New York Rangers' Tony DeAngelo gets off a pass during the first period of an NHL hockey game against the Pittsburgh Penguins in Pittsburgh on Jan. 22, 2021.The Associated Press
Of all the insults you can throw at a pro, the most nuanced is, “That guy’s got a lot of personality.”
Personality can mean you are unhinged; or that everyone who’s ever met you would like to punch you; or that you have Oedipus issues. It can also just mean that you’ve just got a lot of personality. It’s a situational term.
What’s constant about personality is that only certain athletes on certain teams at certain times are allowed to have one. Bill Laimbeer was permitted a personality in Detroit, on the Pistons, in the 1980s. Anywhere else, and he’d probably be in jail.
New York Rangers defenceman Tony DeAngelo has personality. Based on his interactions with all the other boys and girls, it’s not the good kind.
New Jersey-born DeAngelo is a vocal fan of Donald Trump. He’s a fan of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But mostly, DeAngelo is the president of the NHL’s Saying Things Out Loud I Know Will Upset People fan club.
In some places, in some sports, at some other time, DeAngelo would be colourful. His tendency to act out and pick fights with his own teammates would be evidence that he is driven to win.
But in New York, with the Rangers, in 2021 – not such a great place or time for personality.
On Sunday, less than four months after they’d signed him to a US$10-million extension, the Rangers waived DeAngelo. Shockingly, no one in the NHL was willing to take this expensive problem off New York’s hands.
On Monday, Rangers general manager Jeff Gorton said DeAngelo had played his last game for the team. We all make mistakes, but yours don’t cost as much as a Tuscan village.
Two parallel issues got New York to this point, one more important than the other.
On the one hand, DeAngelo’s bloviating was getting harder to ignore. He’d taken great public umbrage after Twitter kicked Trump off its platform.
He was also getting harder to control in person. After berating officials in the first game of the season, the Rangers scratched DeAngelo for a couple of games. On Sunday, it was reported that he’d gotten into a post-game tunnel scrap with a teammate. And because DeAngelo is so ambitious in his transgressions, not just any teammate. The goalie.
This sort of anti-social behaviour is nothing new for DeAngelo. He’s been a malcontent for years, reaching back to his days in junior hockey.
And on the other hand, all of a sudden, DeAngelo wasn’t much good.
If you’re going to pay a player like he’s Dougie Hamilton or Charlie McAvoy, you have a reasonable expectation that he will play like them. Through six games, DeAngelo had as many unsportsmanlike penalties (1) as he had points.
Meanwhile, the Rangers had come spilling out of the starting gate backwards and upside-down. Their hot new season-ticket seller – No. 1 overall pick Alexis Lafrenière – looks well out of his depth in the NHL. It is way, waaaay too early to call Lafrenière a bust, but it’s New York, so people already have.
While things are not going well for the Rangers, they are for just about every other team in New York. Even the Mets have achieved some semblance of forward motion. That scenario might leave some Rangers executives worried about their own futures.
That’s DeAngelo’s real mistake – he failed to take into account the complex, inter-related social and competitive reality in which he makes his living.
If he played, say, football in, say, Arkansas, and was doing it, say, better, DeAngelo could be out there talking about an Illuminati Star Chamber led by George Soros and Matt Damon that controls the world’s banking system and his bosses would be all, “Tony, we hear you. But could you post this stuff to a burner account instead of the team’s official Instagram?”
Instead, DeAngelo plays bad hockey on a bad team in midtown Manhattan, three weeks after one half of America decided to Boston Tea Party their own seat of government. What did he think would happen?
Unless he is a complete tool, DeAngelo could see where this was headed. It’s hard to feel much sympathy for someone who drowns after punching a hole in their own boat.
Somebody, somewhere, thinks this is unfair. That DeAngelo should be allowed to speak his mind, utter his truth, stand up for what he believes and a whole bunch of other nonsense.
DeAngelo isn’t a senator, or a political prisoner. Like every other pro athlete, he is a performer in a circus. The circus survives by attracting customers willing to pay to see the show. If your behaviour prevents people from wanting to do that, you are surplus to needs.
Anyone who doesn’t understand that, doesn’t understand what it is they do for a living. They got confused and began to think what they do is important. It isn’t. It’s hard to think of any job less important right now than ‘hockey player.’
Is DeAngelo being punished in part because he is on the currently unpopular side of the American political spectrum? Absolutely.
Is that fair? No.
Here’s what today’s modern circus performers don’t seem to get – none of this is meant to be fair.
Is it fair that you make more money in a weekend than a kindergarten teacher does in a year? No. But I don’t hear anyone in sport complaining about that. The few who do speak to such issues don’t seem in any great rush to give the money back.
Playing sport at the highest level is a privilege, and not in the way we currently use that word. It is a privilege in the sense that, short of what you’ve got in writing, nothing about it is guaranteed.
You can be uninvited at any time if you fail to carry yourself in a way that shows well on your employer. Behave accordingly. Or don’t. In some places at some times, your boss might see some benefit in employing loudmouths, weirdos and/or conscientious objectors.
But if you choose to let your true personality hang out there, and if it all then goes wrong, don’t pretend to be surprised. It’s no one else’s fault that you never bothered to learn the rules.