Connor Hellebuyck goes back on the Winnipeg Jets payroll today, which must come as a great source of joy and satisfaction to ... well, who, exactly?
Hellebuyck is, as you may remember from that burst of not-entirely-misguided patriotism you felt back in February during the Winter Olympics, the goalie for the gold medal–winning U.S. men's hockey team. He is also the longtime goalie of the Winnipeg Jets, kind of, and by acclaim the finest practitioner of that extremely difficult job on earth. Well, until lately.
Today, Hellebuyck is merely someone who fought the law, and while there is no full reckoning yet, so far the law has won. He was suspended by the Jets for not showing up at training camp, and the NHL season is now three weeks old, which makes it a month and three weeks since Hellebuyck made his official request to be traded to a team that plays somewhere other than Canada. In other words, this has not gone well.
But the suspension-without-pay ends today, under the provisions of the labor agreement between the NHL and the NHL Players Association that allows only for a suspension of "reasonable length" for a player under contract who wishes to return, which is to say, to start getting paid again. Hellebuyck has already lost many dollars—that's according to these accountancy renegades—but that clock stopped at midnight in the Central Time Zone. The Jets now must take him off suspension, and then they must decide whether he can actually come back to the team. And then they must decide whether they have a trade partner who is willing to take on his salary and part with sufficient assets/goodies to make the deal worth their while. It is a festival of mutual pissiness that has galvanized not just Manitoba (and you know how tetchy galvanized Manitobans can be) but Canada as a whole.
In a summer and fall of player trade demands that tested the orderly hockey fan's soul, Hellebuyck's has been both the most contentious and the most unifying. Brady Tkachuk's exodus from Ottawa to Florida was better organized on his part and more happily acceded to by the Senators, which is not to say their fans have let it go. Dylan Larkin's attempt to leave Detroit, and more specifically former head of hockey operations Steve Yzerman, is still pending.
But Hellebuyck's has been the most contentious and embittering on both sides, because unlike Tkachuk, who got to play with his brother Matthew within days of his demand, and Larkin, who at least finally turned up at work, Hellebuyck has remained at home to let the fates handle his public relations. This smacks Jets fans, hockey fans, and fans of work for pay as the height of hockey player effrontery. To the rest of the world, it looks like a regular old holdout, but hockey is always years out of phase on such matters. All of the above have turned nearly unanimously against Hellebuyck while they wait for a resolution that only Jets general manager Kevin Cheveldayoff can truly provide. Cheveldayoff's options include:
- Putting Hellebuyck back on the roster to get value for money.
- Paying him to stay home.
- Sending him to their minor-league team, the Manitoba Moose, which is conveniently located you-know-where, to get him into game shape for a game that may never come.
Of the three options, the second seems most likely. The Senators have already moved on, with the added satisfaction of beating Florida and Tkachuck on Wednesday night. The Red Wings have found a detente of sorts with Larkin, who has fulfilled his obligations; he had two assists in Wednesday's game against Seattle. But the Jets and Hellebuyck have been equally obstinate throughout these months.
The reason that the Hellebuyck issue has been Topic A this hockey season is because it represents the one thing chat shows love beyond all others: the squeaky wheel that nobody greases. And now we have reached the magical point where the Jets have to decide the exact financial level of their dissatisfaction. Metrics are one thing, and ephemeral standards like "Well, how mad are you?" can come and go, but money is the scoreboard that cannot be argued with. It is the indisputably measurable answer to the question, "How much do you hate a guy?"
That answer can be partially found in a sampling of Canadian sports chat shows, but even you haven't done enough crummy things in your life to be subjected to that. The salient point is that there is almost no pro-Hellebuyck sentiment to be found in the general public, which adds the other layer to this circus of too-tight underwear—how much does public dissatisfaction actually matter? That question is rhetorical.
No, this is worth noticing because the Jets also have a Sunday game outdoors against Montreal as part of the league's annual-ish Heritage Classic series. For a town like Winnipeg, this is a big deal, a celebration of being just big enough to get two franchises—the one that eventually went to Phoenix and then Salt Lake City, and then the one they got from Atlanta. The belief here is that Hellebuyck will not be invited to be part of the celebration because nothing adversely effects a party quite like 33,000 people hurling F-bombs at one person for showing up, invited or otherwise. Canada's well-documented and occasionally accurate penchant for courtesy will not be tested here.
In other words, Hellebuyck will start the paid part of his season as the same pariah he was in his unpaid period, and Monday is when the Jets' clock for fixing this mess actually starts.
Maybe Cheveldayoff will decide that there isn't a suitable deal to be found and let Hellebuyck sit out the four remaining years of his contract; we're not sure if that's legal, but as any sports owner will tell you, legal-schmeagal. Maybe he'll punish his wayward goalie by sending him to Columbus or Pittsburgh as a clear example of hate-trading.
But starting now, any executive dithering or standing on principle will cost his boss money, and the longer it takes the sooner the debate will morph into "We actually hate both of them." While more comprehensive in its condemnation of the principals, that is less satisfying than watching an industry pull off its own head in rage. At least it was unpleasant while it lasted, and we'll always have Connor Hellebuyck, Alien In His Own Land, as a way to justify whatever level of fandom we admit to having.
