Bruce Dowbiggin
Are We Okay With Ovie As Hockey’s Greatest Goal Scorer?
Come meet Bruce Dowbiggin, co-author of Deal With It: The Trades That Shocked The NHL & Changed Hockey. Get your copy autographed, talk hockey. In Calgary Saturday Sept. 28 at Shawville Indigo 11-4. On Saturday Oct. 12 Signal Hill Indigo 11-4. Appearances coming in Fredericton late October and Toronto in early November. Let’s do this thing!
With the grinding war in Ukraine showing no signs of ceasing and Biden-led sanctions doing nothing tangible to deter Vladimir Putin, Russia’s image in the West has rarely been so low. Both sides in the U.S. election accuse each other of being Putin’s stooges, signifying his toxic status. So now might be a good time to ask if the NHL is prepared for a Russian to become the greatest goal scorer in league history.
As the league prepares to start another season on October 4, the top pick in the 2004 Draft is showing every sign that he could pass the game’s greatest in goal scoring. Going into 2024-25, the 39-year-old Capitals star Alex Ovechkin has left the immortal Gordie Howe in the dust. He’s now just 41 scores back of Wayne Gretzky, the Prometheus of NHL scoring. He’s recently broken Gretzky’s record for the most 40-goal seasons in the process. Given health it won’t be the last Gretzky mark eclipsed by Ovie.
1. Wayne Gretzky. 894
2. Alex Ovechkin 853
3. Gordie Howe 801
For his career, the Capitals captain is averaging 0.60 goals per game, meaning at that rate, he could pass Gretzky this season, a pace that Ovechkin is very familiar with. It’s not a given. He scored just eight goals in his first 43 games of 2023-24, but came back strong in the second half of the season to put up a total of 31 for the year, which was the lowest goal-scoring total in an 82-game season.
Hampering him as well might be the ineptitude of the Caps who missed the postseason the past two seasons and who now have few alternatives to draw the defensive concentration away from Ovechkin.
And then there is good health. He’s never played fewer than 68 games in a full regular season. But Ovechkin said he tweaked something mid-training this past summer. He assured the Caps it’s nothing major. “You just have to be smart, and we talk about it with our trainers and the coaching staff. I went there just to see how I feel and feel nice out there,” Ovechkin said after the Caps first practice.
Even in a time of peace this would be interesting to see the public reaction in Canada and the U.S. to a Russian passing Canada’s GOAT No. 99. While the No.1 pick in 2005, Sidney Crosby, has had a squeaky clean image, the Great Eight has been a little salty for some folks. He plays a game Howe would love, dispensing devastating hits as well as brilliant goals. His gap-toothed sneer has not always endeared him to many.
Nor, as we noted in July of 2022, has his proximity to Vladimir Putin himself. In November 2017, Ovechkin started a movement called PutinTeam in support of Putin during the 2018 Russian presidential election. In the past he’s sought to have a foot in both camps. “I don’t know what’s happening out there,” he said in 2022. “I know it’s a hard situation, but it is what it is. You know, I play here, and this is my second home. I don’t want to fight between two countries, because it’s going to be a mess.”
Too late on that front, Alex. Putin’s naked aggression and Biden’s clumsy inability to unseat him (he’s endorsed assassination) have left the West on the brink of a war with nuclear potential. Legendary Czech goalie Dominik Hasek thinks Ovechkin should not be allowed to play in the NHL, and that Russian players be banned. “The NHL should, and could make a decision,” Hasek told reporters. “It’s not only about [NHL Commissioner] Gary Bettman. There are 31 owners of NHL teams, and I think that those people are the most responsible. They can sit in their room, and they can vote and make a decision, but they do not want to make that decision.”
With perhaps a million dead so far and no settlement in sight, few can say where the conflict is headed. Except that it’s highly unlikely the West will be surrendering its sons to the battlefield when NATO runs out of Ukrainians willing to die.
One thing about Ovechkin is certain. As we pointed out in our 2022 book Inexact Science: the Six Most Compelling Drafts in NHL History, Ovechkin put paid to the bias against Russians at the top of the NHL draft. While there had been Russian Hall of Fame selections in the middle to lower rounds of the draft (Sergei Fedorov, Pavel Bure, Sergei Zubov) Ovechkin’s No. 1 overall was considered a risk at the time. He changed the equation.
“It began in 2004, when the Capitals selected Russian phenom Alex Ovechkin, maybe the greatest pure goal scorer the NHL has seen. A number one pick who has lived up to the billing of “generational player,” Ovechkin maybe would have been even more widely hailed as that “Next One” had he developed under the intense hockey media spotlight of Canada, or North America in general.
Never before had an international player earned the kind of accolades Ovechkin received leading up to his draft year. After all, he was only the second Russian ever to go that high on draft day. But the fact he wasn’t a Canadian kid may have tempered the headlines around “Ovie” and made some fans skeptical about his supposed wizardry.
