Connor Hellebuyck dressed as an ATM for Halloween, and the funniest part is watching people try to decide whether they're allowed to laugh. You're allowed. It's a good joke. It's his money that got burned, his year that went sideways, and he's the one who gets first crack at mocking it.
Hellebuyck expressed frustration with the Jets' direction back in April, requested a trade over the summer, and when he didn't report to training camp, Winnipeg hit him with an unpaid suspension. That standoff dragged on for months. He missed all of camp and the first 24 days of the regular season, losing nearly $39,000 a day and forfeiting close to $928,000 before the thing finally broke. On October 23 the Devils acquired him, sending Winnipeg a package built around Dawson Mercer, Nico Daws, Nick Bjugstad, Alexander Command and two picks.
A few days later, on two hours' notice, the three-time Vezina winner showed up to his new team's party at a bar in Hoboken dressed as a cash machine. Asked about it, he said, "I'm going to let you guess on that one." Nobody had to guess hard. He torched almost a million dollars to get out of a place he no longer wanted to be, then walked into a room full of strangers and turned that into a costume. He's narrating his own year before anyone else gets the chance.
Some will say the dispute cost his old team, held up a franchise for months, and that making light of the money is tone-deaf given the mess behind it. But the money he's joking about is his. He paid the fine for leaving, in cash, out of his own pocket, and the going rate was nearly $928,000. When you're the one who absorbed the hit, you get to make the joke about the hit. It's the single most disarming thing he could have done.
Think about the alternative. A goalie on an $8.5 million cap hit, forcing his way off a team, going quiet and sheepish and hoping it blows over, feeds every lazy take about the greedy, pampered athlete who wanted out. The ATM does the opposite. It says: yeah, I know exactly how this looked, I know what it cost me, and I find it funny too. You can't dunk on a guy who's already dunking on himself.
If you want to be mad about something real in this saga, there's plenty. A front office in Winnipeg that let a dispute with its best goaltender fester from spring frustration into an autumn suspension, right up against the weekend of the Heritage Classic, is a genuine failure. The holdout that cost everyone time and cost the player a chunk of a paycheck is a real story. That holdout reflects on how a hockey team is run. The costume just reflects that this 33-year-old can take a joke.
The people who come out of this looking small aren't the goalie in the costume. They're the ones squinting at a Halloween party, trying to manufacture a scandal out of a man laughing at his own worst month. He beat everyone to the joke. It's the best thing he's done off the ice all year.
