Your Montreal Canadiens!

In this All Habs piece, I identify 5 major developments that characterized the Montreal Canadiens' lockout-shortened season, the first under the helm of Marc Bergevin and Michel Therrien. Of particular interest are my debunking of an unquestioned narrative created about PK Subban in the hockey media and the role of the Boston Bruins, and the city of Boston, in the day-to-day experiences and emotions of Montreal Canadiens fans.

“Brad who?” Waking From the Bad Dream Team

By Avi Goldberg

It can be called the real start of the Marc Bergevin era, and with the Habs returning to the playoffs, fans also feel as though they’ve truly awoken from a bad dream of team mediocrity, buffoonery, and misdirection. True, folks are stressing big time about a losing streak and about Carey Price, but fans are in an infinitely better situation than where they were at this time last year. Then, about the best I could do to find joy in the dying weeks of a dismal campaign was to celebrate the grittiness of late season pickup Brad Staubitz. But, when my All Habs colleague, Robert Rice, responded to this notion by tweeting that he had to ask “Brad who?” upon learning of the tough guy’s acquisition, I felt the chills of the bad dream one more time.

We’ve come a long way!

As we count down the final games before the Habs enter the second season, I’ve compiled a list of five issues that have provoked thought. These things will be discussed and debated by Habs fans in the aftermath of their collective bad dream.

You can continue to read the piece in its entirety here.

What Happend to Hockey Fans After the NHL Lockout?

In this All Habs piece, I used some sociology to assess why the fans, after they expressed so much anger, were so quick to return to hockey after the NHL lockout came to an end. To help me sort this out, I interviewed sociologist Matt Loveland (LeMoyne College) and two mega hockey fans, Roy MacGregor (Globe and Mail) and Bruce Dinsmore (Montreal actor and organizer of a fan boycott against the NHL). This piece helps to show why that mainstream reports of fan disillusionment with the NHL were highly exaggerated.

Reconcilable Differences! The Return of the Fans to the NHL

 
By Avi Goldberg 

As we roll to the trade deadline of this shortened hockey season, it’s hard to believe that only months ago many of us were cursing the NHL and the players for depriving us of our game. We can easily recall the anger we felt during the lockout, but we may blush as we admit just how easily we let it evaporate when the action returned. Following-up on the effects of the lockout on the fans, I have gone to two known lovers of hockey and to one expert in human behaviour. At the risk of opening old wounds, I use their views to help make sense of how fan bitterness appears to have been forgotten so soon after the lockout came to an end.

You can continue to read the piece in its entirety here.

Digital Media & Hockey Reporting

In this All Habs piece, I respond to some recent mainstream writing that has celebrated the power of new media to allow fans and bloggers to influence both sports leagues and the sports media. To assess this issue in more nuanced way than what has appeared in the mainstream press, I interviewed Elliotte Friedman (CBC), Larry Brooks (New York Post), Darren Dreger (TSN), and Michael Grange (Sportsnet) to get their impressions on how the new media world has affected their hockey reporting and writing and on whether social media allowed hockey fans to influence the NHL and the NHLPA as they worked to end last season's lockout.

Digital Voices: Social Media, Hockey Reporting, and the Fans

By Avi Goldberg

In the ongoing consideration of the effects of social media, one unsolved puzzle is the extent to which digital technologies are changing human communications and interactions. And, with members of the media increasingly relying on Twitter to cover events of all kinds, it’s not surprising that this issue has been addressed in relation to reporting on sports in particular.

Think about the Manti Te’o hoax. Though it sounds alarm bells about the state of contemporary relationships, the fact that it demonstrates digital media’s potential to upend traditional sports journalism has drawn attention as well. Similarly, in a recent Globe and Mail piece on its impact on the hockey lockout, Bruce Dowbiggin argued that social media “emerged [from the lockout] as a powerful voice by defying the [NHL] and traditional media who have long brushed them off.”

In terms of new media and reporting on the world of hockey, are we witnessing fundamental change for the better or merely incremental modifications of that which existed before?

