Let’s dive right in, shall we?
After a pensioner stitches names onto the backs of sweaters, we find Red Wings coach Mike Babcock in his office, furiously scribbling line combinations onto a whiteboard, a practice that apparently encompasses about 85 percent of Mike Babcock’s existence. Detroit captain Henrik Zetterberg is returning from injury, and although no one dares describe him as healthy, Babcock is pleased about his arrival nonetheless. “His presence and his leadership skills and his stick-to-it-veness and doing things right—I think is a big presence in our room,” Babcock says with his trademark earnestness, as if all the things he just uttered were actual words. In the storytelling business we call this foreshadowing.
Meanwhile, in Toronto, Tyler Bozak’s hamstring and oblique are finally feeling cooperative enough to allow him to do his job. This sets off a ripple effect within the Maple Leaf ranks that knocks team whipping boy Nazem Kadri off the top line—a reality that Toronto’s coaching staff doesn’t seem terribly upset about—while Bozak takes his place. “He’s Phil Kessel’s chauffeur,” Maple Leafs head coach Randy Carlyle says of Bozak, smugly. “He drives Phil around. Back and forth to the rink. Makes sure Phil is okay.” Babcock is to whiteboard scribbling as Carlyle is to casually insulting his players.
We are thrust into the Toronto loft Kessel and Bozak share, where they are watching no less than four televisions at once and fiddling with iPhones simultaneously, while Stella, Kessel’s dog, lounges atop a couch. “We’ve had a couple shakers in this place, y’know?” Kessel hesitantly boasts, confirming that poor Stella, while seeming innocent enough, has seen some things she wishes she could forget.
To Florida then, where the Red Wings are playing the Panthers when a particularly horrifying thing happens between a puck and Dan Cleary’s face that I could describe for you but would rather allow Cleary to explain for himself: “f–kin’ teeth gone—everywhere.” If you can’t write it better than they can say it, y’know? Back on the ice, the Red Wings cough up a two-goal lead and, during a television timeout, Zetterberg stick-to-it-vely instructs his mostly distracted teammates to play “a little smarter.” A period later, those same teammates score two goals to secure the game, an occurrence that I speculate may have less to do with Zetterberg’s “modeling of poise” and more to do with some hockey players shooting pucks into a net—but I’m just a lowly television recappist, so what do I know? Post-game cold ones are enjoyed awkwardly.
Back to Toronto, where there are more early-episode storylines to tidy up, such as that of young Bozak. But before we can get to that, David Clarkson hurts himself awkwardly while trying to batter a Carolina Hurricane and we get to see what it looks like both inside the Maple Leafs training room and inside Clarkson’s arm. One of them is a lot grosser than the other.
Clarkson returns in the third and “finds himself at the fulcrum of an unyielding Leafs attack,” which is not a way one could frequently describe the 2013/14 Toronto Maple Leafs. The Leafs score five goals, three of which are assisted by Bozak, thus satisfying our insatiable human desire to have every narrative tied up into a tidy bow.
In Nashville the Red Wings go for dinner with their fathers. Everyone wears their favourite toques. The next night Red Wings goaltender Jimmy Howard has a very, very bad game and does a very, very bad job of not appearing very, very rattled in his post-game scrum.
Meanwhile, Dion Phaneuf and Kessel bicker with each other and then play table tennis. Phaneuf gets kind of intense about it. Like, way too intense. Like, whoa, who invited this guy to the Christmas party he’s making everyone uncomfortable, intense.
Phaneuf meets his good buds “Nonie,” “Claudie” and “Reider”—or Maple Leafs executives Dave Nonis, Claude Loiselle and Reid Mitchell, if you will—in a hotel room to finalize his new contract with the Maple Leafs. These things are always done in well-lit hotel rooms without the player’s agent present, right? Phaneuf takes the opportunity to practice his ambiguous press conference clichés for us.
The Red Wings skate around in slow motion; then the Maple Leafs skate around in slow motion. I don’t know what everyone’s going on about when they say this show has gotten boring. Mike Babcock waxes reflective about Michigan Stadium, Babcockianly. The Maple Leafs take some photos and lose power in their dressing room. Phil Kessel takes off his pants and everyone laughs. The jokes, sometimes they write themselves.
And finally, the game. The coaches deliver their talks of pep. Carlyle wants his team to shoot the puck. Babcock wants his to take care of the puck. They both look very cold and angry throughout. Much of the Winter Classic footage develops as you might expect. Banalities are screamed; dressing rooms are panned across; everyone swears an awful lot. “F–k you, Alfie—you f–cking hero,” Phaneuf taunts in the direction of Red Wings geriatric Daniel Alfredsson. I don’t know what that means, only that this recap would be incomplete without its inclusion.
Traditionally, one of the best aspects of 24/7 has been the game footage, when everyone temporarily forgets the cameras and microphones are present and behaves as they ordinarily would. It is the one thing this show cannot script or manipulate. But the words and images from this year’s Classic leave a little to be desired, if only in the sense that we spend about 20 minutes in that world and not much happens. I mean, Joffrey Lupul cross-checks a man in the traches and there isn’t even an attempt at vigilante justice? I thought this was the NHL.
And maybe some of the tedium has to do with the fact that this year’s Classic wasn’t exactly a sterling display of the finesse and skill inherent in professional sports. It looks nice and snowglobey on your big screen and all, but the conditions eliminate most creativity from the contest and leave the teams to wage a competition of who can throw more pucks towards the net and get luckier. Meanwhile, Phaneuf wages his own personal competition of how long he can prattle on about things. At one point, the scoreboard flashes by, showing the shots as 43-26 in favour of Detroit, and somewhere the advanced statistics community lets out a deep sigh.
The two teams finish overtime clumsily batting the puck around on worn, snow-covered ice before the Maple Leafs prevail in a shootout, Bozak scoring the winner. The players unanimously curse the handshakes before begrudgingly going through with it. Oh, and John-Michael Liles gets traded to Carolina somewhere along the way. There are many resulting bro hugs.