Smoke, Fire and All That
The Globe and Mail had a lot of fun with Dean Lombardi’s comments on what motivated Mike Murphy to allow a goal against the Kings despite what was apparently an obvious high stick. Gary Bettman came down hard on Lombardi and for very good reason. It wasn’t the complaining about the call – although that’s bad enough – it was the fact that Lombardi was questioning the integrity of hockey operations.
This is the third time in the past year the league has been embarassed by allegations that questioned the basic fairness of the NHL game. (There was the Burrows affair, the Campbell emails and now Lombardi.) While I won’t drag out the hoary chestnut about smoke and fire, real questions are beginning to niggle at my mind. I don’t agree with the reader who claimed that Lombardi was right, but for the wrong reason. (According to this person, Murphy allowed the goal because the league still owns the Coyotes.)
While I’m not prepared to buy a conspiracy to favour any team, I don’t think it is seemly for hockey operations people to be actively seeking employment with the various teams. Murphy applied for the LA GM job. The chief disciplinarian is Colin “When I’m a GM” Campbell. Allowing obvious conflicts leads to integrity questions.
I also think Elliotte Friedman has a good idea to deal with the perceptions of bias:
I’m not a conspiracy theorist (although there is no way Oswald acted alone), but if the league really wants to gain trust, there is a solution. All replay reviews could be carried live into the television network(s) broadcasting the games. That means a camera/microphones in the war room, only to be used when something is being looked at. You can’t argue with that transparency.
Why not?
Postscript: Elliotte should read Bugliosi’s book on the Kennedy assassination. Oswald did act alone.
Since we’re co-mingling conspiracy theories with our hockey, I’ll posit that Dean may have pulled a page from the baseball managers playbook, and gone ballistic as a way of indirectly lighting a fire under his skittering team by . . . . publicly taking a bullet, you’ll pardon the expression.
And if I was of a mind to go balls-to-the-wall with my conspiracy theory, I’d suggest the possibility that Bettman & Murphy could be fully commited to the drama, too: their outrage could be as manufactured as Dean’s, and there is no real “fine”, or at least any money that goes to NY today will somehow find it’s way back to LA by summer. Who is watching the watchers, anyway? Is there a forensic accountant checking the balance sheets? If so, who’s paying his salary?
I’ve never read the Bugliosi assasination book, but Gerald Posner’s Case Closed (turned into an excellent PBS mini-series, too) convinced me of the lone-gunman position.
I agree about Lombardi’s motives, BBO. He went a little overboard, but he knew he was getting fined. He distracts from another loss, and he sends a message to his team. Bettman wasn’t part of it though. He can live with complaints about a mistake, even incompetence, but he absolutely can’t put up with a suggestion of deliberate bias.
I wouldn’t exactly recommend the Bugliosi book because it is so damned exhaustive and the case is essentially simple. It got boring after a while. I think he shot down every single alternative theory. The result was an obvious straightforward story with an overwhelming ring of truth versus crackpot nonsense.