He wasn’t helped by how easily a stacked Team Canada had handled him and his Russians in the World Juniors of 2004 and 2005. In retrospect, “The Great 8” was actually undersold as a generational legend. But all of this made his majestic rookie season as a 20-year-old in 2005–06 more of a revelation than it would have been otherwise.
CAA agent J.P. Barry says that some resistance remains. “Even with Russian players, we’ve seen a hesitance in the past. A few teams have said to me, “Sorry, we just don’t draft Russians. End of story.” I know of several teams that did make that an internal memo. Some even said, “We can’t take a Euro in the first three rounds!” I don’t think there’s any team that could say any of that anymore, though. Way back when, however, there were these unwritten internal policies that were just silly.
There was definitely a period there where teams didn’t want to touch Russians, because they didn’t feel that they could get them to come over. Sometimes they were teams impacted by something negative that happened in the past and let it change their course of action.”
If Ovechkin didn’t entirely smash the Russian stereotype then his countryman Evgeni Malkin, selected right behind Ovechkin in the 2004 draft, sealed the deal. (Ironically the two were rivals for a long time, only reconciling in recent years). Lifetime, Malkin has 444 goals and 702 assists in an injury-riddled career.
To the NHL’s credit, it hasn’t banned or sanctioned its Russian stars as some have done. The country’s teams are banned from international soccer and hockey tournaments and the Paralympics. Russian tennis players Daniil Medvedev and Andrey Rublev (the top-2 ranked Russian male players) were barred from participating at the 2022 Wimbledon. Many Russian artists have seen their concerts cancelled.
For now Ovechkin is walking a tight rope. He’s called for peace without mentioning Russia or Ukraine directly. In May 2022, he reiterated his support for Putin, as well as retaining the Russian president on his Instagram profile photo. Much depends on the progress of the war, and how much Canada and the U.S. are drawn into the combat.
The best advice is probably to keep his head down and his politics to himself if he wants to be celebrated for passing Gretzky.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
Most living in Canada would agree that a crumbling infrastructure and healthcare shortages could justify adding bodies to the public rolls. But a deep dive into those jobs extolled by the PM shows an explosion of new positions, not in public works or the military, but in the vanity areas of DEI, gender equality and climate change.
In the tsunami of miserable economic and political news generated by the Trudeau government the past decade, party flacks have always tried to point to job growth in the economy as a sign that they’re doing something right.
But if you look carefully at the numbers of full-time jobs “created”, it soon becomes apparent that most of the highly touted “new” jobs are public-service positions. At all three levels of government the number of workers in Canada’s public sector has soared in recent years, far outpacing the hiring in the private sector.
For example, the federal public service has grown by 38 per cent since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came to power in 2015, according to MEI, a Montreal-based think tank. During the Covid years, nine out of every ten jobs created was in the public service.
Here was Trudeau in 2022 cheering on his aggressive hiring processes, which have also included a similar growth in the use of consultants. “Thanks to your hard work and the hard work of Canadians across the country, Canada’s unemployment rate is the lowest it’s been since the start of the pandemic. In fact, more than 154,000 jobs were created last month — and … in the COVID-19 Era, more than one million jobs have been recovered.”
Most living in Canada would agree that a crumbling infrastructure and healthcare shortages could justify adding bodies to the public rolls. But a deep dive into those jobs extolled by the PM shows an explosion of new positions, not in public works or the military, but in the vanity areas of DEI, gender equality and climate change.
With their generous pensions and benefits these new employees are an expensive drag on the public purse. In addition, except for the very top of the pay scale, government salaries are typically higher than those in the public sector. Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland give Canadians the impression that their massive hiring binge— paid for by increasing debt— means a healthy growing economy. But the money that is moved from the private economy to public economies chokes productivity and creates inflation.
As a result, Canada’s GDP is lowest in the leading Western nations while its borrowing now sits at an unsustainable $713 billion. Carrying the debt is expected to cost the federal treasury $60.7 billion in 2028-29, according to the government’s own economic statement.
No wonder economists warn that this growth of government jobs is not sustainable in the long run. “If you look at how the private sector’s trending, it’s sharply decelerating,” Beata Caranci, chief economist at Toronto-Dominion Bank,
As just one example of runaway government hiring, listen to Kareem Allam, former Vancouver city budget chief, who went on Vancouver’s CKNW recently to describe how runaway hiring has affected his city. “We had 1,200 city employees in 2008. We have about 9,000 now. There are 700 people in the city of Vancouver staff that work full-time on climate change. And (yet) our GHG emissions keep going up.”
