The NHL is like my baby

My baby is smart.

One of his favourite things to do is read books with us. I suppose technically he’s not reading the books — more like looking at, smacking and then chewing on them — but he pays rapt attention whenever we prop one up in front of him and start telling him the story.

I don’t know if he’s a lot smarter than your average baby — maybe the Rhodes Scholarship selection committee members and their lawyers had a point — but he amazes me with the things he learns every day. I guess that’s just how the growing mind of a baby works. It’s thrilling to watch up close.

My baby is also, or at least will be, bilingual. Somehow my wife learned how to speak French growing up in Medicine Hat, Alberta — something that seems about as likely to happen as someone learning how to hang-glide growing up in a submarine.

Nevertheless she is fluent in both English and French and speaks only French to our baby so that he will grow up knowing both languages. This arrangement made me nervous at first, envisioning linguistic confusion such as this happening throughout his life:

OPERATOR:

9-1-1, what's your emergency?

MY BABY AT SIX YEARS OLD:

C'est Mama, elle est dead!

OPER:

Mama, L.A. dead?

MBA6YO:

Oui!

OPER:

We? We who?

MBA6YO:

Mama! Elle est not moving!

OPER: 

L.A. not moving? Is there an earthquake? Are you in L.A.? This is Vancouver 9-1-1.

MBA6YO:

Yes, I sais!

OPER:

You say what?

MBA6YO:

I sais c'est Vancouver!

OPER:

You say say Vancouver? Well I say say prank calling 9-1-1 is a federal offense.

MBA6YO:

No! Elle est dying!

OPER:

L.A. is not dying. I was just there last month. There was a movie filming, I think I saw Tom Cruise getting into a golf cart with Nelson Mandela. Anyway, I've tracked your location and called the police. They're on their way to get you now.

MBA6YO:

Bon! Vite! Tell them all to give my Mama aide!

OPER:

You're sick (hangs up).

But apparently going the bilingual baby route actually gives kids more “cognitive flexibility,” according to a study by researchers from Concordia and York Universities. Très good.

Anyway, you’ll remember that this post is called the NHL is like my baby and I am writing that my baby is smart.

No, my two weeks of parental leave have not made me crazy — I am actually inferring that the NHL is smart. That’s a statement I never thought I’d make under Gary Bettman’s rule. After all, under his reign the league did bloat to an ungodly 30 teams — including ridiculous teams in places like Florida, Carolina and Tennessee — while still managing to lose teams in hockey hotbeds Winnipeg, Quebec and Minnesota. And a season was lost to a lockout. And now as Canadian cities that actually like hockey are bending backwards to get teams, it’s “Oh no, that team will never leave Phoenix. Not on my watch.” What a DB.

Anyway, someone else must be running the show these days because the NHL has had some truly inspired ideas and is suddenly as hot as wasabi eye-drops.

The first was allowing HBO to bring it’s fantastic 24/7 show to the rink, resulting in a series about the Capitals and the Penguins that is just f&#*ing incredible, to use the common parlance of the show. The series led up to this year’s Winter Classic outdoor game, another great NHL idea that is becoming such a popular New Year’s Day tradition that college football’s Cowboy Hat Bowl, Walter Sobchak from The Big Lebowski Bowl and Ball-peen Hammer Bowl are all considering moving to different days.

Now the NHL has come up with the idea of having captains pick teams in a fantasy draft for All-Star weekend. Brilliant, even if the idea was stolen from an old Bill Simmons column. It still took balls for the NHL to make that call, and it has raised the all-star game’s profile from flat-lining newt to frisky golden retriever recovering from surgery.

I still might not watch the game — after all, hockey all-star games are about as exciting as synchronized swimming in a fountain — but I will at least watch the draft and I am more interested in the game than I have been since I was 12 years old.

Smart work, NHL. Now can you please call the Rhodes people and tell them I was just kidding about the bomb threat. 

Photo Brian Babineau/NHLI via Getty Images

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