with a 2—1 win in Game 7 did so because of a speech the coach made back in September. Or because an assistant coach whispered an inspirational message to the goaltender after the second period, or because of a hit a defenceman made that sent a message to his teammates back in the first period.

Those types of things make for wonderful storylines. And, from my point of view, they’re mostly a bunch of crap. No doubt someone reading this will disagree with me.

2. For years, hockey persistently avoided assessing penalties with a game on the line. The league didn’t want the officials to decide the outcome. Now the pendulum has swung to the other extreme. Bob weighs in on who’s right and who’s wrong.

hockey is the only sport in which, for years, officials had to keep more in mind than just what they saw happen in front of them when deciding whether to call a penalty.

They had to be aware of which team was winning and by what margin, and how much time was left to play. They also had to consider at what time of year the game was being played and how important it was to each team. And if it happened to be a playoff game . . . well, then there was a whole different set of standards.

Only by weighing all of those factors was it possible for a National Hockey League referee to make the right call.
All of which made the NHL pretty unique in the world of professional sports. It may be inherently more difficult for an official in any sport to make a tough call in the dying seconds of a close game. But only in hockey were officials encouraged to alter the standards used to call a game, depending on the circumstances.

In football, the definition of holding or clipping has always been the same in the first quarter as the fourth. In basketball, a foul or goaltending is the same from tip-off to countdown. And no, the strike zone in baseball doesn’t change when you get to extra innings. And a player is either called out or safe without the umpire glancing at the scoreboard.

But for some reason, in hockey, the expectation had always been that the referees should back off when a game was on the line and “let the players decide it.”

Television commentators, led by Don Cherry, were the worst offenders when it came to encouraging this. When a penalty occurs late in a football game, you’ll never hear the broadcasters criticize the official. You’ll hear them come down on the player who committed the foul. It’s “How could that guy block from behind on the runback?” Not, “How could the official call him for blocking from behind on the runback?” Same thing in basketball. Yet in hockey, when a player made a flagrant hook or slash with only a minute to play, somehow it was the official’s fault if that guy gets sent to the box.

Thankfully, the National Hockey League h...

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday Canada
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0385664656
• ISBN 13: 9780385664653
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336