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Making ice doesn't mean making nice
Are the Canadiens' Zamboni drivers up to no good?
Published: Tuesday, December 05, 2006
It's about time Zamboni drivers earned the same respect as baseball groundskeepers.
As masters of skulduggery, that is, the hockey version of what the great baseball huckster Bill Veeck once called his hometown edge in Cleveland: "the Michelangelo of groundskeepers."
Baseball's keepers of the field are famous for rigging the batter's boxes, the pitcher's mound, the basepaths and infield/outfield grass for a home-field advantage. An enemy fireballer is coming in to town? Then it might be time to change the angle of the pitching rubber, affecting that pitcher's push-off. Want to mess with the batters facing your fastball pitcher? Add some dirt to the batter's box so that those hitters will sink when they'd rather swim. A running team might have to deal with longer grass and tampered basepaths.
On it goes. Groundskeepers are such renowned (but loveable) masters of chicanery that an ESPN reader poll ranked the infamous Bossard groundskeeping family fourth among all-time baseball cheats, behind the 1919 Black Sox, but ahead of Pete Rose.
What is an ice man supposed to do for his organization? Any bad ice he makes is going to be bad for his team, too. Perhaps, with a faster, more skilled team coming in, the ice artist could soften the surface to slow things down.
It is a development in the new NHL, though, that may have provided Zamboni artists with the breakthrough they needed for a real impact: The shootout.
All regular-season games that are tied after regulation have to be settled with a five-minute overtime, and, if that resolves nothing, a shootout, a one-on-one, baseball-type confrontation between a few select shooters and a goaltender.
The NHL deemed it would hardly be right for the game's most skilled players to confront the pressure of a shootout without a decent ice surface. So, before the first shooter skates in alone from centre ice, a Zamboni clears a path, about two machine lanes wide, of snow chips that have accumulated during the third period and overtime.
The machines don't drop water, just scrape off the snow.
However, what if one of the hometown drivers left a little more snow down at his team's end of the rink as a slight hindrance to enemy shooters?
The Toronto Maple Leafs are claiming that the Montreal Canadiens' Zamboni man did just that on Saturday night during the shootout of a televised Hockey Night In Canada game.
Not for the first time, either.
Maple Leafs head coach Paul Maurice told beat reporters that the previous time the two teams met in Montreal (on Oct. 28), another game that ended in a shootout, "there was a six-foot swath from the blue-line to the crease."
This time, the Leafs coach was on the lookout for subterfuge, and he claims he found it. He hollered for referees Gord Dwyer and Kelly Sutherland to demand that the Zamboni return to do the ice properly in front of Canadiens goaltender Cristobal Huet.
The referees denied Maurice's request. The Habs ultimately won the shootout on goals by captain Saku Koivu and defenceman Sheldon Souray.
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