Down Goes Brown's Grab Bag: Concussion Emails, Wes McCauley, the Sabres and April Fools' Day

(Editor's note: Welcome to Sean McIndoe's Friday grab bag, where he writes on a variety of NHL topics. You can follow him on Twitter.)

The third star: David Legwand and Marcus Foligno—Do you ever get the nagging feeling that the one old guy on the team maybe doesn't really respect you and the other kids as much as he seems to?

When it's allergy season but you don't have a tissue. — NHL on NBC (@NHLonNBCSports)March 29, 2016

The second star: Whatever's going on with Justin Williams' hair here—Dude, it's picture day, drape a hot faceclotch over your head while you're eating your cereal in the morning.

Picture day finest#RockTheRed pic.twitter.com/jfFnSTJq1d
— Washington Capitals (@washcaps) March 28, 2016

The first star: Jonathan Bernier—At first you're going to assume this has something to do with the dancing astronaut next to him, but then it happens and OH NO!

The issue: Years of internal NHL emails were unsealed and made public this week as part of the ongoing legal battle over the league's handling of concussions and player safety.

The outrage: Many of them don't reflect especially well on the senders, or the league itself.

Is it justified: There's a ton here to chew on, not all of it directly tied to concussion litigation. We get glimpses at discussions over the Olympics and realignment. We watch Gary Bettman twist the screws on a TV partner. We even get to see a furious Brian Burke complaining about scoreboard replays.

But the meat here is the NHL's internal discussions on concussions, and on the steps the league could take to make the game safer. This is a selective dump and not everything is in context, so we're not getting anywhere close to a full picture here, but there's enough there to start forming some conclusions.

Colin Campbell and Mike Murphy come across as the old-school types, longing for the days when players weren't so "over doctored" and the league wasn't beholden to "tree huggers" and "Greenpeace pukes." Brendan Shanahan is the progressive, urging the league to reduce fighting because it's "the right thing to do." The league doesn't seem to trust the player's association on anything, and there's a healthy disdain for the media's ongoing coverage of the issue. The NFL makes an appearance. And in one exchange, Gary Bettman uses the concussion concerns as an occasion to make a joke.

But while there's a lot to digest in terms of what's here, it's also worth noting what's not. There's no smoking gun, at least not in the sense that some fans may have been expecting. There's nothing that points to a massive cover-up, or to a league gleefully counting its dollars while shrugging its shoulders at a health crisis in the face of overwhelming evidence.

Instead, we seem to be watching a league that knows it has a problem of some sort but can't agree on how big, or how best to deal with it. While some of the emails come across as dismissive, others carry a sense that the league does want to push the game to a better place. They just don't know what that place is, or how to get there, or even how quickly they should be moving. They're painfully aware of how major changes could be perceived by the fan base, and constantly worry about unintended consequences. And like many large organizations, they too often seem paralyzed by an inability to push beyond working groups and committees and actually get something done. They do make progress—we see Rule 48 on head contact go from controversial idea to reality—but it never feels like it's anywhere close to enough, and the overall look for the league is a bad one.

But there aren't any true bombshells in what we've seen so far, and nobody who steps forward and fills the role of the mustache-twirling villain (although Campbell comes close). In a way that's too bad; maybe that's what it will take for this story to result in the sort of change the game seems to desperately need. After all, concussions and the litigation around them present a genuinely existential threat to the league as we know it. In some sense, it would be nice to really see someone nailed to the wall, if only for the catharsis of it all.

We may still get exactly that—there are more emails out there, and we may eventually see them. But for now, we're left with something a little bit more nuanced; we've got a league and its employees struggling to make changes in the face of an emerging crisis without disrupting what some of them see as the fabric of the game.

It's not black and white, and it doesn't make for great outrage. But for now, at least, it's all we've got.

The Masterton nominations were released this week, and the inclusion of Ryan O'Reilly has set off yet another round of debate over just what the award is supposed to mean.

We seem to go through this every year, which is probably unavoidable given that the award's description—it's meant to recognize "perseverance, sportsmanship, and dedication"—is kind of vague. For years, the Masterton had become a de facto comeback award, one that recognized the player who returned after suffering the worst injury, illness or personal tragedy. The PHWA has been pushing back on that lately, reminding voters that they can apply a broader set of criteria. It seems to be working, which is why Jaromir Jagr is probably going to win this year.

But decades ago, back before the run of tragic comeback stories, the award used to go players for all sorts of reasons. The full list of winners includes everyone from superstars like Bobby Clarke and Henri Richard to somewhat less memorable names. Let's choose one of that latter group for this week's Obscure Player honors: 1980-81 Masterton winner Blake Dunlop.

A high-scoring OHL star, Dunlop was a second-round pick by Minnesota in 1973. He made his NHL debut that season, but didn't do much, going pointless in 12 games. That would be an early theme of his pro career, as he struggled to make an impact in Minnesota. After four partial seasons, he'd played an even 100 NHL games and scored just 18 goals and 48 points. The North Stars dealt him to the Flyers early in the 1977-78 season, and he spent almost the entire year in the minors, winning AHL MVP honors. He finally established himself as a full-time NHLer with a 48-point season the following year, then was dealt to the Blues where he recorded 45 points in 1979-80.

By that point, Dunlop was 27 years old, on his third NHL team, and seven full years removed from being drafted. And then, in 1980-81, the breakout finally came, with an 87-point season. That was the year he won the Masterton; voters back then clearly paid far more attention to the "preservation" aspect than today's have tended to.

Dunlop enjoyed two more productive seasons in St. Louis before a slow start to the 1983-84 campaign led to his release; he later caught on with the Red Wings for what would be his final NHL season. He retired at the end of the year, having suited up for 550 NHL games—or about 400 more than it had once looked like he'd play.