To explore this question, I canvassed the views of a handful of well-known mainstream hockey reporters. Based on their routine work that straddles real and virtual frontiers, the consensus among them is that digital media is promoting a significant evolution in hockey reporting, but not a revolutionary and uniformly positive transformation.

You can continue to read the piece in its entirety here.

Digesting That NHL Lockout Thing

In this piece, I present my thoughts on a few major dynamics I paid attention to during the suddenly resolved NHL lockout. On the very day I am posting this, hockey fans in Montreal and Canada are anxiously waiting for training camps to open and for the abbreviated 48 game race to the Canada Day Stanley Cup Finals to begin.  

 

113 Days of What, Exactly? The ‘Catelli’ Lockout

By Avi Goldberg

I know that we’re all sick and tired of the lockout. And, though it won’t be long before hockey fans in Canada get back into the routine of the games, many of us are also somewhat troubled by what we and local businesses and their workers have had to endure over the last 113 days. As we wait for the sides to ratify the new CBA, and for a feverishly short training camp to prepare for a feverishly short season, I’ve reflected and come up with five issues that summarize what I think went down. I will explore some of these issues again in the future but let’s hope that most of them can now be permanently put to rest.

You can continue to read the piece in its entirety here.

The Healing Power of Sports

My current All Habs piece looks at how sports help communities grieve human loss following a tragedy. It also considers some of the serious shortcomings of using sports to promote mourning during times of crisis. The piece is based on a discussion I had with Ted Bird and Elliott Price on The Morning Show on TSN 690 and is especially relevant in light of last month's shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.

Sports & Tragedy: Good Grief?

By Avi Goldberg

Last month, following the NFL’s acknowledgments of the Jovan Belcher murder-suicide in Kansas City and the horrific school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, media commentators took time to assess the place of sports in relation to real life human tragedies. Is it helpful, it was asked, to play on and to use sports as an activity to help citizens cope with the horrors they’ve witnessed, or is it better to push sports to the sidelines and to encourage participation in true practices of grieving loss? Both history and responses to recent events show how sports create meaningful, if imperfect, forums for community healing during periods of societal crisis.

You can continue to read this piece here.

Underwhelmed by Two of my Favourite Teams

Here I go a little personal and write about the consequences of expecting my former hockey playing heroes to lead my favourite teams back to glory as either coaches or general managers.  A holiday tale of the ups and downs of rooting for two teams with greatness in the past but that struggle to exceed mediocre in the present.

You can read the digital version here.

 

Accepting A Team’s Present by Not Living in the Past

By Avi Goldberg

We’ve all heard people say that fans don’t come to the games for the coaches or the general managers. The accuracy of this sentiment is highlighted by the painful absence of NHL competition and player storylines during the lockout, yet at times like the trade deadline, the free agency period, and the firing and hiring of a coach, fans give their rapt attention to the GMs. Following hockey through the intrigue of coaching and managing can also be compelling when these positions are held by former players who are adored for their on-ice careers. As we wait and wonder if the players and games will return in time for the holidays, this is a tale of the consequences of investing emotionally in management and coaching with the hope that a team’s success will be delivered by its playing heroes of the past.

Born in Montreal but raised in Edmonton, I have always split my team loyalties between the Habs and the Oilers. After early family training in obsessing over the Canadiens during playoff games, I spent my teenage years with the Oilers dynasty serving as the religion that tied me to my friends and city. Though I idolized the play of Robinson, Naslund, Messier, Fuhr, and Tikkanen, the Oilers and the Habs drew additional loyalty from me by bringing some of my other favourite former players into professional positions. In both team success and my resulting sentiments as a fan, the parallels are uncanny.

As it addresses the curious post-playing professional careers of Bob Gainey and Guy Carbonneau with the Canadiens, my first story is undoubtedly recognizable to Habs fans.

In awe of his five Stanley Cups as a player with Montreal, his experience as captain, and his performance as the top defensive player of his day, I felt an awakening of real optimism when Gainey was hired to be GM in 2003. And though the circumstances surrounding his appointment as head coach were not outlined in the GM’s five-year plan, the fact that Carbonneau was brought in strengthened the legitimacy of team management in my eyes. With two revered former players at the helm, I believed that the dark years of Alain Vigneault, Michel Therrien 1.0, and Andre Savard were starting to fade in the rear-view mirror. 

