The Down Goes Brown Grab Bag: Gary Bettman Always Wins

This article originally appeared on VICE Sports Canada.

(Editor's note: Welcome to Sean McIndoe's Friday grab bag, where he writes on a variety of NHL topics. You can follow him on Twitter.)

The third star: Evander Kane returns to Winnipeg—Smooth, Evander.

graceful return to winnipeg pic.twitter.com/VrfIz4jcUs
— Stephanie (@myregularface) January 10, 2016

The second star: Mikhail Grabovski and Nikolai Kulemin, Russian Hipsters—This is the funniest thing Grabovski has starred in since his role in "The Toronto Maple Leafs give their best center $14 million to not play for them."

The first star: The Washington Capitals—That's it. Just the Capitals, period. The fact that this team exists is enough, because it gives us access to a steady stream of stories about them being the most weirdly normal group of athletes ever assembled. First, it was the ongoing team-wide drama over who was following who on Instagram. This week, it's the revelation of the dressing room's "cult of crossword men." Oh, and Alexander Ovechkin buying powerball tickets. Do these guys even know that they're an NHL team? I'm not sure they do. Let's all agree to not tell them.

The issue: Gary Bettman travelled to Calgary this week to a) show off the new beard, and b) tell local politicians that he was "having trouble understanding why there hasn't been further progress" on a new arena. But Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi declined to meet with him.

The outrage: While many are applauding the mayor's move, others have called it "petulant" and accused him of rudely snubbing the head of a billion-dollar business partner.

Is it justified: Public dollars for private sports facilities are almost always a scam, so in a sense it's refreshing to see Nenshi take a stand. The Flames arena is perfectly serviceable—at least as long as you don't have vertigo and need to use the pressbox—and the city's leaders have to make tough decisions about how to spend its dollars just like everyone else.

But there's something important that we need to remember here: Bettman is going to win. He always does. Pro sports leagues across the board almost always do.

In the rare cases where a city draws a line in the sand, the league can just pack up and find a bigger sucker somewhere else. There's little realistic chance of that ever happening in Calgary, but the mere threat should be enough, especially during a time when we'll be inundated with shots of sad St. Louis Rams fans to remind us what happens to towns that don't pony up their protection money.

So given that the outcome here is already inevitable, we should all be happy to see Nenshi at least pretend to drive a hard bargain. Maybe we can even imagine that he's making Bettman sweat a little, as if a guy who stared down Bob Goodenow and shut down an entire league for a full year is really going to lose sleep over a local politician in one of the NHL's smaller markets. There's a lot of money on the line, and seeing both sides posture a little bit before it gets divided up is the least we should expect.

But Bettman is going to win, and Calgary will end up paying for it. If the city and its leaders don't want to roll over like a dog needing its belly scratched first, good for them. It's nothing for the rest of us to worry about, though, because it won't change the outcome.

"Use those fingers to lick the peanut butter off of their bread" [figure of speech]—Hey guys, I have this great idea for a new hockey insult. See, you'd wait for somebody to do something with their finger, and then you'd hit them with this brand new…

Oh wait, I'm told someone already beat me to it.

Yes, Florida Panthers' TV analyst Denis Potvin threw the hockey world into confusion Monday night when he went into a rant against the Sedin twins during that postgame melee. That included him calling Daniel Sedin a "lowlife", for which he apologized later in the week.

But Potvin has yet to apologize to the rest of us for the peanut butter thing, and he needs to, because trying to figure out what he meant has been occupying roughly 70 percent of my brain function this week. When I first heard about it, I thought, "Well, that's weird, can't wait until somebody explains it tomorrow." But now it's Friday and nobody's figured it out, and I don't think I'm overreacting to demand that the Panthers not be allowed to play any more games until Potvin tells us what the hell he was talking about.

