The Hens in the Hockey House go off on Coach Potty-Mouth, Puck Finn, Brock Lesnar’s bad manners and classy fashion Winnipeg Jets style

The two Hens in the Hockey House hadn’t planned on getting together to discuss the Winnipeg Jets for another week, or so, but here they are to flap their gums about the eventful goings-on of the past half dozen days.

Take it away, ladies…

Question Lady: My goodness, there’s so much to talk about. Paul Maurice went orbital, Patrik Laine landed in La La Land, the boys met Brock Lesnar, and the Jets made a lovely fashion statement by wearing the Heritage Classic unis. I suppose we should start with coach PoMo. Don’t you think his hissy fit during and after the 7-4 loss to the Montreal Canadiens was a bit over the top?

Answer Lady: Hissy fit? That’s what you call it when a man’s head almost explodes in front of 15,000 people and a national TV audience? A hissy fit? That was no hissy fit. It was Mount St. Maurice erupting. His face was redder than communist Russia. His head was a beet with two eyes, two ears and a really bad haircut. One of the veins in his forehead was so thick it looked like he had a boa constrictor hiding under the skin. But I can’t say that I blame him. Watching some dude named Phillip Danault dart through my entire team would send me to the ledge, too. I mean, no one not named Bobby Orr or Paul Coffey should be allowed to do that. Quite frankly, I’m surprised Mount St. Maurice didn’t blow sooner.

Question Lady: Okay, maybe it wasn’t over the top. But what about his language? Coach PoMo was dropping F-bombs during the timeout after the Habs’ fifth goal and after the game. He said the Jets were “horse shit.” He wasn’t much better the morning after, either. They better be “damn” sure they’re not dragging their “asses” in Phoenix or there’ll be plenty of “hell” to pay. Do kids really need to hear our head coach using that kind of language?

Answer Lady: Hockey people swear? Who knew? So he’s Coach Potty-Mouth. Big deal. You think kids don’t use that kind of language, and worse, in the schoolyard? Listen to some of the language that’s used on TV these days.

Question Lady: Profanity aside, it seems to me that Maurice might be moving on to a field full of land mines. A couple of weeks ago, he hurled his goaltenders under the bus, saying neither Connor Hellebuyck or Michael Hutchinson was a true No. 1, and now he’s done the same thing with his entire team. Isn’t there a danger in too many public floggings of today’s athletes?

Answer Lady: Yup. Coach Potty-Mo might want to bite his tongue the next time he feels the urge to publicly call out an individual player, a select group of players, or the lot of them. I don’t blame him for the in-game meltdown against the Habs. No coach can abide such shoddy play. But the workers will tune him out quickly if they keep hearing and reading about what a bunch of bottom-feeders they are. I’d say one more scolding in print or on air and he loses them.

Question Lady: On the subject of losing players, when do you think we’ll see Patrik Laine again?

Answer Lady: That’s impossible to know, or guess. Concussions are a nasty bit of business. People don’t really understand them because they’re invisible. I mean, we all saw Puck Finn wobble on his way off the ice after he and Jake McCabe of the Sabres went splat in Buffalo, but he looked perfectly normal after the game. He actually looked better than McCabe, whose face was a stitched-up mess. But those of us who’ve been concussed can relate to what Puck Finn is going through. It can be a very, very dark place. For a long time.

After Puck Finn was felled, there was a bit of fallout.

Question Lady: You’ve had a concussion?

Answer Lady: Plural. Many of them.

Question Lady: Well, that explains a lot.

Answer Lady: Why do people always say that when I mention my concussions? They’re nothing to joke about.

Question Lady: A tad touchy, aren’t we?

Answer Lady: Hey, I know I’m a bit loopy, but I don’t need to be reminded that I’m brain damaged. Besides, it’s like Toronto Maple Leafs’ former gasbag owner Humpty Harold Ballard said when told that his general manager, Gerry McNamara, was brain damaged—“Name me one person in hockey who isn’t.” I think that also applies to anyone who stays in jock journalism for 30 years or more.

Question Lady: Mea culpa. What do you think of the Jets’ response to McCabe’s hit on Laine?