As almost everything about team affairs was wildly inconsistent under the Gainey-Carbonneau regime, my warm feelings quickly cooled. Aside from the heights achieved during a strong regular season in 2007-2008, dysfunction prevailed. Between intimate old port walks shared by the GM and the team’s enigmatic star player, the coach’s inability to explain his squad’s indifferent play, and endless debates about goaltending and the organization’s inability to develop and look after its young prospects, I felt I was following a soap opera, not the systematic renewal of a once proud hockey power.

The Habs limped into the playoffs during their highly promoted centennial season and were swept by the hated Bruins in four games. My suspicion that the team was organizationally rudderless was practically confirmed when Gainey resigned as GM in 2010, less than one year after showing Carbonneau the door. Notwithstanding the tantalizing run to the conference finals overseen by Jacques Martin and Pierre Gauthier, to me, Gainey’s final organizational hires merely capped off a managerial track record marked by mediocrity and drama.

The Gainey-Carbonneau duo did not live up to the expectations I projected on them based on their collective past.

Possibly less familiar to Canadiens fans, my Oilers story centres on another former playing duo for which I had great admiration, that of Kevin Lowe and Craig MacTavish.

The Oilers first ever draft choice, winner of five Stanley Cups with the team, and steadiest of defenseman, Lowe spent one season as Edmonton’s head coach before being named GM to replace Glen Sather in 2000. Meanwhile, after a year in prison for having committed vehicular homicide, MacTavish joined the Oilers in 1985 and, unexpectedly, helped the team win three championships as a pre-eminent shut down third line centre. After two years coaching with the New York Rangers, MacTavish returned to Edmonton as assistant coach in 1999 and was named head coach upon Lowe’s promotion to GM. With both men experienced as on-ice captains, and with each regarded as a winner, I saw the Lowe-MacTavish team as the perfect leadership scenario for the twenty-first century Oilers.

The Oilers did ice some gritty teams under Lowe and MacTavish. Notably, my heart raced through highly competitive playoff series against the much deeper Dallas Stars and Colorado Avalanche during which leaders like Ryan Smyth, Doug Weight, and Todd Marchant put in heart and soul performances. The pinnacle, however, came in 2005-2006. That’s when Lowe astonished Oilers fans by acquiring Chris Pronger and Mike Pecca prior to the regular season and MacTavish deftly rode the hot goaltending of another late season pick up, Dwayne Roloson, to a trip to the finals that ended honourably in a seventh game loss to Carolina. Although the surprise run stirred up magic and joy I had not felt since the early-1990s, my belief in MacTavish and Lowe’s potential to do it again evaporated the moment Pronger told the world he wanted out of Edmonton. Oilers fans are still waiting for the team to recover.

So, due to my indelible net memories of management conflicts with players, oddly timed trades of valuable players, desperate efforts to lure free agents that ended in failure and league ridicule, and of a battle between a hapless coach and an arch rival’s team mascot, I view the 2006 as an accidental happenstance rather than an outcome of the deliberate workings of a competent regime.

The Lowe-MacTavish duo did not live up to the expectations I projected on them based on their collective past.

From two organizations that share having glory days in the ever distant past, recent levels of mediocrity, and whose coaching-managerial compositions have been eerily similar in their playing pedigrees, I now know better how to be a fan today.

From the underwhelming records of my teams in general, I know that championships of the past are not only hard to repeat but also set the bar of my expectations impossibly high. Both Habs and Oilers are in the middle of organizational transitions but I will forever refrain from expecting the accomplishments of the past to portend success in the future.

From seeing the painful struggles of my dream managements teams, I also know that the hometown players who were superhuman on the ice may not be well-suited to lead from the bench or from the front office. By comparing successful mangers like Kenny Holland, Peter Chiarelli, and Dean Lombardi, and in thinking about accomplished coaches like Claude Julien, Joel Quenneville, and Darryl Sutter, it’s hard to identify the factors that make it work. I have my doubts about the potentials of both current regimes in both Montreal and Edmonton, but I also know now to look beyond local heroes when my teams are seeking new coaching and management personnel.