I mean… where do you even start? You don't lick with your fingers, for one. And if you were going to use your fingers to eat peanut butter, why would you put it on your bread first? And why is licking peanut butter a bad thing in the first place? Peanut butter is awesome. If it were socially acceptable to eat it by the fistful straight out of the jar like Winnie the Pooh, we'd all be doing it on the morning commute every day.

I demand an explanation, preferably one delivered at a press conference that all the major networks can cut into live programming to carry. And until that happens, I'm insisting that all you Ranger fans add "… at analogies" to the end of your chant.

The NFL regular season ended earlier this month, which is always a devastatingly sad moment on the sporting calendar because it means the end of pretty much the greatest thing in all of sports: the NFL RedZone channel.

If you've somehow been deprived of the opportunity to let this magnificent creation into your life, it can best be summarized as a one-stop channel for an entire day of NFL action, with a mix of highlights and live cut-ins on games as they happen. If you don't have a strong rooting interest for one team that's playing at the moment, you can just tune in to RedZone and basically get all the important stuff from every game.

That sounds cool, but it's the execution that makes it. The host—and I'm being generic here, because there are two competing versions of the exact same channel with different hosts, which blows my mind a little—spends the entire show frantically flipping between games like a child rummaging through a neighbor's toy box. Occasionally they go to multiple screens at the same time. And here's the key: when the host cuts in to throw to a highlight, he doesn't give away what's about to happen. It's not, "Hey, the Steelers just scored a touchdown, let's go to Pittsburgh." It's always something more vague, and sometimes they don't even tell you if you're seeing a highlight or something live. That's perfect, because you have no idea what you're about to see. And it's seven straight hours of this, every Sunday. I plan to leave my family and marry the NFL RedZone channel once our culture's puritanical laws allow it. Don't judge me, the heart wants what it wants.

All of which leads to the question: Why don't we have this for the NHL? Granted, you couldn't do it every night, because sometimes there aren't that many games and also the host would suffer an on-air breakdown by the third night. But for Saturday nights, and maybe a few weeknights? It would be perfect.

Some fans get caught up on the "RedZone" name—the original concept was that they'd always cut to any game where the ball was in the red zone—and assume that a hockey equivalent would involve waiting around for powerplays. But while that could be part of it, there's a chance to do so much more with the concept. The key is to keep moving, jump around often, and then start narrowing down the focus to the best games as they reveal themselves. And if something happens in another game—a goal, a big save, a hit, a fight, a controversy, something weird—then cut over and show it to us as if it's live, without giving it away.

There have been rumors of an NHL RedZone ripoff in the past, but it hasn't appeared yet. And yes, the NHL Network has tried to pull off something similar. But it hasn't really worked, because it's not ambitious enough. Stop holding back on us, NHL. You need to go full RedZone. Pay any price to steal a producer or two from the NFL who can show you how to make it work, give it its own channel that springs to life a few nights a week, and name your price. I'm throwing cash at my TV right now. Take it.

Alexander Ovechkin scored his 500th career goal Sunday. It was a nice moment that went smoothly and wasn't screwed up in a completely ridiculous way. All of which puts him one up on Brett Hull.

• It's Dec. 22, 1996, and the Blues are hosting the Kings with some history on the line. Hull entered the game with 497 goals and has already scored twice, so he's just one away from 500. Or maybe more than one, as it turns out.

• This version of the Blues is one season removed from the delightfully weird 1995-96 version, but it's still a pretty eclectic bunch. Wayne Gretzky is gone and Mike Keenan has just been fired the week before, but they've still got guys like Chris Pronger and Al MacInnis, Grant Fuhr is still trying to play almost every game, they've added Pierre Turgeon, and they've got the usual collection of veterans and castoffs, including a two-game stint from Gary Leeman. The mid-90s Blues were fun.

• Hull is on a line with Turgeon and Stephane Matteau, and they break into the Kings' zone just seconds into the period. Turgeon makes a nifty pass to Hull in the slot, and he fires it home for No. 500. Kind of. We'll get to that in a second.

