Just away from WordPress, otherwise it’s the exact same blog, with the same foul language, sports metaphors and (hopefully, shortly after a couple of happy hockey posts this week) the same political and journalistic intrigue.
Please adjust your browsing, blogrolls and bookmarks accordingly. And for those getting bored with all the hockey, one way or another, it ends this week.
Thank you for your attention.
Q: How difficult has it been for you to sit and watch rather than be playing
PAVEL DATSYUK: Oh, I tell you, just this is not fun to watch. I take in lots of beer.
Me too, Pav. And I don’t even have the luxury of imagining how different things would be if only I was on the ice.
Well, I suppose I do, but even in my over-active imagination, the most I could pull off would be to take a Donald Brashear swing at Evgeni Malkin’s head as he blazes past, then ankle-burn my way over to the penalty box.
And that wouldn’t help anyone.
Pavel Datsyuk in skates and a uniform, however, would look better than a Playboy centrefold right about now. It’s still somewhat unreal that the Wings managed to beat Chicago and take this lead on Pittsburgh without him. It’s pretty staggering, really.
Had you told me, before the playoffs, that Datsyuk would miss most of the conference finals, I wouldn’t even ask you if he was going to play in the Stanley Cup Final, because I would have just assumed we wouldn’t be there.
So … yeah. This is welcome news, and may even cut down on my beer consumption.
(The rest of the Datsyuk/Osgood interview is here.)
Lead, transitive verb: (1): to direct the operations, activity, or performance of <lead an orchestra> (2): to have charge of <lead a campaign> (3): to suggest to (a witness) the answer desired by asking leading questions b (1): to go at the head of <lead a parade> (2): to be first in or among <lead the league> (3): to have a margin over <led his opponent>.
Sidney Crosby — captain, prodigy, wunderkind, man-crush of several thousand otherwise heterosexual Pittsburghians — does not lead the Pittsburgh Penguins. If he did, they wouldn’t be in the Stanley Cup final. In fact, it would be unfair to criticize him for not leading, despite the ‘C’ on his sweater. So can we all stop pretending this series is some sort of referendum on his ability to “lead”? Because we won’t know the answer to that question for another ten years or so.
Crosby is 21, he’s the captain of his team and his team is in the Cup final and they’re in trouble. So the natural cliche is to ask if the young star can “lead” them from the depths of despair and to the promised land. Yeah, sure … an easy article to fill inches on an off-day, but…
Leadership doesn’t work like that. The two definitions above, in bold, are probably the ones that best apply how we use the verb in the cliche-ridden language of sports … but neither of them are something I would be comfortable applying to a extremely talented 21-year-old kid.
I know, because I’m Canadian, that to disparage a Canadian captain’s leadership ability on the ice is to emasculate him in the eyes of our collective tribe. Our leadership, after all, is what separates our boys from the Russians and Swedes, at least in the eyes of Don Cherry.
But I don’t care whether you’re a commie, a viking or a hoser from Kingston … you ain’t leading shit at 21 years old. Keep reading →
I have no one to blame for this but myself. I wrote some time ago, no doubt giddy from a promising beginning to another post-season, that if the Red Wings found themselves in the Cup finals, I would incorporate the sonnet into the poetic playoff predictions.
Sonnets, it turns out, are fucking hard to write at 10 a.m. the morning of the first game when you’re slightly hungover and drinking black coffee because you ran out of cream and the convenience store down the block is closed.
Sonnets would probably be hard to write under any circumstance, but I am merely emphasizing my handicaps. I promised, however, and therefore must deliver. “Shall I compare thee to a hockey puck? Thou art less vulcanized, yet also softer.”
See? That sucked. This is going to be difficult. Keep reading →
I know what you may be thinking but — despite the title in the header of this blog — this is not a website dedicated to the Chicago Blackhawks Game 4 performance.
In fact, one of the reasons we named the blog ‘Dirty Games’ is so that we could call that sort of cheap, thuggish and staggeringly impotent behaviour exactly what it is: An ugly, failed ploy from an increasingly desperate and outmatched hockey team.
We usually pride ourselves on being something of a thinking person’s sports blogger. When the topic turns to athletics, we try to provide the context, the overarching themes and the literary metaphors to lift the discussion from sports bullshit to somewhat more legitimate grounds. It rarely works, but we try to do it anyway, because there’s not enough of that kind of sports writing — or at least there’s not enough of that kind that’s any good — floating around the internet.