Finally, from having sufficient time to heal from the coaching-management experiments in which I invested so heavily, I also know not to allow the non-playing parts of my playing heroes’ careers to erase the memories of what they did on the ice. Whether it was a resounding hit, a spirited penalty kill, or a timely and team-inspiring goal, my favourite players performed at the highest possible level when it counted the most. Yes, they gave me little to cheer for when they donned the suits and ties, and they also failed to prepare their clubs to be competitive today, but I have chosen to separate these unfortunate facts from what I saw them do a long time before.

Following favourite teams through the ups and downs of their coaches and managers can be fun. When it comes to a favourite team’s former playing heroes, however, it might be best for everyone to leave the glory in the past.

Lockout Politics

This piece is the first official contribution I made to the digital hockey magazine AllHabs.net as a Featured Contributor.

While many fans lament the ways that economics and power struggles have kept hockey off the ice during the current lockout, in this piece I explore the historical connections between sports, politics, economics, and culture.  After understanding the ways that sports is used by societies to promote, and argue over, its most cherished social values, I suggest that fans use these connections to get involved in trying to bring the game of hockey back and to contribute to the social needs of the societies and communities in which they live.

You can read the digital version here.

The Politics of Sports and the Hockey Lockout

By Avi Goldberg

It’s been a rough couple of years for hockey fans in general and for fans of the Montreal Canadiens in particular.  Between the lockout, intractable negotiations over arena deals, and intense scrutiny over whether the Habs coach and GM must be bilingual, much attention has been focused away from the game of hockey itself.  While resentment of the presence of politics, economics, or culture within what we like to think of a realm of play is understandable, ties between sports and core features of society cannot be unravelled.  We may choose to shy away, but awareness of those ties can give us control when the perceived contamination of sports by societal issues leads us to feel as though we have none.

Because humans have always imagined their sports as representing their most valued social characteristics and aspirations, direct resemblances between politics, economics, culture and sports can be traced far back into history.

Ancient Greece, birthplace of modern democracy, was known for a liberal approach to life and for enlightened politics in which citizens joined together in discussion and decision making over community affairs.  Contours of this participatory philosophy and other societal features were grafted onto sports practices of the Classical Greek era.

Echoing Greek politics, values of fair play and equality in competition were taught to students in physical education classes in the national education system and were also intricately applied to events in the ancient Olympic Games.  Exemplifying additional sports-society links, ancient Greek athletics displayed core social values through their public enactment of rituals that characterized Greek religion.  Greek athletics were not merely about physical fitness.  The organization of sports highlighted revered social priorities.  Participation signalled honouring of the gods as well as efforts to bring divinely granted good fortune to the community.     

Whereas participation, fairness, and religious practice were fundamental virtues of society and sport in ancient Greece, the organization of ancient Roman sports was directly reflective of the core economic and militaristic dimensions of that great civilization.

The Emperors of Ancient Rome routinely used the wealth they accrued from imperial and economic success to please their citizens with the public provision of material opulence and national holidays of leisure.  The culture of conquest and economic extravagance was replicated in Roman sports festivals that featured gladiatorial fighting by paid performers before audiences that were permitted to gamble on outcomes.  Thus, in an advanced commercial and militarily robust society, sports took the form of orchestrated entertainment publicly celebrating the spectacle of violence in amphitheatres throughout the Roman Empire.

In one final example of the constructed connections between core elements of society and sports, hockey in Canada provides a familiar illustration.

As a game originally played outdoors on ice, and that historically showcased tough physical play, hockey not only models the reality of a cold physical environment but also the strength required by Canadian communities to thrive within their geographic contexts.  Parallel to the requisite physicality, hockey players off the ice are also valued for their humility, politeness, and generosity.  When they find these character traits in the everyday comportment of their favourite players, Canadians locate in hockey a particular approach to social conduct and political affairs that many argue distinguishes their culture from that of their neighbours to the south.

