Keenan may be right about hockey players

While following the Blackhawks through the Stanley Cup playoffs, it became clear to me that Mike Keenan had a point.

Now, that's something you don't hear very often: Mike Keenan might have been correct about something.

But while the Hawks were extinguishing his Flames last month, Keenan remarked that hockey players are the world's greatest athletes.

At first blush that might sound absurd. For decades in the United States the prevailing opinion has been that NBA players are more athletic than anybody. Those guys run and jump and shoot and muscle each other, and generally compete in a modified decathlon every night.

Speaking of decathletes, fans of the Olympics love calling the decathlon gold medalist the world's greatest athlete.

OK, so a case could be made for that. The decathlon champ certainly is one impressive chiseled chunk of athlete.

Anyway, the discussion has many tentacles. My goodness, cycling advocates referred to Lance Armstrong as the world's greatest athlete when he was winning the Tour de France every year.

Sorry, but while I can't go there, it doesn't make me right or them wrong. Nor can anybody say unequivocally that Keenan is right or wrong or even sane.

But hockey players do have to be in the discussion, don't they? Why wouldn't they be, especially after the circus goals that Pittsburgh's Evgeni Malkin scored last week? Why shouldn't these players at least be in the discussion of the world's greatest athletes?

Actually, this shouldn't surprise me. NHL players amazed me from the first time I saw them as a kid.

Yes, that was when Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita were with the Hawks. They alone had to be as good - and as athletic - at what they did as anybody in any other sport was at what they did.

I'll never forget seeing my first hockey game and thinking that these guys are doing what football and baseball players do - and they're doing it on ice skates!

Asking an athlete to do that is like asking a fish to fly, but hockey players somehow pull it off without looking like fish out of water.

That was a big part of Keenan's argument - that hockey players are playing on ice and going somewhere between 20 mph and 30 mph.

They're doing it under duress against opponents who are swinging sticks at them, throwing bodies at them and shooting pucks at them.

Imagine Derrick Rose going to the hoop and Rajon Rondo whacking at him with a stick or Kendrick Perkins being allowed to throw a hip check into him.

The recent Bulls-Celtics series was rough at times, but a hard foul in basketball is like a wet kiss in hockey.

Maybe the point is moot. Like, how far would Rose have made it down the lane on skates anyway before crashing to the hardwood, which isn't any harder than a block of NHL ice?

Listen, other athletes in other sports shouldn't be slighted. Watching them is like listening to poetry.

It's just that hockey is like a poetry slam on skates, like a sonnet with a punch line.

So while Mike Keenan is generally goofy, he also might actually have had one moment of truth.