There are plenty of words flying around a National Hockey League rink that serve to offend. We won’t review the menu here, but if you’ve ever summarized George Carlin’s “Seven words you can’t use on television,” you’ll have things pretty well covered. But there is another word that cuts even more deeply when accurately used. Hockey’s eighth word, if you will.
That word is “phony,” and it is most often followed by a noun (think pin…) that drives home the point about the accused. That two-word epithet has embedded itself into hockey’s lexicon over the years, as surely as “skate” follows “morning.” So in the aftermath of a line brawl that really doesn’t offend this columnist as much as it does some, what I did find offensive was the amount of “phony” that spilled out in the aftermath. At least Richard Sherman said what he felt, not what he thought people wanted to hear. “We had absolutely zero intentions there,” said Calgary coach Bob Hartley, who started the forward line of Brian McGrattan, Kevin Westgarth and Blair Jones, innocently quipped post-game. “Those guys are playing well for us. They got us a goal last game.”
Phony.
“As far as I know,” added Hartley, “they were the home team, so they had the luxury to put whoever they wanted out on the ice.”
Phony as the day is long, Bob.
You pressed the issue; you set the direction; you forced Tortorella into a position where he had to back down by starting a lineup that might get beat up—see John Scott vs. Phil Kessel—or counter your move. You knew exactly what he’d do, and that your team’s only chance of sticking with Vancouver was to muddy the basepaths. So you did it. Why couldn’t Hartley just say, “Look, my team is sliding, and I’m trying to find a little glue here to get us through the next couple of weeks?”
You want to reward your fourth line, Bob? Give them some power play time. Do it on your own time, without making decisions that bring the opposing coach into your little rewards program.
Of course, the phony was not exclusive to Hartley. Tortorella went heavy on the “It shouldn’t be in the game, that stuff,” only a couple hours after he had charged the Flames dressing room looking to prolong the violence. But of course, Torts didn’t want to talk about his own transgressions after the game. Just the ones committed by Calgary, please. “Don’t push me,” he said.
Phony.
Torts was dead on when he dismissed the idea of starting a passive lineup to avoid confrontation with Calgary. “It’s easy for people to say, ‘Put the Sedins out there, and it’s deflated.’ I can’t put our players at risk that way.” But the part about, “It shouldn’t be in the game, I don’t want it in the game?” From a guy who had just launched an assault on other other team’s dressing room?
Phony.
Or as Bobby Clarke once said, “Ah, The Great Tortellini. There are no mirrors in his house.”
Somehow, whenever there is a game-opening five-on-five in the NHL, there’s a short-ish, Italian guy with anger management issues standing behind one of the benches. Remember New York-New Jersey last March? Tortorella, then the Rangers coach, penciled fourth-liners Mike Rupp, Ruslan Fedotenko and Brandon Prust into his starting lineup in a December game at New Jersey, then complained loudly when Devils coach Pete DeBoer started Eric Boulton, Ryan Carter and Cam Janssen in a rematch at MSG. “I guess in John’s world you can come into our building and start your tough guys, but we can’t do the same in here,” DeBoer said then. “He’s either got short-term memory loss or he’s a hypocrite. So it’s one of the other.”
Tortorella had the a five-hour, cross-continent flight on Sunday to decide which of DeBoer’s adjectives best fit this time around and, of course, to ponder the sheer stupidity of what he did between periods on Saturday. He’ll also have about five games away from the Canucks bench, we predict, and likely a six-figure fine. And upon his return, he might just say he’s learned from all of this, and is willing to change.
Should it come, you can be assign your own hockey adjective to that confession.