Answer Lady: Rink Rat Scheifele acted according to hockey’s unwritten code. You stick up for your stars when they’re roughed up. Some people think the Jets didn’t go far enough in seeking retribution, and now other outfits will see them as a soft touch and it’s open season on smurfs like Twig Ehlers and Toby Enstrom. I don’t see that happening. I doubt this will signal the beginning of a lawless frontier.

Question Lady: A few of the opinionists are calling for a ban on such open-ice hits. Even though they’re legal and clean according to the rule book, they’re dangerous and send people to the infirmary and can end careers. Agree or disagree?

Answer Lady: What you’re really asking is should you hit a guy with his head down. Probably not. At least not the way McCabe hit Puck Finn. But the game is played at a split-second pace. Instinct kicks in. I don’t know how you get rid of that. And, quite frankly, I’m more concerned about players running each other from behind, into the boards, or running defenceless goaltenders. Mutual respect is not in overabundance in the National Hockey League.

Question Lady: Speaking of big hits and tough guys, pro rassler Brock Lesnar paid a visit this week, and he had the bad manners to walk on the Jets logo in the dressing room. Does that make him the world’s biggest doofus, or what?

Answer Lady: Oh, pu-leeze. If you don’t want people to walk on the damn logo, don’t put the damn thing on the floor. A freaking floor is for walking on. Put the damn logo on a wall or the ceiling. Sorry about the language. Coach Potty-Mo must be rubbing off on me.

The best uniforms in the NHL.

Question Lady: Final thing. What’s your take on the Jets wearing the old World Hockey Association uniforms against the Calgary Flames?

Answer Lady: Boffo. Brilliant. Classy with an uppercase C. They should ditch the gawdawful logo and those colors that the Puck Pontiff introduced in 2011 and reactivate the WHA unis. Maybe that would inspire them to play some retro hockey. You know, like the WHA Jets, who actually made the playoffs and won championships.

Question Lady: You’ve living in the past again.

Answer Lady: Not true. I just know class when I see it, and those WHA unis are classy and so were those WHA Jets. Gotta go. See you next month. We’ll start spreading rumors about Mathieu Perreault being traded at the NHL swapping deadline.

Patti Dawn Swansson has been scribbling about Winnipeg sports for 47 years, which means she is old and probably should think about getting a life.

 

About a guard dog for Puck Finn…the goalie blind Winnipeg Jets…soccer stupidity in hockey…a classy King…classy curlers…and adios to a classy Ken Fidlin

I cannot survive in a 140-character world, so here are more tweets that grew up to be too big for Twitter…

As Dire Straits advised us in the early 1990s, sometimes you’re the windshield and sometimes you’re the bug. We know which one Patrik Laine was on Saturday afternoon, and let’s agree that the Winnipeg Jets rookie extraordinaire was the victim of a clean hit. Not clean-ish. Clean.

If you can’t agree, please proceed to another blog, because I’m not prepared to debate it.

I will, however, happily engage in a verbal to-and-fro re the suggestion that the Jets ought to send an SOS to former guard dog Anthony Peluso.

I mean, seriously? Anthony Peluso?

Yes, some among the rabble think it a swell idea to insert Peluso’s bare knuckles into the Jets’ lineup to discourage ruffians like Jake McCabe of the Sabres from taking liberties with the likes of Puck Finn, as he did in Buffalo. Well, sure. And some people also believe Donald Trump in the White House is a swell idea.

Look, it’s bad enough that a roster spot is occupied by Chris Thorburn, a loyal foot soldier whose sole purpose when not munching on popcorn appears to be dropping his hockey mitts and wrestling a foe of equally limited skills for 30 seconds or less. Unless this is 1975 and the Broad St. Bullies are pillaging the National Hockey League, adding another no-talent thug who would be tethered to the end of the bench or banished to the press box is not a wise use of personnel.

So no. Anthony Peluso is not the answer.

