The NHL GM Meetings Were a Farce

Three fucking days.

That's how much time the general managers of the National Hockey League spent together in Boca Raton, Florida, this week. The league's power brokers, its top minds, theoretically in between playing grab-ass on a golf course and whipping each other with towels in a sauna, coming together to cure what ails the sport in its time of need.

And, you're not going to believe this, but the GMs did fuck all for 72 hours, hopped on private planes and flew back to the safety of their heavily guarded castles after finding a way to redefine the term "bare minimum" at one of these paid vacations.

The NHL's GM meetings are like Infinity War, only if The Avengers' plan for stopping Thanos was coming together and deciding, "Let's have a really old, former Avenger just, like, you know, watch video of Thanos in Toronto."

The league that sits on its balls with more force and frequency than any other has done so again. Goaltender interference, a problem that threatens to disrupt a playoff push or a postseason series, was addressed with all the enthusiasm of a teenager cleaning their room by stuffing socks under their bed.

Despite players, coaches, and hockey fans begging for clarity, 30 GMs—and I'm guessing some no-necked guy new Hurricanes owner Tom Dundon used to collect money from people that couldn't pay back his predatory loans on time—decided the way to fix the problem was to stick referees that have been put out to pasture in Toronto's situation room so they (along with Colin Campbell, the guy who was reassigned to the job partly because he attempted to use his influence so referees would treat his hockey-playing son more favorably) could have the final say on goaltender interference.

NHL: "What do you want?"

Everyone: "SIMPLY WRITE A CLEARER RULE FOR WHAT DEFINES GOALTENDER INTERFERENCE AND CALL THE PENALTY MORE CONSISTENTLY!"

NHL: "I'm hearing keep the rule worded exactly the same, hire more friends of the league to high-paying jobs and give the guy that tried to bully John Scott out of the All-Star Game, and accused all goaltenders of diving like two days ago, and called Marc Savard a fake artist, more power than he already has. Got it."

People, what are we doing here? Even the god damned NFL on Wednesday took a major step toward more strictly defining a catch by at least minimizing the gray area. There will always be a gray area and you can bet your ass we will all be back here next season bitching about a catch interpretation, but even the NFL was like, "Enough already." It didn't decide to stick Ed Hochuli into a situation room so he could rule on all catches. THEY ADDRESSED THE RULE ITSELF!

And the spin on this is wild, too. According to Campbell, there have been 170 coaches' challenges for goaltender interference and "nine at the most, possibly six" of the scoring plays were debated internally by his department, which is intended to imply that this isn't really a big deal. Everyone seems to be taking the vague recollection of a 65-year-old man as some sort of mathematical certainty. As someone who watches his fair share of hockey and spends far too many hours online, there is no fucking way 161 of 170 goaltender interference reviews were met with unanimous agreement. It's ludicrous.

Let's say you make 170 trips to Taco Bell and on nine of those trips, your burrito filling is swapped out for gorilla shit. So nine times out of 170, you bite into a warm, moist corn wrap filled with gorilla shit. Now you tell me if that's not a problem worth addressing. Imagine store manager Colin Campbell in his Taco Bell uniform telling you that you're probably embellishing your gorilla shit story but hey, let's hire a retired Taco Bell manager he knows from the 1980s to watch current Taco Bell employees continue to put gorilla shit in your gordita. That'll solve it.

Another aspect that makes no sense—if coaches and players are unhappy with the lack of consistency with the calls, and the calls are being taken from referees and given to a room full of guys that spent this week boasting about how they almost always agree with the referees, how in the hell does this help anything?

That's the best the NHL GMs could come up with after three days.

This is how the NHL has operated for a long time. There are many ways to make the game better but that's not something the league's general managers are interested in doing. So this is what happens—a bunch of rich guys that care more about protecting their jobs than improving the game spend three days impotently addressing a problem that is really just a symptom of a root issue that never gets addressed, then circle back to it in the offseason after finding a way to create a new problem.

Think about all the ways the game could be improved. Now realize that for three days, this one issue dominated the meetings and they still couldn't fix it or to get anything else remotely meaningful, even though you KNOW this will screw someone in the playoffs. Nobody kicks cans down a road quite like NHL general managers.

Offside reviews? Any tweaks there? Nah, everyone hates it, but nah. Playoff format that's an utter sham? We're not even getting into that even though it's silly. Periods beginning in the attacking zone when a team has a power play that carries over from the previous period? This isn't a crisis or anything but I'd love to hear the reasoning against it, which I assume is something along the lines of, "sounds scary."

A sports league's general managers—especially ones that are too chicken shit or too lazy to extend offer sheets or make trades—are not the guys you want shaping what the league looks like.

Looking back on these three days, you'd have to say the meetings interfered with the GMs' desires to have fun and unwind in Florida. Maybe that's open to interpretation but everyone in my department unanimously agrees with the ruling based on the parameters involved with accepted standards of getting work done. If you're unhappy about this, fear not—in an effort to find more consistency in this matter, I plan on having a retired editor in the room for all future incidents of work interfering with fun.