We all wish this story could be taken at face value as a victory for merit and against nepotism, a triumph of the lack of human spirit and a blow against familial gladhanding. We want it to be a message of total bastardy in action, because we are small people in a small era. We’re probably wrong, but damn it, we can dream.
Dan MacKinnon, the assistant general manager of the New Jersey Devils and therefore the de facto general manager of the Devils’ top minor league team, the American Hockey League’s Utica Comets, did in fact trade his son Will to the Cleveland Monsters for future considerations. Future considerations including nothing whatsoever. We dare your heart to resist that strange warming sensation.
Ahh, but we don’t live that well. No quotes from Pops or Lad are extant to divine the motives here, and it may well be that Dan moved Will to Cleveland because the Monsters are still in playoff position in the North Division standings while the Comets are nearly eliminated. It would seem in this scenario that Dad got the boy a job for the spring that he wouldn’t otherwise have if he remained in Utica.
We aren’t sure which explanation is true, because there seems to be some issue about nature vs. nurture. Will MacKinnon had been a healthy scratch the last several games and apparently did not figure prominently in the plans for interim coach Ryan Parent (no pun intended), which is to say right now. This feels more like your standard doting father doing his son a solid with the willing connivance of the Monsters and their parent club, the Columbus Blue Jackets.
There is no way to use precedent here because as near as we can tell, there are no other such cases of parents swapping their children at this level. Dads don’t trade their kids as a general rule, not even in Little League when parents lose their minds at a moment’s notice and make the rest of us wish that kids’ sports were restricted to orphans. Dads might choose not to draft their kids to play on their teams, either because they don’t want to be those parents—even though all parents eventually become those parents, even as grandparents—or because the prospect of doing a cold-eyed scouting report on one’s own progeny and then dealing them away for a draft pick feels so wrong. Those of you who have kids have certainly imagined wanting to trade them at one point or other, and those of you who do not can surely get behind it philosophically. Not all kids deserve no-trade clauses; many of them deserve to be waived at least once, generally during high school.
But we all know the story we want to be true. And if he gets a call from the White House any time soon, we’ll get our answer. Either way, it will be a moment in the MacKinnon home for years to come: “Son, pass the potatoes or I’ll trade your ass again.”