• You'll note that Hull's reaction is kind of muted here. Sure, sure, act like you've been there before, but the guy just achieved an historic milestone that he'd been chasing his entire career. And yet he barely even smiles. It's almost as if he didn't score at all. Hmm…

• I've got some bad news for this kid.

• The Blues' bench empties as everyone goes to congratulate Hull, who's still acting oddly low-key and even seems to be trying to explain something to various teammates. Oh well, I'm sure what it is won't turn out to be important.

• It's time for a round of "Most Obscure Guy In The Pile." I'm going to go with rookie Harry York, mainly because I know that if I mention Ricard Persson every Senators fan will throw empty bottles through my window while angrily muttering about balance.

• By the way, you're not imagining things—the numbers on the Blues jerseys are crooked. This was when the NHL was as the height of its "cool uniforms" phase, and the league's design consultants didn't have time for your "paradigms" and your "rules" and your "straight lines" old man.

• (But trust me, it could have been worse.)

• "Interim coach Jimmy Roberts has a smile, and so does Brett Hull!," and at that exact moment the scene is interrupted by a scowling Pronger. Never change, Chris.

• We finally get our first replay, and it's a great look at Hull's classic wrist shot, one that could get the puck away so hard that it would literally bend time and space on the way to the net and hey, wait a second…

• "He gets some help from Matteau in front." Yes. Yes he certainly does. You know, in the sense that Matteau helps him by being the one who actually scores the goal. The puck clearly deflects off him and changes direction on the way into the net. That's Matteau's goal.

• Well, this is awkward.

• Um, Brett, anything you want to tell us about who scored that goal?

• By the way, you have to enjoy the irony of the announcers talking about how the 500-goal club is exclusive and reserved for only the game's greatest legends at the exact moment that Pierre Turgeon comes into the shot.

• We get another replay, and this one makes it clear that a) Ian Laperriere really didn't feel like back-checking that night, and b) Hull's shot was headed wide, and bounced in off Matteau's shin. Hull even gives him the "that's your goal" point and nod thing that hockey players do.

• I'll be honest, Hull's reaction as he slowly realizes that everyone has just decided to pretend that that's No. 500 is probably the highlight of the clip. It's not often you get to see a man's internal moral dilemma play out in front of 18,000 people on live television, complete with slow motion replays.

• Hull eventually comes back onto the ice and skates over to referee Don Koharski, who's laughing as he basically tells him it's too late to change it. And it is! The moment has come and gone, the celebration has happened, the hats have rained down, and it's over. No point changing our minds now.

• No, just kidding, the NHL totally did that.

• Really. They finally got around to reviewing the goal and awarded it to Matteau, temporarily stripping Hull of his 500th-goal honors. Even worse, they didn't make any sort of formal announcement, so nobody knew for sure whether or not Hull was still at 499.

• That turned out to be kind of important ten minutes later, when Hull scored what would end up being his real 500th goal. It led to this call, which I've transcribed verbatim: "He has a goal here in the third period. That could be his 500th, it could be his fourth of the night. There are reports that the previous goal that we thought was his 500th has been credited to Matteau." It's not quite, "Do you believe in miracles" but it will have to do.

• By the way, there was a precedent here, and it was fairly recent. The previous year, Doug Gilmour had scored his 1000th point, only to have it taken off the board after a review. Years later, Mats Sundin was wrongly credited with breaking the Leafs' all-time points record on a phantom assist that was later revoked. Why yes, I am able to relate literally every hockey moment to something that happened to the Maple Leafs, thanks for noticing.

• Still, as weird as this moment was, all's well that ends well. Hull got his 500th, he got to celebrate it twice, and Blues fans went home happy. And the NHL learned a valuable lesson: Always make sure to review Brett Hull goals in a responsible and timely manner, before the celebration gets too out of control.

• (Bottle crashes through window.) Oh, hi Sabres fans!

Have a question, suggestion, old YouTube clip, or anything else you'd like to see included in this column? Email Sean at nhlgrabbag@gmail.com.