Today though? Fuck it. The Blackhawks deserved to get the shit pummeled out of them yesterday, if only to restore karmic balance to the universe. And one of the other reasons we started this blog is so that we could swear with motherfucking impunity.
The Hawks didn’t show up for the game and got their asses handed to them. You cannot ever bring less than your absolute best game against the Red Wings in the playoffs and expect to have a chance. It’s pretty much a given by now.
But the best part of this entire series has been the coaching matchup and the postgame press conferences. If the games themselves have been — in a metaphor the entire hockey world has slept with like a security blanket through the entire series — Big Brother vs. Little Brother, then the coaching matchup has been teacher vs. student. Or maybe principle vs. student. Or principle vs. special-needs-short-bus-riding student. It’s honestly not even that close. Keep reading →
Athletes are taught, from a very young age, that they shouldn’t “play tight”.
Playing tight, a whole whack of Junior, Pee-Wee, Amateur and Professional coaches will tell you, leads to nothing but losses. If you are too terrified of making a mistake to relax and play your game, the theory goes, you’ll be too tense to play effectively.
You’ll squeeze your stick too hard and miss easy scoring chances. Your vision that allows you to sense your teammate behind you and drop a pass right to his stick, will betray you and you’ll find yourself paralyzed with the puck, afraid to make the drop pass because it might be intercepted.
You must “play loose” if you’re going to succeed, is the popular wisdom.
Unless you are trying to beat the Detroit Red Wings. Then you’d better play tight. Like, squeeze-the-stick-until-it-breaks tight.
Because while the popular wisdom might dictate that playing loose will allow you the mental time and space to make enough plays that the occasional error is forgivable … when you face a team that can take nearly every single mistake you make and capitalize, that wisdom should go out the window.
The Chicago Blackhawks biggest strength in the 2009 playoffs has been their ability to play loose. To fall behind and come back and make charges and give up goals and then find a scrappy, endearing, oh-just-look-at-those-young-pups way to earn them back.
Now, in this series, it’s their biggest weakness. Against Vancouver or Calgary, a cute little cross-ice pass at the blueline might work; and if it doesn’t work maybe you get the puck back; and if you don’t get the puck back, it probably gets cleared to centre ice or your own end and you go and retrieve it and try again.
This is what happens when you try that against the Red Wings. You lose quickly, and the goal comes with a combination of creativity, ruthless efficiency and execution that the assembly lines of Detroit can only dream about.
If this was perhaps the first time in this series the Blackhawks had made a careless, “loose” mistake that came back to immediately bite them in the ass, maybe it would be okay for them to write it off and continue to, as their coach will no doubt do in the next 48 hours , state that “we just have to keep playing our game”. Keep reading →
This post should absolutely be a scathing indictment of the media’s swine flu coverage. It could also easily be a heart-wrenching opus about how Manny Ramirez testing positive for steroids crushed whatever was left of a little boy’s love for baseball. Poking fun at Jack Layton’s Star Trek outfit or writing an incredibly offensive parody of Sarah Palin’s upcoming memoirs would also be completely in keeping with the spirit of this blog.
Darren Helm, doing what he does.
But I won’t do it. Because it’s still hockey season, dammit. And I still can’t imagine writing about anything but the Wings. And mostly, just one player.
Beginning with baseball, I’ve been a sports fan since I was about 7, be it the Expos and (for a reason I simply can’t remember, because he hit .172) Casey Candaele, Tony Fernandez (like Casey Candaele, with hustle and skill!) and the Blue Jays, Pinball and the Toronto Argonauts and, of course, the motherfucking Red Wings.
(A True Tangentially-Related Story: If Nikolai Borshevsky doesn’t eliminate the Red Wings in disgusting fashion in 1993, and Chris Osgood doesn’t misplay the puck and give the 1994 series to the San Jose Sharks, and then break down in tears afterwards, I would probably never have become a Wings fan, and my life would be poorer for it. I started cheering for them because they were awesome and I was a little kiddie bandwagon jumper just beginning to discover hockey,and Sergei Fedorov was the best damn player ever in NHL 93 and 94. Then they got their ass kicked twice in humiliating fashion. But by then I loved Stevie Y too much, and it would have been absolutely faithless to abandon them then, when they were getting the hell kicked out of them and people were crying for Yzerman to be traded. I loved them because I watched them fail first. If Borchevsky doesn’t score that goal … 12-year-old me might have ended up a Maple Leafs fan. And I can’t imagine what might have happened to me after that without wanting to drink my face off.)