Puck Finn

As one who has suffered multiple concussions (10 at last count), I know what a dark and nasty place La La Land can be. The nausea, the dizziness, the ringing in the ears, the headaches, the imbalance, the forgetfulness…horrible. I was first concussed at age 13. Got hit in the head by a baseball. When I awoke in St. Boniface Hospital, the kid in the bed next to me had control of the TV. I asked him to put on Hockey Night in Canada. It was mid-July. I thought it was winter. I hope Laine knows it’s winter and there’s plenty of hockey to be played. More to the point, I hope Puck Finn doesn’t miss too much of it.

Almost lost in the hue and cry that arose after McCabe sent Laine to La La Land was the numbing reality that the Jets coughed up a huge hair ball in losing 4-3 to Buffalo. Ahead 3-1 less than 20 minutes from time, they gagged and it didn’t help that they received more minor league-level goaltending from Connor Hellebuyck. I’m not prepared to close the book on Hellebuyck, but I do find it odd, also annoying, that general manager Kevin Cheveldayoff and his bird dogs can recognize blue-chippers up front (the Lickety-Split Line of Puck Finn, Twig Ehlers and Rink Rat Scheifele, as an e.g.) and on the blueline (Jacob Trouba, Josh Morrissey) but they continue to be goalie blind. Should it really take six years to find a legitimate starting goaltender?

Interesting to note that Jets head coach Paul Maurice doesn’t discuss the NHL standings with his workers. “I don’t talk about the standings and I don’t talk about any of that in the room,” he says. “It’s on a board somewhere and they can look at it if they like.” Perhaps that explains their lack of urgency some nights.

We can do without this and the shootout in hockey.

At the risk of sounding like Don Cherry, it occurs to me that Europeans have brought two things to hockey—soccer’s twin evils of diving and the shootout. Yes, of course, some hockey players (hello, Bill Barber) were acting like Italian footballers in their death throes before the great European wave arrived on our shores, but it got so bad that the NHL was motivated to pass anti-diving legislation in an effort to nip it in the bud. As for the shootout, I’m sure most of us would agree that it’s the devil’s handiwork. Under no circumstances should the gold-medal match at the World Junior Championship be determined by gimmickry. The Canadian and American kids put on a boffo show the other night, and they deserved better than soccer stupidity to decide the issue. I mean, it’s not like anyone was in a hurry to leave the rink.

So nice to see Dave King acting like a kid on Christmas morning after Canada’s success at the recent Spengler Cup tournament in Davos. King, who was Luke Richardson’s associate coach at the Swiss event, is among the finest men I met in 30 years of covering sports in mainstream media. He was always classy, always honest and always obliging. No doubt he still is.

Speaking of classy, former world champs Kerry Burtnyk and Jeff Ryan were two of the reasons I enjoyed working the curling beat back in the day, and now their names are in the news again. Only this time, it’s their kids chasing glory. Laura Burtnyk and Hailey Ryan teamed up to win the Manitoba Junior women’s title, while J.T. Ryan skipped his team to the men’s crown. The kids will be wearing the Buffalo on their backs at the Canadian championships later this month in Victoria, and it’s never wise to bet against a Manitoba outfit at a national curling event. Especially if their names are Burtnyk and Ryan. Go get ’em, kids.

Ken Fidlin

Another good one has left the toy department. That would be the now-retired Ken Fidlin, longtime jock journalist with the Toronto Sun. Fids and I arrived at the Sun at the same time, in late 1980, after his Ottawa Journal and my Winnipeg Tribune both ceased operation in the same 24-hour period. I bailed after a year and a half in the Republic of Tranna, moving to Calgary and then back to Pegtown, but Fids never left and the Little Paper That Grew was always better for it. He’s a terrific writer and an even better person.

Postmedia truly has done a nasty number on sports writing in Canada. Fidlin joins a lengthy parade of quality writers and people who have been bought out, forced out or walked out on the newspaper chain in the past 12 months—George (Shakey) Johnson, Cam Cole, Bill Lankhof, Dave Stubbs, Randy Sportak, John MacKinnon, Joanne Ireland and Kirk Penton, among others. I suppose Terry Jones of the Edmonton Sun will be next on the chopping block. Sad.

Patti Dawn Swansson has been writing crap about Winnipeg sports for 47 years, which means she is old and probably should think about getting a life.