STACKHOUSE’S 10 THOUGHTS

1 – HAMLIN INCIDENT – Unfortunately, the biggest news of the week was the shocking and tragic incident during Monday Night Football when Damar Hamlin suffered a heart attack in the first quarter of the Bills-Bengals game. Because there always has to be a major corporate entity to blame, the NFL took a lot of heat for not canceling the game soon enough but I felt everyone involved that night did an A+ job considering the unprecedented circumstances. That includes the two coaches, the players on both teams, ESPN, the fans, and yes…the NFL itself. The right decision was made and it was handled as well as you can possibly handle it.

2 – MEDICAL HEROES – The real heroes here are the various medical people who attended to Hamlin. You can pay professional athletes as many millions as you want, but the fact remains that no amount of money is enough to pay those who have the ability to save your life. I wish we knew their names. Maybe some of you do. I don’t consume mainstream media anymore so perhaps there have been stories done on the trainers and emergency responders, but their names aren’t as ‘out there’ as they should be.  

3 – PAST SIMILAR INCIDENTS – While nobody can recall ever seeing something like what happened to Hamlin in the NFL, there have been a number of situations in the NHL over the years so those that say this ‘never’ happens would be incorrect with that assessment. Chris Pronger, Rich Peverley, and Jay Bouwmeester all come immediately to my mind in recent years. Jiri Fischer collapsed on the Detroit Red Wings bench in 2005 and was unconscious for six minutes before being resuscitated. In 2016, AHLer Craig Cunningham went down during the pregame skate and needed 83 minutes of continuous CPR. In Russia, Sergei Zholtok died in the arms of Darby Hendrickson in the dressing room in 2004. So, this DOES happen.  That doesn’t mean we can’t talk about it, which I will address in point 10.

4 – NFL STANDINGS – I can appreciate the NFL was put in an impossible position to try and determine the standings in the AFC. With Buffalo and Cincinnati not playing the most important Monday Night game in many years, you have a situation where no matter what is decided, someone is getting shafted. Kansas City has the most wins – 14. Buffalo and KC both have 3 losses and the Bills did beat the Chiefs, in Kansas City, earlier in the year. But, how do you not reward the team with the most wins? My solution would be to have pushed the start of the playoffs back a week and made the Bengals and Bills play the game. At some point, life has to go on. Then you have Cincinnati, which lost against Baltimore earlier in the year and they may have been in a situation where they could have rested their regulars on Sunday, but they needed to go all-out and even by doing that, the standings could have gotten icky in the event of a Ravens win. The Bengals finish 12-and-4, the Bills 13-and-3, the Chiefs 14-and-3. Why can’t you just rank them Chiefs, Bills, Bengals and forget the neutral site games? Winning percentage seems to make this quite clear cut.

5 – CANADA GOLD – Canada won World Junior gold this week with a thrilling overtime victory over Czechia. After taking a shot at the state of Canadian goaltending last week, I watched Thomas Milic simply get better with each passing game. Canada won gold and then I, immediately, shut the game off so I missed the now famous quote from Connor Bedard, who deflected talking about himself and wanted to discuss only the achievements of the team. While it’s admirable that young Bedard was able to fend off such a stupid question by a seasoned media ‘professional’, the reality is that there needs to be much more accountability in the media when it comes to doing interviews. A lot of these folks show just how bad they are at their jobs in the phrasing of their questions.  

6 – BEDARD IMPACT – What does the achievement by Bedard at the World Juniors do for fan attendance at Pats games? I guess it remains to be seen, but I hope the Pats pull out all the stops as far as marketing and promotion is concerned rather than sitting back and assuming people are going to line up at the ticket office without any nudging. I also understand the appetite some may have to see Bedard get traded for future help but unless the Pats are getting two surefire, guaranteed first liners there is no point in dealing him. I’ve never felt that trading established players for lotto tickets ever gets you ahead. Sure, we can all point to a couple of transactions where the future haul was highway robbery, but in most cases you never ever recover what you give up.

7 – BEDARD DOMINATES – By the way, in case you missed it, Bedard had four goals (two shorthanded) and two assists in his first game back for Regina on Sunday in a win over Calgary. We’ve never seen this level of domination ever before and I don’t think we will see it again in our lifetimes. Watch if you want. Don’t if you don’t want to, but you can’t see you never had the opportunity.

8 – COST OF GAMES – I had to check multiple sources, but ticket prices for the gold medal game in Halifax this week were in the neighborhood of $20,000 a seat. Who says Maritimers are poor? I don’t know if anyone actually paid that or not as I’m assuming all the tickets would have been pre-purchased before the tournament even began but this does bring to light an issue that some of have been talking about for years – the cost of junior hockey (especially the World Juniors) is out of hand. Until the seats are empty (and they weren’t in Halifax) you have to concede to supply and demand as to whether or not the prices are grossly inflated or not. There are signs at the club level in both Major Junior and Junior A that prices have reached a point where fans are starting to say ‘no’ and that does need to be paid attention to.

9 – STEVE YOUNG AUTOBIOGRAPHY – It took me about a month, but I finished my first audio book this week. It was Steve Young’s autobiography. What I didn’t know was that the play that caused Young’s career ending concussion wasn’t really a career ending play. Lawrence Phillips (who has since died while in jail) missed a block and Young got drilled by Aeneas Williams. Young says within 48 hours he felt fine and numerous medical checkups indicated he had no lingering effects of the hit.  Nevertheless, Steve Mariucci wasn’t comfortable putting Young back into a game and so he missed the rest of the season. Then Denver coach Mike Shanahan approached Young about playing for the Broncos, but Young just felt if he wasn’t going to play for San Francisco, he didn’t want to play at all and, therefore, he retired. To this day, Young says he has suffered no long term complications from numerous concussions during his playing days and he’s thankful for that, but also puzzled because CTE is very real and several other players who played in the same era have not had nearly as happy an ending.

10 – NEED TO HAVE THESE DISCUSSIONS – The cause of Damar Hamlin’s cardiac arrest on Monday seems to be off limits in media circles. I’ve told both of my pro-vax and anti-vax Twitter doctor friends to cool it with their diagnosis. Nobody has any idea what caused this health event. The fact we aren’t allowed to discuss it, however, seems weird to me and that only fuels further covid vaccine skepticism so you’d think we’d want to have these conversations to quell that. I can also tell you Bills broadcaster John Murphy suffered a stroke last weekend. Bad week for the Bills to be sure. 38-year-old Uchechukwu Nwaneri, who played offensive line for Jacksonville, died from a heart attack this week. Meanwhile, 40-year-old Modeste M’Bami (former Cameroon and Paris Saint-Germain soccer player) died from a heart attack this weekend.  These ‘rare’ deaths just don’t seem so rare right now and we should be talking about it without assigning blame before we actually get real concrete answers. If all of these people were felled by Covid, their deaths would be weaponized by the media but since they aren’t, we are met with crickets and that doesn’t do anyone on either side of the argument any good. For me, I say since the shots are no longer mandated all we can do is arm ourselves with whatever information we can find and make decisions accordingly. Personally, I’ve got my two and that’s all I’m getting whether they bring back mandates or not. Put me in the suspicious category.

(Mike Stackhouse is a freelance writer/broadcaster. Follow him on Twitter at @Stack1975)