The greatest spectacle on ice this weekend might not have taken place on a football field in New Jersey but instead in Toronto on Friday where 19,285 fans packed the house to set an all-time attendance record for women’s hockey.
The path forward for women’s professional hockey has been challenging and littered with obstacles that ultimately became immovable objects. Good people have tried and failed, perhaps by undermining their own efforts in senseless turf wars.
But this inaugural season of the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) represents the template that has the greatest chance of long-term success and that is a cause for celebration.
There are no logos for the league’s six teams other than the generic PWHL crest that adorns every uniform. The teams don’t have names. This all seems quite odd in this era where brand so often trumps substance and folks with no apparent talent or trade become influencers, whatever that is supposed to mean.
But this also reflects the fact that the league hierarchy that includes Hockey Hall of Famer Jayna Hefford in a senior management position and has the imprimatur of the legendary Billie Jean King has chosen substance over style, though there is some styling — and elite talent — on the ice. This reflects a meticulous approach in which a foundation is being laid for long-term staying power.
It would help if the team that represents New York did not play most of its home games in Bridgeport, Conn., with four at UBS Arena on the Island, the first having drawn 2,201 for a Wednesday night game in early January. The next one at UBS comes Wednesday. Obviously there are scheduling challenges. But off-Broadway is not Broadway and Bridgeport is not New York.
It’s a crowded field here and it’s a crowded field across the North American sports landscape. But the PWHL represents opportunity. It allows young and maybe not-quite-so-young gals to dream while getting to watch their role models on the ice. Next year there will be team names and team logos. Word of mouth will grow. (So will the cost of merchandise.)
And here is one thing that Friday night in Toronto proved: If they build it, people will come.
All has been forgiven in Pittsburgh, where hockey’s Methuselah will have his No. 68 retired on Sunday almost a quarter of a century after he left town.
Jaromir Jagr, who celebrated his 52nd birthday Thursday and is still a part-time active player for the Kladno team in Czechia that he owns — four assists and no goals in 15 games this season — has come home again after having been mercilessly booed every time he played as a visitor in Pittsburgh for the final decade of his NHL career.
The relationship was complicated because Jagr was a complicated man back in the day. He left staggering records behind in Pittsburgh, but he left the Penguins in a smog of smoldering bitterness via a trade with the Caps, where his name was dragged through the mud playing for a team that never really wanted him but got him almost out of spite to stop him from coming to the Rangers. Pittsburgh GM Craig Patrick took less from the Caps team whose president happened to be named Dick Patrick, a cousin.
When Jagr inevitably got to Broadway late in 2003-04 after a predictably miserable stay in D.C., he resurrected his career and his good name. His failure to win the Hart in 2005-06 when he established franchise records for goals (54) and points (123) while carrying a Rangers team projected to be a lottery entrant to the playoffs for the first time in eight seasons represents the greatest travesty in the PHWA’s history of awards voting.
Jagr is among the handful of players I have enjoyed covering most in my career. He could be challenging, he could be combative, but he was always interesting, always engaging. He left for the KHL, returned to the NHL as a vagabond who, along the way as a senior citizen, became lovable with scintillating turns in his early 40s with the Devils and Panthers.
No. 68 is a folk hero now. His banner will be displayed in the burgh that he and Mario Lemieux turned into a city of champions. Long may it wave.
Maybe it was the actual high stick to Ridly Greig’s head following the showboat empty-netter that got Morgan Rielly his excessive five-game suspension, but the NHL has done this before, overreacting by suspending Mark Scheifele for four playoff games after blasting Montreal’s Paul Evans to smithereens after Game 1 of their second-round meeting in 2021.
The message should be pretty clear at this point: Hands off empty-net goal scorers, regardless of how obnoxiously they behave.
(To be clear, Evans did nothing but put the puck in the net before he was steamrolled by the Scheifele locomotive. The Jets never recovered and were swept in the series, thus setting up the question of whether the 2021 Habs were the worst team to appear in the Cup final either ever or since the 1991 North Stars?)
The downfall of the Blue Jackets and GM Jarmo Kekalainen, dismissed last week by team president John Davidson, has its roots at the 2019 trade deadline when the hierarchy decided not to trade pending free agents Artemi Panarin and Sergei Bobrovsky for packages of future bounty and instead loaded up for a playoff run by trading for pending free agent Matt Duchene.
The strategy paid off immediately, with John Tortorella’s team shocking the world by sweeping first-overall Tampa Bay in the first round. But a second-round loss followed, Panarin signed with the Rangers, Bobrovsky with the Panthers and Duchene with the Predators and the Jackets were left in ravages. Even JD left to join the Rangers.
The Columbus franchise has been running on a treadmill since. Players have fled. The Tortorella Effect went past its expiration date. The decision to hire Mike Babcock this past summer constituted a major unforced error. The franchise is as irrelevant as ever.
Maybe it would be different if the 2019 deadline had been handled differently, as well.
OK, which is the more famous goal?
The Wayne Gretzky shorthanded slapshot from the left circle that beat Mike Vernon in overtime to win Game 2 of the 1988 Smythe Division final or the Steve Yzerman slapshot from just across the blue line that beat Jon Casey in double overtime to win Game 7 of the 1996 Western Conference second round?
