TORONTO – Is John Tortorella less than 48 hours away from killing the 2016 World Cup of Hockey?
While it would undoubtedly suit everybody up here to have Team Canada run the table at the World Cup of Hockey and suck the life out of the game the way it did in Sochi — Canada is actually too good and is in the process of establishing the type of hegemony enjoyed by the U.S. in basketball — it’s safe to say that the nascent event has more riding on Team USA than any other club.
Tournament hockey — as different from regular-season hockey as tournament soccer is from league soccer — is far too nuanced for the cack-handed Tortorella. It’s about process and building to a crescendo; about steadiness as opposed to living and dying with adrenalin and publicly calling out players and benching others. Team USA, it’s said, was built with an eye toward beating Team Canada but in sacrificing talent for hazy, undefined notions such as ‘grit,’ its brain trust has fundamentally misread not just the tournament but Team Canada itself. The U.S. seldom gets this type of thing right in hockey; they have a reputation as a country whose players specialize in doing most of their work, uh, off the ice. They aren’t as bad as the Russians when it comes to being hockey’s dysfunctional version of what France is to international soccer — but they’re pretty damned close.
It isn’t good news for the tournament that Team USA faces a make-or-break game on Tuesday; it’s far too early for that. The event needs somebody to hate, and from a Canadian point of view, the U.S. is tailor-made to wear the black hat. I mean, Vladimir Putin’s a bad man and all that but his hockey players are part of the NHL furniture — no more or less detestable than Swedes or Finns.
No, it’s more than that. Simply put, the NHL needs to give ESPN a reason to fall in love with this event, because for all its flaws, ESPN is the way to gain a foothold in an increasingly fractured consumer marketplace. Its reach remains unsurpassed, and having your product be part of the daily churn of commentary is priceless. A happy, healthy, successful Team USA keeps all these bad things away; and that’s too much power and responsibility to ever put in the hands of John Tortorella.
NOT WILD ABOUT THE WILD CARD?
Forget the American League East Division title. It’s now wild card or bust for the 2016 Toronto Blue Jays — and hands up if you like this team’s chances in any one game, winner-take-all matchup given the way they’re playing.
Thought so.
For the next three nights the Blue Jays will be playing a Seattle Mariners team with designs on one of the two wild-card spots available in the AL; a team that has set up its starting rotation specifically for this series; a team that has been looking ahead to these next three days as it used an 8-2 run to put itself back into contention. The Blue Jays can all but snuff out the Mariners’ wild-card dreams this week; their destiny is in their own hands … even if that destiny seems to be the dice roll of a playoff meeting with another wild-card team.
Look: you can get there from here. Six wild-card teams have won the World Series, most recently the 2014 San Francisco Giants, and if that doesn’t happen there will be a time for a proper conversation about whether losing a one-game wild-card playoff constitutes a successful season for a Blue Jays team that made it to the AL Championship Series the year before.
Whether they are beaten up or just too old or too right-handed, the Blue Jays looked very much like a team in fumes in splitting a four-game series with the Los Angeles Angels. They are playing with their heads up their asses; making incomprehensible base-running errors and playing slap-handed defence. Hitting and pitching go into slumps at inopportune times but baseball instincts and intellect shouldn’t. They are being killed by what the longtime voice of the Blue Jays, Jerry Howarth, refers to as plays not made and for the first time all season — even moreso than his now-famous "rock bottom" pronouncement — I detected a note of resignation in manager John Gibbons’ voice after his team’s no-show on Sunday afternoon. This is a team that looks like it could use less baseball right now as opposed to more baseball, hardly comforting news with two weeks left in the regular season.
QUIBBLES AND BITS
• Winning the AL East is hardly a free pass to the World Series, but it should guarantee the winner a shot against the Cleveland Indians, a good team that was hammered this weekend when Carlos Carrasco (non-displaced fracture in right hand) became its latest starter to suffer an injury. Carrasco is likely done for the season, while the right-hander Danny Salazar (right forearm pain) is all but unavailable for the division series.
• Speaking of the Tribe, remember Rajai Davis? The former Blue Jays outfielder, who turns 36 on Oct. 19, has 40 steals and is bidding to become the oldest player to lead his league in thefts since Rickey Henderson swiped 66 bases for the 1998 Oakland Athletics at the age of 39.
• Denver Broncos cornerback Aqib Talib recorded his ninth career interception return for a touchdown on Sunday, this time victimizing the Indianapolis Colts’ Andrew Luck. Talib is tied for the fourth-highest total of career pick-sixes in NFL history — along with Ken Houston, Deion Sanders and Aeneas Williams — behind Rod Woodson (12), and Charles Woodson and Darren Sharper (11).
• It was only a matter of time before Rex Ryan would be exposed once again as a snake oil salesman and it appears as if Buffalo Bills owners Terry and Kim Pegula have reached that conclusion, based on reports from NFL.com’s Ian Rapoport that they went around their blow-hard head coach and held meetings with offensive players before offensive coordinator Greg Roman was dismissed. You’d have to think the Pegulas are tired of seeing their reputations damaged by a team that is in serious need of adult supervision and a drastic culture change.
THE ENDGAME
The Premier League is a disgrace when it comes to dealing with concussion issues — worse, even, than the NFL because it appears to believe there is no such thing as a concussion, that unless a player is out cold and unresponsive for minutes he’s fit to carry on. Further evidence was presented Sunday when Manchester United’s Anthony Martial was allowed to continue to play despite being clearly disoriented after a clash of heads in a match against Watford. When he was eventually substituted, it was laughingly deemed to be for a knee or ankle ‘knock.’ High-level soccer in general seems to have a laissez-faire attitude to the issue — witness the World Cup final in Brazil when Christoph Kramer of Germany was allowed to remain in the match for 14 minutes despite being disoriented and actually asking referee Nicola Rizzoli "Is this the final?" — and it isn’t helped when on-site commentators seem completely incapable of bringing up the issue.
Part of the reason North American sports have been dragged out of the leatherhead era when it came to dealing with concussions is because there was a deliberate attempt made to educate sports media about the issue, or at least to get us to think about it with something more than blithe indifference. That process is sadly lagging overseas.
Jeff Blairs hosts The Jeff Blair Show from 9-11 a.m. and Baseball Central from 11 a.m.-Noon ET on Sportsnet 590/The Fan.