Michael Farber says it’s a crisis. Frank DeFord says, eh, no big thing. I say that if it’s any story about hockey, and people have been talking about it for two days, then it must be huge.

Personally, I don’t care if Jeremy Roenick, Janet Gretzky, or Ned Braden gamble their entire life savings on the next Grey Cup. That’s their business. No one’s in any position to tell athletes what they can or can’t do in their free time. But, that said, it is bad news when you have professional athletes aligned with organized crime and gambling rings. You can’t have that. A sport absolutely cannot tolerate that.

I know that no one involved has (yet) been accused of gambling on hockey. But, let’s say, for example, that you’ve got a guy who happens to be an assistant coach for an NHL franchise in the southwestern portion of the United States. Let’s say this guy starts up an illegal gambling ring, taking millions of dollars in bets. I’m supposed to believe that he’ll draw the moral line at gambling on hockey? Clearly, this hypothetical person is not all that concerned with ethical behavior.

I just could not be convinced that if you’ve got a hockey coach, an illegal gambling ring, and all kinds of guys with mob ties, that they’re going to stop themselves at some point and say, “Hey, wait this might be unethical. We can’t take bets on hockey. We’re better people than that. Now, come on, we’re going to be late for our volunteer shift at Meals on Wheels.” No. That possibility that none of this ever affected hockey strikes me as remote.

If you’re the NHL, or any sports league, you simply can’t have your athletes and coaches hanging out with people in the gambling industry. I mean, I don’t care if Michael Jordan and his pals play Pebble Beach for $60,000 a hole, or if Jaromir Jagr plays blackjack for $100,000 a hand. That’s not what we’re talking about here.

For an athlete, a guy with so much information about his own team and other teams, to be hanging out with someone involved in a mob gambling ring… that just looks bad. A sport can’t risk it. I know I said that no one has a right to tell athletes what to do with their personal lives, but if 17-year-old Guy LeMullet was friends with a guy running a gambling ring before he got to the NHL (which seems unlikely), then he has to stop being friends with him once he’s in the NHL. A relationship like that can jeopardize an entire league.

And, back to this particular instance, it was much more than any of that. A coach is accused of actually bankrolling an entire illegal operation, with the help of organized crime and a(n) (alleged) dirty cop. To me, that is a huge, huge, story. And it gets huger when you consider that the two people named so far, Rick Tocchet and Janet Jones Gretzky, surround the game’s most famous and influential figure on both sides… well, that’s not good.

The whole thing kinda baffles me. I don’t know why someone as successful as Rick Tocchet is screwing around with some New Jersey wiseguys to do something that could put him away for 10 years and deliver a serious black eye to his sport. It will be interesting to see what kinda of details continue to surface.