Anyway. That’s not the point. The point is I’ve always been a sports fan to some degree, an it only got worse when I was introduced to hockey. And usually, on every team, there’s a guy who is the favourite player, and the guy who is your favourite player.
Sometimes they’re in harmony. Yzerman’s an obvious example. More often they’re not. Like now, when the favourite player on the Wings is Nicklas Lidstrom, or Pavel Datsyuk, or Henrik Zetterberg, Marian Hossa or Johan Franzen.
But my favourite Wing? I think, in some weird way, it’s fast becoming Darren Helm. Keep reading →
One of the easiest things to do in life is to say ‘fuck it’ and walk away. Things ain’t happening. You get the short end of the stick. You keep shooting and nothing goes in. It goes in and then it doesn’t count. You show up on time and the bus breaks down. Do a good job and get a pink slip. Sometimes a middle finger and a retreat seems like the obvious move.
It’s easy. It’s an appropriate response, even. Sure some people would be disappointed, but they wouldn’t really blame you. And even if they do, you’ve got plenty of reasons why you did it. A lot of them are perfectly understandable.
Things don’t break our way, so we walk away. A lot of us do it, in small and in what we think are meaningless ways, all the time. Hell, sometimes, it takes a concerted effort not to fold your tent. So it’s inspiring when a bunch of guys shut their mouths in the face of less-than-perfect circumstances and go to fucking work.
The way the Wings chased Jonas Hiller from the nets, played their own brand of hockey and refused to give a single inch after being outplayed, outmuscled and outreffereed in Game 4 is the stuff, plain and simple, of men who understand what it is to look in the eye of something ugly, nasty and possibly futile and say, ‘Yeah, I’m down for whatever.’
This series might not end with a Detroit victory. It might, and then it might end next round. This is one of the more phenomenal collections of talent I’ve seen in 15 years of watching professional sports, but they ain’t guaranteed shit except a sixth game in Anaheim. And that doesn’t matter.
They’re demonstrating that they won’t lose. They’ll have to be well and truly beaten. Isn’t that all we can ask of the teams that we cheer for?
For all the bullshit involved with being a sports fan … for all the idiocy and stigmas and targeted marketing and network television ratings and steroids and arenas that have different names than they used to … at least we get those occasional moments when you understand why you bother.
When the collection of millionaires that have you really have no business being emotionally invested in can demonstrate what it means to stare down failure and refuse to even think about taking the easy way out … well, I don’t feel so bad for dropping $15 on a hat and sacrificing a some Saturday nights.
I can't take credit for this. Thank fark.com.
I wrote a piece after the Cup win last year about how this team meant more to me than the others, because they’re the ones I watched from the very beginning. It’s rarely more true than when the line that leads them to victory is Hossa-Franzen-Valtteri Filppula, while Lidstrom and Chris-fucking-Chelios patrol the blueline. It’s a strange thing to watch the past, present and future come together like that.
Kudos to the Ducks — excepting Chris Pronger, of course — for being a more than worthy opponent. When Perry scored and then Bobby Ryan ran over Hossa, you guys must have thought you’d finally beaten these foreigners down. I can’t engage in vicious trash talk (aside from pointing out that Chris Pronger looks like a severely retarded kid who grew up down the street from me) but I will say this:
These Red Wings are NOT the San Jose Sharks, motherfuckers. Do not get that twisted for one damn second.
There are plenty of arguments one could make both for and against government offering a bailout to newspapers.
And the arguments, at least in America, would probably fall on deaf ears, as the White House seems to have already made up its mind:
With the Boston Globe just the latest big-city newspaper teetering on the edge of shutdown, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs brushed aside a question about whether the federal government will consider stepping in to help save newspapers, as it has with so many other industries.
“I don’t know what, in all honesty, government can do about it,” Gibbs told reporters.
Well … what, in all honesty, government could do about it is the same damn thing government has done for every other failing industry — throw buckets of cash at the problem. Keep reading →
I wrote a post the other day that drew a little bit of attention to our little corner of the internet. Who would have thought that unleashing amusing insults about another hockey team and finding great YouTube clips of players you really like would receive more attention than an earnest discussion about the future of the newspaper industry?
