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Next Generation’s Best

I think most everyone’s had this happen to them: you’re a kid, and there’s something pink in the room.

It might be you who says it. It might be another kid. It might actually be an adult. You might be playing or drawing or just talking. But the pink thing is in the room, and it has a presence. You don’t know that yet until whoever’s going to say it says it, but once it’s been said, pink will forever mean something; be somehow tangible one way or another. Nothing, and then:

“Ew, but it’s pink.”

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Part One: Canada and Russia

1978

The plane lands in Edmonton, in the end.

The negotiations were so up-in-the-air they didn’t even know where they were being sent. Later, they’ll hear the whole wild story: a bluff over a bet, hinging on a game of backgammon; something right out of pulp fiction. So the plane, previously heading towards Schrödinger’s destination of Winnipeg-or-Edmonton depending on which airport they see when they step off the plane, lands in Edmonton.

The year is 1978. Ice hockey, in North America, is a men’s sport full of violence. There’s no use in skating fast or handling the puck skillfully if you can lay out the other guy: a man lying face down on the ice isn’t going to score. So you shouldn’t bother playing hockey if you aren’t big, mean, and maybe spoiling for a fight. You lay a guy out, you pass to the best guy on your line if the puck comes your way, and you let him do the scoring. In the NHL, it’s really only nominally a team sport. No one’s really passing much or using their teammates to their full potential or thinking about things like positioning.

Beyond that, it’s a turbulent time to be playing ice hockey for a living: teams are folding.

In November, three players get off the plane in Edmonton as part of a last-ditch Hail-Mary deal to save the Indianapolis Racers of the WHA. It won’t work: the Racers will fold a month later, and by the end of the season the WHA will have strong-armed the NHL into merging together, saving three of its six teams— including the Edmonton Oilers.

None of this really matters much to the little blond guy walking into the rink, the smallest and youngest of the three.

He’s a stick of a kid; a 17-year-old pretty boy whose hands are softer than his body, and that’s saying something. Blue eyes, grown-out blond hair. He looks like a girl from the back, actually. He’s just about six foot tall and 160 pounds soaking wet with his gear on; barely big enough for anyone to let him onto the ice.

The kid’s bright-eyed and he loves hockey; learned everything he knows from his father, who got the love of it from his father; a man who saw the signs coming for the Russian Revolution and fled so far from the Bolsheviks he ended up on the opposite end of the ocean from his homeland. But he couldn’t shake his love for the cold biting winter air or for a sport that connected his old home and the new. So: two generations and sixty years later, somewhere in Canada, the blond little skinny guy walks into the rink.

He doesn’t care about the looks; he’s gotten those since he was a kid, playing against children twice his age and size. He’s not going to care about what the reporters are going to say at the end of the season either, the way they’ll call him too frail for the NHL. He’ll stick to what his dad taught him: don’t go where the puck is, but where it will be.

He’s not the fastest on the team, and possibly the smallest. There’s almost nothing physically exceptional about him. None of that matters; everyone in that rink in Edmonton knows that it doesn’t matter if he looks like the goddamn princess of England.

That Gretzky kid is better than anyone else on the team.

1967

But this story, for once, doesn’t actually start with Wayne Gretzky. That’s just an easy entry point. It actually starts, as many things in ice hockey do, smack-dab in the middle of the Cold War.

About ten years before Wayne Gretzky walks into a rink in Edmonton, there’s a little guy in Moscow. Even smaller— he barely cracks 168cm. They call him the Spaniard because his mother is Basque and you can tell in his face and his body; he’s got thick, dark Mediterranean brows and a big, plump mouth. He’s been on the Red Army team since age 12, working his way up. Everyone knows he deserves to be there: the Red Army sports teams may be the pride of the Soviet Union, but it’s a gruelling regimen that they put you on. Sure, everyone wants to be on that team; the privileges for your family are tremendous, but they don’t take just anyone. And you don’t just earn it; it’s a deal with the devil.

At least he’s got a real Russian name, and real Russian skills too. He racks up points you wouldn’t believe, and for a decade he’s the driving force behind a literal score of gold medals that proves to the rest of the world that Soviet hockey is better than any other hockey, as it will stay for almost two decades. His skill is unparalleled. He’s fast, his hands are soft, and he stickhandles in a way no one else has ever even thought about, let alone tried. He sees the ice; sees opportunities, thinks not of where the puck is but where it will be.

