Sanderson played in my heyday. He descended so far into the depths of alcoholism that he literally became a a skid row bum drinking from the bottle in a paper bag and passed out on the park bench. His life story is in book form and here is an actual documentary on it that many of you might have seen.
Drinking in those days by players at any level was prevalent night before, day of, between periods, and after the game. I haven't met many hockey players who don't like their beer.
Hockey players are also some of the biggest BS artists on the planet. A good lot are not well educated particularly back in Sanderson's day and before. They were hockey players from an early age and their education was never completed. They drank, they smoked, they womanized, and they played hockey the way lived or vice versa, HARD.
It's changed, but alcohol, beer in particular, is still part of the culture. They do still party. Every year we hear about some major issue with some team and the alcohol problems or partying or both. The Flyers with Carter and Richards and then the surfacing of the same problems in LA with the two at the center of the controversy. Kassian in Vancouver. Evander Kane wherever he goes. Patrick Kane with two major incidents back in Buffalo. There are many more and no team has been spared their story.
Yet, with all of this said, I can't believe this story from the standpoint of management encouraging such a prescription for dealing with a schneid. I think you have a combination of guys having a pop or 2 and the alumni displaying their party behavior reminiscing about the good old days and a Irish writer falling for a ruse.
Yeah. That's exactly what it is.
We all know binge drinking and substance abuse are still around in the game, even at the highest level. Not the same sort of lunacy you'd hear about from "back in the day", but it's still there and it starts right down at the lower levels. It's part of the culture of the game. When the time comes to party, they will part hard. There's evidence of this out there all the time, even for those who haven't been involved in the game.
Then there are the guys we hear about every year with the serious substance abuse problems that wash out of the league and into rehab/behaviour modification programs or open up about their struggle after the fact.
But what we have here, is an article probably foolishly conflating some "wild stories" from back in the day, with a couple players maybe having a beer or two with lunch the day before a game. If that even, considering the only named roster player in the exchange (Gudbranson) has been on the LTIR most of the year...and this whole exchange program thing was centered around the Alumni Scrimmage thing, meaning those guys were certainly around and playing "a game" of sorts - if one was ignorant enough to the NHL to not understand that's a glorified Beer League game, not a real "match".
It's a total non-story, aside from some folks who were apparently somehow ignorant to the fact that NHL players drink, drank, and are sometimes very drunk. Yet are gullible enough to believe the team is encouraging the sort of "change-up" described in the article.
Players do stuff and party and let loose like real people. Which i guess sometimes gets lost on a lot of fans who are convinced that they're all just numbers on a spreadsheet?
