Dennis Cholowski knew they were talking about him.
The Red Wings defenseman, a rookie at the time, had just upgraded his car from a Honda to a Volvo. So when he heard “somebody got a new car today” from his teammates, he understood the implication.
“I’m going, ‘Do I have to put money on the board for that?’” Cholowski recalled. “I mean, I just bought the car. I have to put more money (up there) now?”
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In short: yes. Getting a new car is among the many reasons an NHL player is expected to put “money on the board” — a time-honored tradition in which players write a dollar amount up on the whiteboard before a game in an effort to fire up their teammates. If the team wins, the player makes a contribution of that amount into the team’s general event fund. It’s a tradition that exists throughout all levels of pro hockey, but it reaches new heights in the world’s best league.
And to be fair, by the time they reach the big show, the players can afford to shell out. NHL salaries are generally a matter of public record, and a few hundred dollars — or thousand, depending on the player — here or there before games is seldom a hardship.
“Money on the board is just kind of a schoolyard pressure from your peers to get the boys fired up before a game,” said Ryan Barnes, a former longtime AHL player who called himself a “willing participant” in the tradition.
But while the definition is simple enough, the individual stories themselves — the funniest and most interesting board instances, most generous financiers and more — are a window into one of the less-seen parts of NHL culture.
Most active players are shy to say too much on the record about the tradition. But with the promise of anonymity for some, nine current or former players agreed to give The Athletic an inside look into their experiences putting money on the board.
The financial parameters are the first thing to know about money on the board. Multiple current players have referenced $500 as a sort of minimum, which typically isn’t prohibitive for most guys in a league where the minimum salary is $700,000.
Plus, in the words of one former player: “You end up getting it back at a party. You’re going to drink it anyway.”
“It’s just a fun way to collect the money rather than having to divvy it up at the time of the party,” a current player from the Eastern Conference said. “We don’t have to worry about it when we go out, we know we have enough money to cover whatever we want to do.”
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On the upper end of the spectrum, though, are some totals that can’t really be expected to be made back at one Halloween or Christmas party. And not everything put on the board is a monetary challenge. Team dinners, which can run a tab of a few thousand dollars, are one pricey incentive. Multiple players had also heard of iPad whiteboard entries in the AHL, where a player would, for example, buy an iPad for the teammate who scored a game-winning goal.
But when the incentive is cold, hard cash, the process is a bit more straightforward. Players walk up to the whiteboard and write down their dollar amount. According to a former player, someone such as an equipment manager will snap a photo of the various incentives, erase them and forward the photo on to the team member in charge of funds to keep track.
Once in a while, you can catch a glimpse of the final tallies in the background of a locker room photo. Look at this from Dallas recently … and on another particularly noteworthy night.
Take a look at Dallas’ season opener….😳💵💰💵💰💵 pic.twitter.com/TS6XmSYqD1
— Alex G (@P1AlexG) November 3, 2019
The highest dollar amounts players had seen varied, in part based on experience level and era. One current Eastern Conference player, who is on the younger side, estimated the most he’d seen was around $5,000. A retired player said $7,500. One active veteran would only go so far as to say five digits, but another of a similar age in his same division had seen $12,000.
Those are the exceptions, not the rule, but the upside of those pricey dollar figures is clear: If you’re paying them out, it means your team won. That much is universal. But there are also, occasionally, sub-propositions on the board — still contingent upon winning to pay out, but more individualized. Game-winning goal is a standard one, but the challenges on the board can vary.
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“I always love to see blocked shots, because I know I might have a shot,” one Western Conference player said. “The game-winning goal? Mmmm. Not so much. But the blocked shots, then I know I might have a shot at it.”
That player clarified: It’s not like the financial incentive is in the back of players’ minds during the game — they’re already motivated — but the proposition is “just something in here that brings the guys together. When guys are going up and putting money on the board, everyone’s screaming and chirping.”
And you’d better believe the chirping can have an influence on the dollar amounts going up on the board. On the night another current Western Conference player made his NHL debut, he was largely unfamiliar with the tradition — which left him in an especially tricky situation to figure out the right dollar amount.
