POSTED ON SEPTEMBER 21, 2021 BY SECRET AGENT POPO

Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl’s Selfish Play Will Ruin the NHL 

The NHL has some dirty secrets that have been hidden from their fan-base for too long.  Time travel with me back in to the annals of hockey history so I can share information with you that I think I read on the underside of a Snapple cap.  The 1980’s was a decade of high-flying offense that was dominated by teams that could out score their opponents, I know an ice shattering strategy.  What was different about the 1980’s you ask? A few things that would change hockey forever. First and foremost, players learned that the best way to score goals on goaltenders who thought strapping on slightly oversized loaves of bread was, not only the safest way to protect their shins and tibias from vulcanized rubber traveling at velocities faster than speed limits on literally every highway in North America, but also the most effective way to keep pucks out of the net was to simply direct the puck towards the six by four opening.  (I know that was a run-on sentence but shut-up about it.) Yes, you read that correctly, players just had to shoot the puck anywhere near these makeshift gingerbread men.  They had to shoot the puck pretty fast to score though, right? Nope, not really at all.

  Back in those days you could shoot a puck in section 323, have the left and right wings use their sticks as curling brooms and watch them sweep a path for the puck to slide in the night as you sit in your seat waiting for the beer guy to give you your change. The high-scoring hockey of the 1980’s could’ve also been attributed to companies actually making stable and durable hockey boot frames instead of screwing on a couple of dinner knives to the bottom a nice pair of Sunday shoes and hoping players would be able to get through a full game without their ankles exploding. New knowledge of how to score goals in combination with legends like Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux deciding to make sure that NHL goalie’s wives would never sign a prenup again, made for some electrifying T.V. early on.

  But over time, the oversaturation of goals made the games boring and predictable.  Booze, which is usually a remedy for all things mundane, couldn’t bring the passion back into hockey fans hearts.  To combat this issue, the NHL started a secret coalition comprised of hockey players old and new.  They decided that every decade moving forward would have a quota for the number of goals that would be able to be scored league wide in order to keep the game exciting.  The coalition would intervene with the NHL governing body if need be, to either slow or speed up goal scoring, depending on future projections for that decade.  There are many glaring instances of these two groups tweaking the rules to meat goal quotas. 

The NHL allowed more clutching and grabbing in the 90’s to slow the high goal output of the 80’s. The coalition slipped equipment providers some extra R&D money to make goalie pads look more like mattresses than baked goods in the early 2000’s.  This intervention worked too well because 5 years later, the coalition had to make rules which led to more power-plays to fast track the goal total for the decade. 

This insanely creative story which is in no way made up, now leads me to Connor and Leon.  These two punks are going to single handedly, or I guess double handedly, dissolve the NHL.  The bottom line is they are scoring and setting up way too many goals.  Had McDavid not gotten hurt for seven games in the middle of the year, these two would’ve both put up back to back 100 point seasons. Their offensive numbers over the last two season projects the duo to surpass the next decade’s quota for goals just 3 years in to the decade. That projection was made without factoring in their corsi stats, which might cause the new-age analytic experts to write me a wildly passive aggressive email on their calculator. You might be thinking that the coalition can just step in and make a rule that every player named Connor has to wear shoes when he plays or that every player from Germany has to fill their water bottles up with Imported Tanqueray: London Dry Gin before every home game, but this is where you would be hopelessly wrong.

  The secret coalition was forcibly disbanded after Covid-19 wreaked havoc on the whole planet.  The coalition had all of their meetings, gatherings, conferences, etc. at bars and pubs. When news of the quarantine hit, and the members of the coalition realized that they were no longer able to gain access to their meeting venues for the foreseeable future, they all stepped down. AT THE SAME TIME! 

Without the secret goal quota coalition, McDavid and Draisaitl are going to run amuck on the league until the NHL gets so unwatchable, from all of the highlight reel goals they’ll be either scoring or setting up every night, that it will inevitably be forced to shut down.  How selfish of these two young superstars to continually dangle their talent and offensive wizardry in the faces of fans who don’t want to see it? A player in the NFL would get set back 15 yards for taunting like that. And what do these two cocky superstars get? Hart Trophies and scoring titles.  On the topic of trophies, I recently took a trip to the rumor mill and Bob McKenzie told me that McDavid and Draisaitl are actually petitioning to have the Hart Memorial trophy (MVP) renamed as the “Leonner McDraistl” trophy.  The league was doomed from the moment of both of their conceptions.