March 2, 2015, was the Day the Tank Went Too Far.
This whole hockey season has been narratively constructed around a race to the bottom. It's likely more casual fans know who's sitting last in the NHL standings (Buffalo) than first (Nashville).
For a while, this was sort of fun. It warms the heart to watch millionaires in despair. It reassures us that while the world isn't just, it is at least equally cruel.
The corrupting core of the tank is the unspoken pact at its heart. Players will not play poorly on purpose. Management can't ask them to do so.
Instead, the club slowly denudes its team of talent, forcing those who remain to confront their essential natures – as the sorts of players you can trust to be terrible at hockey. It's a virtuous cycle of viciousness.
This involves a certain amount of proportion. You could "accidentally" sign a chimpanzee. Or "forget" everyone's skates on the plane, and ask them to play in flip-flops. But you don't. Because that would embarrass the craft.
The tanking Sabres did essentially that late on trade deadline Monday, when they dealt human-flotation-device Michal Neuvirth for New York Islander Chad Johnson.
Neuvirth and Johnson are both goalies. Sort of.
Playing for the worst team in the NHL, Neuvirth has a .918 save percentage. Playing for one of the league's top five teams, Johnson has an .889 save percentage. If you were to stand completely still in the crease for the entire game while wearing a blindfold, you'd probably hover around .875.
He's played well recently, but that's over now. For tanking purposes, Johnson is denser than a collapsed sun.
This is just too bold, and it didn't raise an eyebrow. In fact, most people seemed delighted by Buffalo's cheek. It was the naughty child whom nobody can find the courage to reprimand.
The Neuvirth trade (the second time this year Buffalo has dealt its starting goalie) is proof every league in the world needs a relegation system to keep it honest.
And while we usually land somewhere between laughing at and encouraging the tank, that's its essential problem – honesty. It turns everyone it touches into a liar.
On Monday's TSN broadcast, former Leafs coach and analyst-for-a-day Ron Wilson recalled the time he was asked by an unnamed (but pretty easy to figure out) general manager to sabotage his own team. Wilson's chances of getting another head coaching job were thin in the morning. After that lapse of reason, they're non-existent.
The tank is the NHL's Fight Club. You don't talk about the tank.
I know one big-league executive who can't bring himself to call things by their real names. Instead of "tank," he refers to "the T-word."
This doesn't change the reality, but it does reduce decent men to shifty dissimulators and habitual public benders of truth.
You can't blame the teams. It's not their job to protect the integrity of hockey. It's their job to sell tickets and win, in that order. Whatever they have to do to manage that – within or just slightly outside the rules – is fair play.
But the NHL should be worried. The game's honest reputation is their business, quite literally. If hockey starts looking crooked, there are plenty of other prime-time viewing options.
From the league's perspective, the tank is deceiving. It sounds popular. It's wonderful fodder for columns (META!). It's good on talk radio. The quants and wonks in the fan base love discussing the permutations – and they tend to be the game's most effective cheerleaders.
The tank is designed to be talked about. What it is not designed to do is be watched on television for three hours at a time, when you could be sitting inside a closet drinking gin from a shoe instead.
The tank is terrible for that vast, silent majority of hockey fans who don't spend four hours a day tweaking their fantasy teams. They just want to lay down on the couch, turn on a game and be entertained.
That sort of fan doesn't want to hear about five years from now. They don't want to pay to watch Chad Johnson swiping at the puck as if it's a beach ball. They want to maintain the illusion that, with a little luck, anything's possible. The NHL abandons that fan at its peril.
It's not hard to imagine a failed 10-year tank slowly morphing into permanent disillusion and eventual system failure. The tank is a nuclear option, but it's being used across the league as if it's a cherry bomb.
It's not Connor McDavid's fault. We're facing the same problem next year, as everyone goes nose down trying to get to 17-year-old American winger Auston Matthews. It's going to go on like that forever. There's always going to be one guy everyone covets.
The NHL is slowly moving to correct the problem. This year, the last-place team can pick no worse than second overall. In 2016, separate lotteries will determine spots one through three. The NHL's worst team may end up falling to the fourth pick.
It's a good start, but it doesn't go far enough. Make the top eight picks a series of rolling lotteries. Scare everyone straight.
It won't change the finished product. What it will do is reward the teams capable of mining a draft past the first two or three picks, rather than let them lean on the dull logic of the tank.
It's a simple choice – continue to treat a lot of fans as if they're stupid, or force teams to get smarter.
Cathal Kelly