{"id":23,"date":"2007-10-18T12:54:57","date_gmt":"2007-10-18T16:54:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/2007\/10\/18\/im-a-bad-fan\/"},"modified":"2007-10-18T19:41:01","modified_gmt":"2007-10-18T23:41:01","slug":"im-a-bad-fan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/2007\/10\/18\/im-a-bad-fan\/","title":{"rendered":"I’m a bad fan."},"content":{"rendered":"

Look, I’ve badmouthed Bryan McCabe <\/a>over the last couple of days.\u00a0 I’m not saying I haven’t.\u00a0 I’m not saying you<\/em> shouldn’t.\u00a0 I’m just saying that maybe the folks raining boos down upon him from the newly-humidified rafters of the Air Canada Centre <\/a>ought to reflect upon the legitimacy of their booing.<\/p>\n

First, the facts.\u00a0 Bryan McCabe will be receiving more than 7 million dollars<\/a> to play defence for the Toronto Maple Leafs this year.\u00a0\u00a0 He is the highest paid player on the team.\u00a0 The team is, once again, disappointing fans with games that frequently feature either inconsistent efforts\u00a0<\/a>or\u00a0decent efforts that\u00a0degenerate into\u00a0late game collapses<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The fans at the Air Canada Centre are booing McCabe, and not without some justification.\u00a0 He tripped over the net while circling behind the goal the other night.\u00a0 Obviously, Bryan isn’t playing the kind of hockey that he’d like at the moment.\u00a0\u00a0 I am not without sin here – I have fallen prey to making the occasional easy joke about this – pointing out to those in the office who were giving me grief over McCabe’s own goal in Buffalo the other night that it was to be expected that Bryan might find it difficult to identify which<\/em> goal he was in front of in the dying seconds of the game, as he’d spent so little time in front of the Leaf net previously in the evening.<\/p>\n

At the risk, however, of having this degenerate into a “Leave Britney Alone<\/a>” kind of rant, I seriously question whether the boos are appropriately directed.\u00a0 The fact remains that McCabe is a quality defenceman who would play in the top two on any other team.\u00a0 The fans are frustrated because they feel he is not only underperforming (true) but being overpaid (also true, at least based on a perusal of the salaries of comparable rearguards in the league today).\u00a0 But can you really boo a guy for accepting a pantload of money to play hockey?\u00a0 The point is that the decision to write the cheque with all those zeroes on it was made by someone else – in this case, John Ferguson Jr. – and to the extent that this decision was ill-conceived (hamstrings the Leafs by tying up too much money in one player or too much money on the defence in general), it is JFJ who must be excoriated for this state of affairs, not the player who has chosen to cash the cheque.<\/p>\n

All of this is part and parcel with my long-running lament about the current status of professional sport:\u00a0 to read the sports pages these days, you basically need an M.B.A. and a law degree.\u00a0 Time was, you used to just want to read about why a guy had trouble batting against left-handers or what the Coach was proposing to do to fix a sputtering power play.\u00a0\u00a0 Basically, in this case Leaf fans choosing to boo McCabe is a visceral expression of their dissatisfaction with Leaf management’s “return on investment” or ROI decisions.\u00a0 For more of this type of excitement (underperforming portfolios!\u00a0 careless planning!), maybe these folks ought to be attending shareholders’ meetings or something.<\/p>\n

But let’s be clear – the boos are NOT about McCabe’s performance in general, or at least not about his performance without the superimposed context of the money he makes.\u00a0 He hasn’t played as well as he can, but he hasn’t been abysmal either.\u00a0 I know this because I watched Leaf hockey in the mid 1980s.\u00a0 THAT, my friends, was some abysmal hockey.\u00a0 Whatever the calibre of his performance, there is also the issue of the duration of this supposed inadequacy.\u00a0 The season is only seven games old at this point, and although the Leafs did not make the playoffs last year, that particular obscenity cannot be laid at his feet alone.\u00a0 There’s been some pretty good defencemen who’ve played long and hard in the league (see Brad Park, Ray Bourque and Rod Langway) on some pretty awful teams.\u00a0 My point is that it’s too soon to be booing him for his diminished performance alone.<\/p>\n

Why do I care?\u00a0 Well, Leafs fans have a kind of checkered history on this issue.\u00a0 When I say “kind of checkered”, I mean “abysmal”.\u00a0\u00a0 Remember Larry Murphy?\u00a0 Remember how convinced the Gardens faithful were that he was a washed up bum in the mid 90s?\u00a0 Remember how they booed him mercilessly and basically ran him out of town on a rail accompanied by flaming torches and pitchfork-waving villagers?\u00a0 Remember how it turned out that he wasn’t that washed up after all, seeing as he won a couple of Stanley Cups playing a major role with Detroit later that decade?\u00a0 Remember how it became obvious that the reason Larry hadn’t performed as a Leaf was because the other players on the Leaf team were too slow to stretch defences and open up sufficient room on the ice for him to do what he did best – make the long pass out of the zone to the open man on the fly and create offence as a result?\u00a0 How about Frank Mahovlich?\u00a0 Remember how the Gardens faithful were convinced that he was slow and unmotivated?\u00a0 Remember how they disregarded his 47 goals and basically ran him out of townon a rail accompanied by flaming torches and pitchfork-waving villagers?\u00a0\u00a0 Remember how he won approximately a gazillion Stanley Cups in Montreal after that and became such a beloved staple of that team that he’s sitting in Parliament as a Senator now (not the hockey-stick-waving kind, the kind that goes on “fact-finding” tours and “trade missions”) ?<\/p>\n

So send JFJ a letter, build a derogatory sculpture on your lawn dedicated to expressing the wretched excesses of Maple Leaf mismanagement throughout history, write an angry blog post\/letter to the editor – but please think twice before you warm up the angry mob, fire up your torches and get out your best wavin’ fork.\u00a0\u00a0 You will live to regret it, mark my words.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Look, I’ve badmouthed Bryan McCabe over the last couple of days. I’m not saying I haven’t. I’m not saying you shouldn’t. I’m just saying that maybe the folks raining boos down upon him from the newly-humidified rafters of the Air Canada Centre ought to reflect upon the legitimacy of their booing.<\/p>\n

First, the facts. Bryan […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}