Players are generally expected to put money up for their first game, as well as any games in their hometown or against their hometown team, games against the team that drafted them (or any subsequent former teams), for major career milestones (every major games-played interval, such as 100, 200, 300, etc.), new contracts and life milestones like getting engaged or the birth of a child. It’s also been mentioned that a player could be expected to put up when he has his parents or girlfriend in attendance.
But on the night this player debuted — in his hometown, no less — he didn’t know any of that. A couple of the players he had befriended let him know he’d have to put money on the board that night, but “I had no idea what they even meant,” he said.
“In college you just do Kangaroo Court, and you kind of fined guys a dollar here and there for something dumb that they did,” this player explained. “… So I didn’t know, and they kind of explained it to me, what it was. Like, ‘Oh, you gotta put money on the board. If you win, you have to pay the team. It goes toward team functions, whatever.’”
Oh, that’s kind of cool, what do guys put up? he asked.
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The players demurred.
“They were kind of bugging me. So we finish (morning) skate, go home, nap, pregame meal, whatever, come to the rink, I change, and then it’s right before warmups, they’re like, ‘How much you gonna put on the board?’ I had no idea what to put. I walked up there. … I was so nervous. I put $2,000. And they were like, ‘That’s it?!’ And I was like — I didn’t know! So I erased it, and I put four. Like, I doubled it.
“And they were all like, ‘Oh! Rich kid! Rich family!’ And my parents are not rich at all.”
Fortunately for him, by the time he came back in the room from pregame warmups, the team leaders had erased his $4,000 reward and replaced it with the $500 standby he didn’t even know he could have written.
“But that was like my first taste of it,” he said. “It was absolutely hilarious. They got me good. Because I just thought it was normal. Hockey players make a good living. They put this up on a daily basis. I thought it was outrageous, but they fooled me on that one.”
That player probably could have benefited from former NHLer Craig Conroy’s sage wisdom, though, on how to keep your number reasonable: “If you’re going up there, they’ll start yelling out numbers. So it’s better, after this pregame (morning) skate, if you were really gonna do it, just write your number and put what you want and then leave.”
In fact, one current player from the Pacific Division said he had employed a variant of that strategy at times: “Usually when I come in, and I know it’s a big night or something like that, I’ll do it as soon as I take off my street clothes and come in here, and most of the time it’s before anyone else gets in here. It’s usually not a bad tactic.”
The flip side, though, is that if the goal of putting money up is to fire up your teammates, it may be better achieved when the whole team is actually present to watch you do it.
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“That’s what lots of guys like to do because everyone gets to see it,” one of the Western Conference players said.
Either way, hassling the rookies and trying to bid up teammates’ offerings isn’t the only way teams have extra fun with the tradition. A different active Western Conference player recalled a time the team put “best Corsi” up as a prop bet — one that would pay the individual who graded out best by the advanced metric.
“It was a joke,” the player said. “But it paid out. They still did it.”
As with anything that involves money and humans, there are varying levels of — let’s call it generosity — among players.
The same Western Conference player who recalled the Corsi bet, when asked which players put the most money up, said, optimistically: “It should be the guys with the most money, right?”
“There’s some guys that are more generous than others,” he said. “For the most part, if you’ve got more money, you put more up. Some guys get in trouble because they know a lot of people, they got family who come a lot, or whatever it may be, so then they’ve gotta shell out a little bit more.”
And hey, maybe that player’s teammates are truly proportional in their earnings and contributions. But as one former player put it: “Every team has one guy that makes pretty decent money that won’t put up ever.”
No one wanted to name names when it came to that end of the spectrum, for obvious reasons. But a few of the players were willing to share who had been the most generous participants in their locker rooms.
Alex Ovechkin’s name came up — “He’s been known to throw some money out there and get the boys fired up,” said one active player — as did Dan Girardi’s.
“Since my first day I came to the league, it’s how you show appreciation for the team, I think,” Ovechkin told The Athletic’s Tarik El-Bashir. “… Everybody puts the same kind of money. Sometimes I put a little bit more. It’s a regular thing. The whole league, all teams doing it.”
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Conroy was quick to cite Jarome Iginla.