NHL instant replay announcements are awful. The referee's mic never works, they stumble over their lines, and half the time they still manage to get the call wrong. Meanwhile, the whole announcement is delivered with all the stage presence of a terrified child at the school play who just realized they need to go to the bathroom. These guys make the NFL refs look like Laurence Olivier.

So I've argued for years that the league should just abandon the announcements altogether and go back to the old system: point for a goal, wave for no-goal. Sometimes, old school really is better.

Then, during Monday night's Kings/Sharks game, Wes McCauley did this:

YES! Now that is a goal review call! Confident, direct, and loud—I'm not even sure if his mic worked, or he was just yelling loud enough that it didn't matter. It's short and gets right to the point, but still manages to build in just enough of a dramatic pause to create some tension. And, in a small detail that longtime readers will appreciate, he even finishes it off by avoiding the idiotic "good goal" phrasing that everyone else uses. The performance earned rave reviews, and rightly so.

Be it resolved that Wes McCauley now teaches an offseason course on how to deliver goal reviews, and no NHL referee is allowed near a microphone until they've taken and passed it.

Today is April Fools' Day, as you're no doubt already aware thanks to that one co-worker who insists on playing hilarious practical jokes on everyone at the office. Go easy on that guy. He probably once worked for the Buffalo Sabres.

• OK, let's set the scene right off the bat because things are about to get very weird. This is the April 1, 1990 broadcast of the Sabres' final regular season game of the year. They're finishing off one of their better seasons in recent franchise history and are hosting the last-place Nordiques, and the broadcast crew at NFSN is feeling wacky.

• Let's all just pause and enjoy a few moments of "Sabres Dance," the team's unofficial theme song for much of the 80s and early 90s and again in recent years. You know, we all love Brass Bonanza, and rightly so, but I don't think Sabres Dance gets enough love as far as novelty NHL songs go. Between this and "Let Me Clear My Throat", the Sabres organization has damn good taste in music.

• We transition to a very odd opening montage, featuring scrolling text that is kind of Star Wars but not quite. It contains words "escarpment" and "rarified air"—all set to extremely dramatic music. I think this might be part of the April Fools' joke, but I'm not entirely sure because it's 1990 and in hindsight literally everything seems like it must have been some sort of joke.

• Up next are some very early 90s graphics. Look, we had just figured out how to use computers to make things look shiny and we may have gone a little overboard. Give us a pass.

• And now we get to the studio crew, and something is amiss. Host John Gurtler welcomes us, and he's… well, he's not John Gurtler. The joke here is that the broadcast has swapped out all the regular faces, replacing them with random crew members. That becomes painfully clear when "Gurtler" throws it to Ted Darling and Mike Robitaille, who struggle through some pregame chatter as the Sabres walk by in the background.

• That's the real Robitaille and Darling going by in the background and briefly getting into a playful shoving match, which is extra funny when you watch the concerned guy in the blue shirt who doesn't seem to be in on the joke.

• Fake Robitaille is definitely the trying-too-hard guy of his crew, attempting to drop one-liners about running buses. Meanwhile, fake Darling gets the ol' goose, because it is literally impossible to be holding a hockey stick behind somebody who is doing something important and resist the urge to reach over and goose them.

• They refer to the last-place Nordiqes as "a team going nowhere." Oh, give it about five more years, guys, they're definitely going somewhere.

• We get what I think is a daylight savings joke from fake Robitaille, and then throw it to commercial with a tongue-in-cheek fact. Cheektowaga is a real place, by the way, and would go on to be rhymed with "Lackawanna" in a Joe Bowen-themed rap song three years later. Don't ever tell me you don't learn anything important from these columns.

• When we come back from break, fake Gurtler is joined by fake Danny Gare, here played by Chris Christie wearing Ron Paul's hair. Fake Gare blatantly reads his lines and sells his punchline by making my new favorite "please get me out of here" face.

• Look, I'm not saying this is the world's greatest joke, but you've got to give these guys credit for selling the hell out of it. Nobody winks at the camera, there's no "just kidding" graphic… the four impostors mostly just play it completely straight, and keep it up for the entire broadcast. If you're going to do the joke, you really have to commit. I admire that.

• We briefly head up to the broadcast booth, where, tragically, the real Robitaille and Darling are going to call the game instead of letting their doppelgangers give it a shot. But we cut away quickly and go back to the studio, where all four fakes have now gathered to work their magic. They make their Stanley Cup picks, and everyone picks the Flames because even in a bizarro alternate universe, nobody ever thinks the Sabres are winning anything.

• That face where you realize you've maybe stretched the joke out a little too long.

• Fake Gurtler signs off, but the fun's not over yet. We get some sideways credits, in which we learn that fake Robitaille was played by Dan Neaverth, the son of legendary Buffalo broadcaster Dan Neaverth and a future Erie County Emergency Services Commissioner. Keep an eye out for bonus fake names like Ray Zamboni and Graham Kracker. Or don't, I can't tell you how to live your life.

• How often do you think the real Gurtler googles himself and then has to be restrained from throwing his laptop out the window when he sees this?

• In case you were wondering what the point of all of this was, the annual April Fools' Day prank was actually a bit of a tradition in Buffalo, which makes sense coming from the franchise that gave us Taro Tsujimoto and other pranks. (And trust me, if you thought the 1990 broadcast was weird, head back to 1985 and watch them really let loose.)

Have a question, suggestion, old YouTube clip, or anything else you'd like to see included in this column? Email Sean at nhlgrabbag@gmail.com.