While Americans are experiencing the same bloating of the civil service, Allam points out that they are more efficient than Canadians. “Dawn Pinnock is the head of the Civil Service in the city of New York. She’s their city manager. And not only is she responsible for being the city manager, she’s also got the same responsibility as (Vancouver’s) Translink, but in New York.
And it’s a city that has thirteen times the population of Greater Vancouver. Dawn makes US$ 240,000 a year. Our CEO of Translink, our CEO of Metro Vancouver, and our city manager combined make $1.4 million. The executive from New York doing the job of essentially three executives here in the lower mainland, and yet making a fraction of what they make here.”
Naturally these salaries have to come from somewhere. That somewhere is tax. “It is unbelievable the amount of money that is pouring into city hall and the lack of accountability we’re seeing around how that money was being spent,” says Allam. “When Gregor Robertson first got elected as mayor in 2003 the city budget was $894 million. It’s going to be well over $2.4 billion this year.
“That’s almost a tripling of our taxes. Is anyone in Vancouver thinking that we’ve gotten a triple in the benefit of services? Are potholes getting better?”
There are some exceptions to the bloating of the public service and its budgets. In Calgary, the multi-billion Green Line transit system has been chewing through hundreds of millions without any progress. The original estimate of track was shrinking with the southeast part of the plan mothballed. Now the unpopular Green Line has been stopped by the provincial UCP government of Danielle Smith.
Assessing the project as a “boondoggle” Transportation minister Devin Dreeshen said, “This is unacceptable and our government is unable to support or provide funding for this revised Green Line Stage 1 scope as presented in the city’s most recent business case… throwing good money after bad is simply not an option for our government.” Calgary’s progressive city council is seeking to find alternatives (they could always build a direct link to the airport) before they’re tossed out of office in the next municipal elections.
Would that Ontario and Toronto governments had paused before creating their Metrolinx Crosstown subway line, the 25-stop, 19-kilometre project. Work began in 2011 and Metrolinx previously announced completion dates of 2020 and 2021. Its budget has now soared to $13 billion with stories emerging of 260 cases of quality control issues still pending at the start if the summer.
One of Pierre Poilievre’s favourite attack lines against the federal Liberals has been getting control of spending, making government live within its means as taxpayers do. No one expects him to slay the dragon as Javier Milie has done in Argentina. But Canadians will be looking to him to at least change the Trudeau Spend, Spend, Spend philosophy before it ruins the nation.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
From the Brownstone Institute
No data is 100% secure, and this is mental health data. Data that might be extremely embarrassing, career-damaging, or has the potential to disrupt family relationships. Remember, no one knows what new laws, regulations, or more might come to pass years from now.
True Story: The Health app built into iPhones is now collecting as much personal information on the mental health of each and every one of us as they can get a hold of.
Yet, a search on Google and Brave yielded no results on the dangers of sharing such information over the phone or the internet. Seriously, no single MSM has done an article on why such data sharing might be a bad idea?
To start, in sharing such data, you aren’t just sharing your information; iPhone knows exactly who your family members are. In many cases, those phones are connected via family plans.
iPhone mental health assessments not only ask questions about your mental health but can also infer the mental health status of family members, as demonstrated by the image publicly shared by phone on the benefits of a phone mental health assessment.
What could possibly go wrong?
Although the iPhone has historically been known to keep user data “safe,” this is not a given, and there have been hacks and data breaches over the years.
CrowdStrike happened – from just a simple coding error. In 2015, all of my confidential data given to the DoD and the FBI in order to get a security clearance was harvested by the Chinese government, when they hacked into the government’s “super-secret,” and “super-secure” government data storage site. In response, the government offered me a credit report and monitoring of my credit score for a year. Yeah – thanks.
The bottom line – no data is 100% secure, and this is mental health data. Data that might be extremely embarrassing, career-damaging, or has the potential to disrupt family relationships. Remember, no one knows what new laws, regulations, or more might come to pass years from now. This type of information should not be harvested and stored.
Stay Informed with Brownstone Institute. Sign up for updates.
Furthermore, trusting that Apple will never sell that data or pass it off to research groups is very naive. In fact, mental health data is already being mined.
Apple has partnered with various health organizations and academic institutions to conduct health-related studies, such as Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the University of Michigan on various health studies. Apple also collaborates with the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) on a Digital Mental Health Study. This study likely utilizes data collected through Apple devices to investigate mental health patterns and outcomes. Trusting that the user identifiers have been completely stripped before that data is passed on is a risk that one takes when entering such information into an iPhone.
“Connect with resources.”
So how does Apple benefit? At this time, it appears that Apple is selling advertising of various mental health services by “connecting” services to people’s phones. Apple writes that “These assessments can help users determine their risk level, connect to resources available in their region, and create a PDF to share with their doctor.”
That might mean that if one presses the depressed button in the mental health assessment, Apple will place ads on the search engine for anti-depressants or physicians that prescribe them.