“Jarome would buy 100 tickets in Edmonton, and he’d still put (money up),” Conroy said. “He didn’t have to, but he’s like, ‘Oh, I got a lot of people here.’ Jarome did it because he wanted everyone else to be happy. And he wanted to beat Edmonton.”
“There’s always guys (who) make it and don’t mind spending it … and there’s always guys that you gotta kinda look at the stat sheet and go, ‘Oh! Game No. 300, you should probably put some money on the board,’” the Pacific Division player said. “They try to sneak by you and hope that no one notices. There’s always both kinds of guys in the room. You’ve just gotta figure out who’s who and be ready to call them out, make sure they put the right amount up there.”
Two Eastern Conference players were asked independently what happens when a player fails to provide an expected board incentive.
The first simply said the player would be called out, hollering would begin and the player in question would end up making his way toward the board.
As for how often that might happen, though?
“I’ve never seen it,” the other Eastern Conference player said. “I mean, I don’t think anybody here’s really hurting to put $500 on the board.”
If money on the board is a relatively voluntary way to contribute to a team’s event fund, then team fines are the mandatory alternative. These days, according to the current players interviewed for this story, fines are mostly limited to low-maintenance instances in which a player is late to practice or commits a similarly common-sense offense. He pays his price, and then it’s done.
But back in the day, they meant a whole other level of attention, and encompassed a much broader scope of perceived violations. Sure, maybe you were late. Or maybe the team just didn’t like your choice in clothes for the occasion. Or maybe there was something you’d done the night before.
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“When I first broke in the league, it was like a big deal,” Conroy said. “They’d call you out, wait for everybody to get off the ice, and they’d even tell guys, ‘OK, Kangaroo Court, let’s get in there.’”
The rule system was nebulous.
“Every little thing you did, they were trying to catch you on something,” Conroy said. “Whether it was being late for a plane, a bus, anything like that. I mean, it was always in good fun. I can’t remember anything that was, like, really serious. But it was always those type of things, breaking little team rules, doing something when we’re out after the game having too much fun and maybe you do something crazy and you’re like, ‘Oh! Shouldn’t have been doing that.’”
Now, though, that system appears to be basically gone.
“I can’t remember the last time I did one of those,” the current veteran Pacific Division player said. “Must have been in the minors.”
Conroy, who is now the Calgary Flames’ assistant GM, said the new structure and regiment of the new generation’s culture could be one reason it’s less common now. Guys tend to get down to business when they arrive at the rink rather than sitting around with their morning coffee.
Still, there was something to be said for the bonding from it all — which, at its core, had nothing to do with fines or money anyway.
“I love it when I hear the guys (saying), ‘Oh, we’re gonna go do this or we’re gonna do that,’” Conroy said. “It makes me feel like, ‘Oh OK! They’re actually enjoying themselves, having more fun.’”
While money on the board and what’s left of team fining systems are mostly about fun, motivation and perhaps a modicum of accountability, there are also the occasional instances in which they can make much more tangible impacts.
The final regular-season game of the 2017-18 NHL season was April 7, the day after the Humboldt bus crash. Flames goaltender Cam Talbot was playing for the Oilers at the time, and he decided to put money on the board for the families affected by the crash.
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Then, seeing that, more players joined in.
“Literally every single guy on the team followed, even guys that didn’t play, came in and wrote something up,” Talbot recalled.
“It was obviously a big thing for the whole league,” said Oilers defenseman Oscar Klefbom. “You want to help out all the ways you can, but it’s tough — it’s nothing you can really do to make it that much better.”
The Oilers won that night, 3-2 in a four-round shootout, with Talbot making the game-winning save. That led to the team donating “a huge check,” Talbot said.
Among all the stories, this is the one that still stands out for him when recalling his most unique memory with the tradition. Which is fitting: For the most part, money on the board is a ritual of the locker room, by the locker room and for the locker room. That time, though, it made it out into the real world.
“Usually it’s something funny or a milestone or whatever, but that’s completely different,” Klefbom said. “That’s by far the most sensitive and most emotional money on the board, for sure.”
(Top photo: Dave Reginek / NHLI via Getty Images)
