Burnside: NHL’s credibility rightfully questioned in wake of Blackhawks’ cover-up

If the National Hockey League thought that by making commissioner Gary Bettman and deputy commissioner Bill Daly available for the better part of an hour to break down the league’s response to the Chicago Blackhawks sexual assault scandal they could achieve some clarity or chart a new course out of the pall cast by the cover-up, well, that didn’t exactly happen.

In fact, it might be argued that the league is actually in a worse place in terms of its credibility after the media event – and that is saying something given the rightful pounding the league has taken in the last week since the findings of a report into the complaint made by former Kyle Beach were made public.

(At least groundbreaking journalist Rick Westhead of TSN finally got called on to ask a question near the end of the Zoom conference after being shamed into it by a colleague.)

After an hour of dutifully answering questions from reporters from around North America, the NHL seemed focused mostly on rationalizing their oft-criticized responses as opposed to having a frank and open discussion about the problems scandal has revealed.

Like, for instance, the paltry $2 million fine levied against the Blackhawks for covering up the 2010 sexual assault of Beach by then video coach Brad Aldrich, who not only got his name on the Stanley Cup and got to spend a day with the trophy but ended up with a nice work review from head coach Joel Quenneville before going on to be convicted of sexually assaulting a teenage hockey player in Michigan in 2013.

Several questioners pointed out the fine pales in comparison to other penalties levied against NHL teams like Arizona for a scouting combine transgression and the New Jersey Devils for salary cap circumvention.

“The others that you refer to: different context, different facts,” Bettman said. “This was to make clear that the way the Blackhawks organization handled this matter was not appropriate, even though ownership was not aware. And it was also a message to the rest of the league that you need to make sure your organization is functioning properly on these matters.”

For sure, it’s impossible to compare the Arizona and New Jersey situations to this tawdry event.

Two are hockey rules transgressions. The other is covering up a sexual assault for a decade so a team on the verge of a Stanley Cup final didn’t have to deal with ‘distractions.’

So, the reality is the $2 million fine for the Blackhawks sends a message vastly different than the one Bettman thinks it does. The Blackhawks should have been fined exponentially more than $2 million and been stripped of draft picks as a signal the league takes this seriously.

The $2 million fine says: This is an annoyance.

Similarly, the justification for letting former Chicago head coach Joel Quenneville man the bench for one final game for the Florida Panthers on Tuesday night before meeting with Bettman and being forced to resign is completely backwards.

Bettman referred to due process and wanting to be fair to Quenneville after the report clearly showed one day earlier that Quenneville played a pivotal role in suppressing the incident’s reporting.

 “I knew I had to have Joel come in, and I had to have a very candid conversation with him. He was entitled to due process in terms of letting me hear from him directly and judge his credibility,” Bettman said. “We were dealing with something that was 11 years previous. He had been on the bench for the past 876 games, and I didn’t want him to feel that he was being prejudged in any respect. So, really, while it may have optically not been the best look, I was more concerned with the substance than the look.”

Oy.

The league somehow still doesn’t get that the look is the substance.

The fact that the Florida Panthers and/or the NHL believed it was the right and fair thing to do to have Quenneville standing behind the Panthers’ bench hours after Beach gave his first gut-wrenching interview to Westhead on TSN is the substance.

And the substance of that image is we hear you, but we’re not really listening.

Bettman was also peppered with questions about why then-assistant GM Kevin Cheveldayoff wasn’t going to suffer additional sanctions a la Quenneville. Basically, the answer was that even though he was an assistant GM Cheveldayoff didn’t really have much responsibility, didn’t know anything, didn’t say anything in the meeting at which the allegations were first raised on the eve of the 2010 Stanley Cup final and can’t be held responsible for anything that happened then or after.

“I believe based on what was available to Kevin and what he did and did not know that he had no responsibility for this,” Bettman said. “It wasn’t a question about speaking up. It’s not a question of values. You can’t speak up and be focused on values on things you don’t know about. He didn’t know and he didn’t have access to the information. What he did know led him to believe that it was being dealt with appropriately.”

But for more than a decade, Cheveldayoff has been the leader of his own NHL club and as far as the NHL is concerned, had no responsibility to follow up even in the most causal way what might have happened to a player who made a claim of being sexually assault by another staff member on a team Cheveldayoff was part of – no matter how minimal his role at the time might have been.

Not once over a decade of attending multiple GM meetings a year with Bettman and Daly as GM of the Jets did it ever apparently come up because certainly if it had, the NHL might not be ruing the painful gap between Beach’s first complaint and what has now become an irrevocable stain on the game.

And so, Monday’s press conference appears to be a classic case of taking an about face away from logical responses. Even a simple question asked – finally – by Westhead about whether the NHL would extend to the victim of Aldrich’s sexual assault in 2013 the same offer that was made to Beach and his family for any kind of counseling that would assist them moving forward was mangled by the league.

Instead of simply saying, yes, of course, we’ll do whatever we can and as soon as we can to help this boy and his family, Bettman had to put a qualifier on it.

“I would have to know more about that circumstance. I am more focused because of the circumstances in front of us on what happened in the NHL environment. I certainly wouldn’t rule it out. I certainly would need to know more information,” Bettman said. “Having said that, making our resources available is something that I would probably, not even knowing all the facts, want to do. But I think I would need to know more before I can make the type of blanket commitment you’re asking me for.”

Really?

So, if explaining the past ended up to be pretty much a tire fire for the league, what can we take from this that gives us reason for any kind of optimism?

Two items we’re particularly interested in:

First, the league will be looking for a yet unnamed outside party to examine whether the league has all or enough pieces in places to first encourage people to come forward if they experience abusive or unwanted behavior, and then to respond properly to those allegations.

We asked if the NHL was prepared to share the results of that independent examination publicly but there wasn’t a clear answer to that.

“What we’re going to do is bring in professionals to make sure that the resources that we have and are devoting to this are adequate and what we can do that may be better,” Bettman said. “We think we’ve done a lot. I went through the list of things that have been put in place long before this, and I believe particularly as you’re seeing the culture of the game having changed over the years and continuing to change, I think we’re probably right now in a better place than we’ve ever been. I just want to make sure it’s good enough and that we can’t do better.”

Sure. But given the amount of cynicism that exists, especially as it relates to the league’s handling of this since the moment Beach’s lawsuit was made public in June, it behooves the NHL to be as transparent as possible. And to make sure that when this independent assessment is done, the public hears about it. Warts and all.

Secondly, the league has promised to help establish a network for reporting abuse of any kind that transcends the game. The NHL has for two seasons now had an anonymous reporting hotline that players and staff are encouraged to call if they encounter issues of racial or sexual abuse, intimidation, discrimination, hazing or bullying – or if they see others who are being victimized in any of those ways.

The NHL wants to be at the forefront of expanding that to include all levels of hockey regardless of age and gender and geographic borders.

“With respect to the other network I want to make sure there’s a structure in place that people – no matter who they are, where they are and in what level of hockey they’re involved in – they have a place that that they can access quickly by putting together the existing organizations that have the expertise in this in a network that connects people in our game at all levels closer to these resources,” Bettman said. “And that’s something we’re going to move forward on as prudently and as practically and as quickly as possible.”

Again, the appropriate cynicism will make it hard to embrace those as anything but words.

But given how hollowly the NHL’s words have resonated in recent days, maybe that’s as good as it gets right now.