Baffoe: Duncan Keith & A Return To The Steady
By Tim Baffoe--
(CBS) Hockey memes are, for the most part, bad.
They usually involve some sort of dog whistle, if not blatant declaration of the game's superiority to other sports via honor and toughness. And like most of the Internet, they're chalk full of logical fallacies and ignorance.
There's your "best tradition in sports" handshake business.
There's the "hockey is tougher" idiocy -- which suspiciously almost always juxtaposes basketball and its best player for some reason.
And then there's the "NHL players aren't selfish" buffoonery, which ignores that there have been four work stoppages in the league since 1992. (And, hey, a return of the LeBron complex.)
And I'm not even going to share the Patrick Kane ones. Yet despite the non-creativity, you have to give the bumper stickers of social media credit: They're consistent and enduring. Which makes them all the more annoying if you don't choose to outright laugh in mockery at them.
But it would be equally wrong to negatively paint all of NHL hockey with as broad a brush as those lazy tweets and Facebook posts try to do conversely. There's consistent good in the game, just enough to keep an intelligent faction above water while the rest of the iceberg of fans screams obscenities under water.
Soon, one of the Chicago Blackhawks' pillars of consistency will be back on the ice after a significant absence. Defenseman Duncan Keith has been out since he had a meniscus surgically repaired in his right knee on Oct. 20. He was supposed to miss four to six weeks, but just three weeks after going under the knife, Keith has been cleared for contact and participated in an optional skate Tuesday at the United Center. He could see game action as soon as Saturday.
The Blackhawks could certainly use their alternate captain and reigning Conn Smythe winner back -- and not just because he's an established rock to lean on in front of goalie Corey Crawford.
There's a steadiness to Keith. Dare I say, he's Chicago's involuntary embodiment of the hockey meme. Yes, there's his resiliency from injuries like a torn knee or famously losing teeth to stop a slapshot from getting past him.
A calming comes with his presence that parallels his demeanor off the ice. Soft-spoken though not avoiding of the media, Keith has long been a reporter's go-to for honest commentary on the status of the Blackhawks — good, bad or otherwise. He's not the most eloquent of speakers. (He once even took media heat for a comment, the debatability of which was whether it was sexist or just "your analysis is inferior because you didn't play the game," which is a slightly dumber argument comparatively.)
But when pressed on a difficult issue such as his recent divorce and the intrasquad rumors tied to it, Keith didn't answer "hockey-only questions" and stroke reporters by thanking them for asking questions he wouldn't answer. He talked about it as maturely as he could. When off-ice Blackhawks issues involved him, he was steady, not flaky.
And under a team directive to dodge questions at the incredibly tone deaf 2015-'16 season kickoff press conference that was only about hockey and not Kane amid a rape investigation, Keith still managed to get a message across.
And as the Blackhawks look to further distance this season from this past offseason, it's the steadiness of Keith that can work to level the tumult the early season has seen, both in their current sixth-place standing the Central Division and otherwise.
Keith recently made us aware that his knee injury was suffered in last season's Stanley Cup Final against Tampa Bay. Rather than let the team know and chalking it up to normal wear and tear, Keith toughed it out through winning the championship and entered this season with the lingering injury.
Like a hockey meme, that was pretty dumb, and it cost him three weeks of this season.
Noted the Sun-Times' Mark Lazerus:
Maybe if Keith had mentioned something to his coaches, or the athletic trainers, or the team doctor, the team would have learned about the meniscal tear in his right knee earlier, and could have repaired it over the summer instead of during the season. Instead, Keith kept quiet. And after dealing with the pain during his summer workouts and throughout camp and into the first couple of weeks of the season, Keith finally relented.
But then asked how he was rehabbing, there was steady Keith, invoking a tongue-in-cheek toughness that you can't help but laugh at.
"I'm trying to push it every day and feel good," he said Tuesday. "It's just a meniscus. It's not getting my leg amputated."
Fine, I can't compete with that.
Go ahead. Be consistent. Make it a meme.
Tim Baffoe is a columnist for CBSChicago.com. Follow Tim on Twitter @TimBaffoe. The views expressed on this page are those of the author, not CBS Local Chicago or our affiliated television and radio stations.