Why would that example be relevant, and which pharmaceutical companies might benefit?
iPhone has developed their mental health assessment with an “educational grant” from Pfizer!
Pfizer manufactures and sells Zoloft, Effexor, Pristiq, and Sinequan formulations. Together the sales revenue for these drugs is in the billions each year:
From 2015 to 2018, 13.2% of American adults reported taking antidepressant medication within the past 30 days, with sertraline (Zoloft) being one of the most common. Even off-patent, there were 39.2 million prescriptions filled with an annual sales revenue of 470 million.
Effexor XR is an antidepressant medication that was originally developed by Wyeth (now part of Pfizer). In 2010, when the first generic version of Effexor XR was introduced in the United States, the brand name product had annual sales of approximately $2.75 billion. By 2013, due to generic competition, Pfizer’s sales of Effexor XR dropped to $440 million.
According to IMS Health data, in 2016, Pristiq (desvenlafaxine) had annual sales of approximately $883 million in the United States, although sales appear to have fluctuated over the years.
The bottom line is that Pfizer is not supplying educational grants to develop mental health assessment software for Apple out of the “goodness of their heart.” Mental health inventions via medication are a big business, and these companies are looking to profit.
This is just one way that Apple is using surveillance capitalism by data mining mental health status and then selling access to that data to Big Pharma, Big Tech, physician and insurance companies, etc.
How this information, which once released or leaked, can never be returned with privacies intact, will be used in the future is unknown.
If the setting for sharing research on health conditions has not been deactivated, this information will go into a database somewhere. It is only Apple’s assurance that your identification has been stripped from the data. Further, your mental health information will be uploaded to the cloud and will be used as a behavioral future. To be shared, packaged, sold, used to influence your decision-making, etc.
I am wary of the highly profitable industry that has been built up around “mental disorders.” Over the years, the American Psychiatric Association and the fields of psychology and psychiatry have hurt individuals and families by both classifying diseases and disorders incorrectly and by developing treatments and therapies that were and are dangerous. Many are still in use. Here are a few examples:
- There are estimates that 50,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States, with most occurring between 1949 and 1952. In 1949, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to António Egas Moniz for his development of the lobotomy procedure.
- Homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder in 1952 with the publication of the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-I) by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). It was listed under “sociopathic personality disturbance.” This classification remained in place until 1973.
- Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) are a widely prescribed class of antidepressant medications. There is a link between SSRIs and increased risk of violent crime convictions, and other research has shown an increase in self-harm and aggression in children and adolescents taking SSRIs.
- The APA supports access to affirming and supportive treatment for “transgendered” children, including mental health services, puberty suppression and medical transition support.
- The APA believes that gender identity develops in early childhood, and some children may not identify with their assigned sex at birth.
- Asperger’s syndrome was merged into the broader category of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in the DSM-5 in 2013. Since then, a large number of people have faced discrimination and barriers to entry into higher-paying positions. Children handed such a diagnosis also can suffer a lack of confidence in their ability to manage relationships effectively, which can easily carry on to adulthood.
These are just a few of the many, many ways the American Psychiatric Association and the fields of psychology and psychiatry have gotten things very wrong.
- A survey of more than 500 social and personality psychologists published in 2012 found that only 6 percent identified as conservative overall, implying that 94% were liberal or moderate.
- At a 2011 Society for Personality and Social Psychology annual meeting, when attendees were asked to identify their political views, only three hands out of about a thousand went up for “conservative” or on the right.
The liberal bias in psychology influences findings on conservative behaviors.
To bring this back to the use of software applications and the iPhone mental health app in particular, be aware that these software programs are being developed by people with a liberal bias and who will view the beliefs of conservatives negatively. What this means for future use of this data is unknown, but it can’t be good.
If you do choose to use the mental health applications, which mainstream media has nothing but praise for, be aware – there are alligators in those waters.
But sure that the data sharing mode, particularly giving data access to researchers is turned off. But even then, don’t be surprised if your phone begins planting messages about the benefits, SSRIs, or other anti-depressant drugs into your everyday searches. Or maybe your alcohol use or tobacco use data will be used to supply you with advertisements on the latest ways to reduce intake or how to find a good mental health facility. These messages may very well include neuro-linguistic programming methods and nudging, to push you into treatment modalities. But honestly, it is all for your “own good and for the benefit of your family.”
Now, the iPhone and the watch can be valuable tools. The EKG, blood oxygen, and heart rate monitoring are fantastic tools for those who suffer from cardiac disorders. I have found them to be extremely helpful.
My wife, Jill is often motivated by getting more walking steps each week via her iWatch tracker.
Just be aware that these programs can be invasive. Data is never 100% secure and it is being used. We just don’t know all the details.
Republished from the author’s Substack
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