While the situation was far from clear-cut, and no civil charges were ever filed, the scandal shook the team. Stevens went to St. Louis, as did Courtnall, and Ciccarelli was basically given away just three years after he came to DC in exchange for Mike Gartner and Larry Murphy.

What really happened? What might the Capitals have been had they kept that core together? Matters for conjecture only — but there’s no doubt that scandal changed the Capitals for a long time.

Is Ovie involved in a sex scandal or something?

I forgot that Tiger Woods passed off hockey! He can suck it.

Heatley’s wild ride is up there but definitely not near the top 50 for sports scandals. I think Farty CrapSorely’s assault on Brash is probably in that neighborhood, though. The life and times of Chris Simon?

2 — so what’s your top 10 sports scandals of all time? I love lists like this. #1 has to be the Black Sox. maybe glo-pucks on Fox.

3 — I guess I wasn’t really shocked at the Tiger scandal. I know he had squeaky clean image, but that’s all it really was. I’m surprised by the scope of his actions, but not at the underlying cheating. When the story broke, I thought “super rich athlete cheats on wife .. hardly ‘stop the presses’ news.” Put it this way, this story could been about almost any athlete and I wouldn’t be shocked. Disappointed if its someone whose sweater I wear — but not likely shocked.

4 – Don’t know if counts as a scandal, but the Danny Heatly/Dan Snyder incident made it to mainstream news.

I’d tend to think that Mike Danton’s effort to pay someone to have another person killed trumps infidelity, steroid use, or even financing/running a dogfighting ring, for example. In terms of gravity of the offense, I don’t see any way that’s not in the top ten. Heck, off the top of my head I don’t see anything that beats it out for number one.

In less egregious offenses, you have Martin Brodeur’s affair with his sister-in-law, and Brendan Shannahan moving in on his line-mate’s wife. Both of those are at least as sordid as the sex scandals you referenced, and if they’d been players of the same stature in the NFL or NBA, I think the coverage would have exceeded what it did those other cases.

I agree with you about both the notoriety and severity of those scandals as well as their provinicialism. And of course, the perps in those stories aren’t hockey’s performers but rather peripheries on the sport — junior coaches and such. Makes it no less tragic of course.

Theoren Fleury, of late, has resurrected perhaps hockey’s worst scandal, the Graham James sexual abuse case in the junior Western Hockey League. It shook the game at its foundation: the relationship between coach and young athlete(s).

Mike Danton’s travails rate pretty high in scandal if low on the other two scales.

The Maple Leaf Garden sexual abuse scandal, revealed in the late 1990s, was tangential to the game of hockey but brought the cathedral of the game into disrepute as a haven for a multiple predators through the 1970s and 1980s.

But again, all these things were only well publicized in Canada. Their overall scandalousness depends on how you measure such things.