Oh … everyone would. Right.
Regardless, we got about 50 comments on that piece about the Wings and Ducks, though if you discount the ones without any semblance of coherence, insight or even sentence structure the number probably goes down a bit. Such is the nature of the Internet, and of course it’s well known that most Ducks fans cannot even speak, let alone type, in proper English.
Okay. Stop. See that? That was a good-natured joke. I know lots of Ducks fans who can read and write and speak. Okay, actually, I don’t know any Ducks fans, but I’m sure the vast majority of the ones that do exist are literate.
But we digress. That’s only tangentially related to the point I want to make today. And that point is this:
A lot of people are retarded. I already knew this, but reading random comments from Ducks fans has driven the point home. I’m not from Detroit and neither are all (perhaps even the majority of) Red Wings fans. Neither (for the most part) are the players, the coaches, the management and anyone employed by the organization above the level of, say, the valet or the beer-and-popcorn-guy.
I am well aware that Detroit, as a city, is not doing very well right now. Here in some parts of Southern Ontario (where I do actually live) we have a substantial part of our workforce employed by the automakers as well, and they are also struggling. So I definitely understand the tragedy of the situation, though our economy is more diverse and we certainly aren’t in the same dire perdicament.
But … all that, as sad as it is, has fuck all to do with anything about hockey, aside from who can afford to buy the tickets to the games.
You could demolish everything in the city of Detroit except for Joe Louis Arena and make homeless every man, woman and child … and Pavel Datsyuk could still deke the shit out of Ryan Getzlaf with his eyes closed and one of his beautiful Russian hands tied behind his back.
So comments like these, and there are hundreds of them out there every time someone talks about the Red Wings …
-u gona watch us win in ur stupid bankrupt fuckyng detroit…
-This from some buffon from shit hole detroit. Ducks in 5. Will give you one win at home to keep the natives from rioting and burning down what’s left of your shithole city.
… accomplish nothing but to make you look like a fool. The Internet is free for the perusal of fools, haters and idiots alike, but you guys really shouldn’t make it so easy to spot you.
Anyway, the only reason that I wrote these 500 words, and made a point already obvious to anyone with a brain, is to ask you guys who do engage in this kind of trash talk … why?
Theoretically at least, you guys are all American. The economic situation in Detroit hurts industry in the country as a whole. Bashing the city has no impact whatsoever on its very talented hockey team composed largely of Canadians and Europeans, and all you’re doing is rubbing the fear and uncertainty of a nasty recession into the faces of a city that is on the front lines of it.
I realize, intellectually, that sport goes back to the whole my-clan-is-superior-to-your-clan thing, and that we’ve sublimated the desire for full clan-on-clan warfare into the spectacle that is modern professional sports. And I’m grateful for that, both because I love sports and because I dropped out of karate too early to learn to be an effective warrior.
But still … taking on the city to spite the fans of a particular team makes little to no sense, especially when the two cities are located in the same country. How hard is that to understand?
If you want to bash the shit out of the Wings, or any other team, have at it. I realize there’s not a hell of a lot of stuff you can say about a franchise that’s been at the top of the pile for close to 20 years now … but you can still make fun of Chris Chelios with a well-placed diaper joke, or claim that Osgood’s a terrible goalie playing behind a dominant team, or even misguidedly call them they “Yankees of hockey”.
I promise you that last one would provoke me enough that you would get a lengthy screed in response.
But bashing the City of Detroit? You’re just being petty jerks and saying hurtful things to people who have nothing to do with the conflict you’re purportedly discussing. It’s dumb and should be beneath any fan with neurons still firing.
For instance, I would never say that someone from Anaheim is so stupid they can barely comprehend basic spoken instructions; so ugly and stench-ridden that waitresses cringe when duty compels them to get within four feet of them; so mean-spirited and hateful that nearly everyone acknowledges mention of their name with an ‘Oh … that asshole’ and so completely rejected and dismissed by society as a whole that they have to resort to skull-numbingly stupid invective and violent cries for attention just to feel as though they’re a part of the human race.
Of course I wouldn’t, because that doesn’t describe a random person from Anaheim.
That right there describes Chris Pronger.