This brief history shows that modern sports activities are not merely by-products of society, against which a human group’s politics, economics, and culture collide from time to time.  Rather, society and sports are deeply intertwined, with the latter often deliberately built as a stage on which core features of the former are publicly expressed.

But, if it is really a society’s prized social philosophies and values that are showcased in sports, why should conflicts arise over these features at all?

 

As current tensions in the US remind us, societal values reflect the aspirations of many of its members at the same time as they can exclude the preferences of some.  Serious disagreement over political, economic, or cultural policy can result in social unrest, but this is part of an unavoidable continuous process in which citizens of free societies move between stability and change as they work through defining and institutionalizing their social priorities.  Due precisely to its role in expressing society’s values, there is no escaping the fact that sports is involved in social dynamics that are almost as likely to stir up debate and contestation as they are to promote collective agreement.    

So, just as a political doctrine or an economic policy will not represent the aspirations of all members of a diverse society, the deliberate presentation of some of these features in sports will necessarily promote the interests of some citizens more than others.  This was clearly the case in Greek athletics as women, non-aristocratic males, and slaves were excluded from participation in Olympic competition just as they were from the deliberations of the vaunted first democracy.  And, while fighting and hitting are widely appreciated as reflective of a Canadian style of play, there is also an increasingly restive segment of fans and media pundits willing to speak out against their presence in the game.  

The promotion of a society’s core values contributes to making sports an emotionally compelling experience for its fans.  As fans in Montreal know well, when those values lack full citizen endorsement, the potential for acrimony is always there.   

In the context of the ongoing hockey lockout, what does a consideration of the nation-building functions of sports offer to counter the intense frustration that hockey fans currently feel towards the NHL and the NHLPA?

With knowledge of the relationship between sports and society, the first suggestion is to accept that there is no mystery to the hockey lockout, or to the tactics taken by both sides, and to view it as tied to historic battles over the terms and possibilities of our society’s economic system.  Shaped by and expressive of fault lines that characterize capitalism, the NHL is advocating owner or manager control over the conditions of work while the NHLPA is defending a more cooperative model of economic affairs.  Fans and pundits appear surprised by owner and player greed, but limited restriction on material acquisition is endorsed by the private enterprise economy and by the culture in which it operates.  Despite claims to the contrary, the lockout is a stage on which owners and players are performing societal deliberations, and intense disagreements, over core societal economic principles.

Recognizing the economic values being showcased in the lockout leads to a second suggestion that fans work toward developing specific positions on what is required to resolve it.  It is common to hear that both sides are to blame, but this is a non-position that sidesteps the possibility of forming an informed judgment.  Beyond displeasure resulting from missing the games, or from a lost salary if one’s income depends on the NHL, frustration is also created by confusion over which side’s policy ambitions are most unjust.  Once they see the lockout as similar to management-labour battles waged in their own professional fields, fans can more easily identify the policies advocated by the two sides that require immediate reform in order for the business of hockey to resume and return to being healthy once again.        

With a defined perspective, a final suggestion is for fans to join the deliberations by taking action.  This can mean writing letters to the NHL, the NHLPA, or to specific teams to challenge the details of their stances.  It can take the form of organizing online communities to pressure corporations that do business with the league or the players.  It can also mean developing innovative projects, such as mobilizing to punish the NHL and the players when they return or appropriating popular symbols of hockey to get people involved in social priorities more important than arbitration rights, HRR, and ‘make whole.’  The fans’ power lies in their pocketbook and in their passion, interest, and time.  By communicating clear preferences on the issues, by withdrawing support unless priorities are changed, or by channelling their frustration into either pressure tactics or needed public involvement, fans can use their power during the lockout to get things done.

Because fans are both valuable members of their communities and citizens, seeing hockey as a battleground for a society’s political, economic, or cultural direction need not instil fear.  Just as sports will always be used to express official societal agendas, fans have the power and the right to get involved in the process.  Involvement will not only help to ensure that the games are organized and played as the fans would like, but it would also mean that their communities and their societies are being built according to the visions that are closest to their hearts.