Especially not those North American brutes. What they don’t understand is that hockey is art and takes skill. No one embodies this level of Soviet excellence better than Valeri Kharlamov. He is not just the best Russian player, or the best player in a generation. He’s the best player of all time. Every child will know this for next thirty years— until right after a blond, thin Canadian retires in the year prophesized on the back of his jersey.

Here’s a secret: the little blond Canadian never makes it that far without Valeri Kharlamov taking the hockey world by storm.

Kharlamov was the envy of every hockey player, coach and GM on the entire North American continent and some outside of it. North American hockey started out stubborn in the face of that much skill: first convinced it could bulldoze its way through with brutish violence, then trying to deny and belittle what it couldn’t emulate, and then barely accepting jealous defeat before it got hungry for their own answer to Kharlamov and Soviet Hockey.

Joke’s on them: Wayne Gretzky was home grown in a Slavic migratory background, steeped more in the mentality of Russian hockey than North American hockey. Gretzky also loved the Soviets and their hockey; so much so that he engineered a secret dinner with Igor Larionov in 1984 (before Larionov defected to become one of the infamous Russian Five) and stole the Green Unit away from their KGB handlers into his parent’s basement to shoot the shit over a couple of beers in 1987. Something every single one of their contemporaries will tell you about Gretzky and Kharlamov is this: no one saw the ice like them. The eyes and brain were what made the skill. Physicality didn’t matter a lick.

A sorrowful note: Wayne Gretzky and Valeri Kharlamov missed each other in international competition by a hair. Kharlamov died in a car crash in 1981, two weeks after the announcement that he would be left off the Soviet roster for the ‘81 Canada Cup, which was the first tournament Gretzky competed in on the Adult Men’s team for international competitions. If I had to guess, I’d wager there’s almost no one as sad about that as Wayne Gretzky himself.

Despite the attitude in the NHL at the time, Gretzky wasn’t all that much of a brawler either. Here’s a stat that doesn’t get trotted out very often: along with his ten Hart trophies, Wayne Gretzky won the Lady Byng five times. He was outspokenly against the type of violence in hockey that led to debilitating injuries, and he’s been outspoken against headshots in the NHL for decades.

It makes him a curious type of outlier, but what, are you gonna call the Best Player in the World soft for not liking physical play?

— Maybe if it’s still the middle of the Cold War and the guy’s a Red fuckin’ Commie.

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Part Two: Detroit and Pittsburgh

1983

There’s another guy. Born and bred Canadian; I swear there ain’t a red thing about him this time. Five years after the Great One storms the Big Leagues, this little shit cracks the roster and works his way up to becoming captain. A real hard-working kid.

Here’s the catch: his records say six foot but he just about cracks 5’10”. He’s enough of a pretty little thing that they don’t call him Steve, they call him Stevie. He’s so good they can’t justify sending him down for a conditioning stint, but he’s small— the Red Wings wanted a bigger guy, this one was the consolation prize.

A year later, a big, hulking guy with soft hands gets picked first overall by the Pittsburgh Penguins. 6 foot 4— now that’s a real hockey player. Big and strong and tall, and yeah— he’s mostly skill, but you definitely want a real man that can take a good hit, you know? Anyone would love to have picked Mario Lemieux.

The Oilers are still winning their Cups, and Gretzky’s still in the middle of winning every Hart for almost a decade straight, but the big guy in Pittsburgh and the little guy in Detroit are about to do their damndest to fight him for it.

1989

A couple of funny things happened in the late eighties and early nineties.

First, the little fat-lipped pretty-boy captain in Detroit insists two years into wearing the C that team management should be drafting some Soviet players over. So much for a non-Commie-loving Canadian. Hey, the iron curtain is looking shaky, sure, but the big men from the front office are gonna have to give him a stern talking to to make clear who’s really in charge before they admit to little Stevie Y that he’s right.

They start with Sergei Fedorov, the twenty-year-old wonder, and Vladimir Konstantinov, then known as one of the best defencemen in the world. They’ll end up acquiring three more Russians by 1993.

The critics, at the time, wonder if a team with so many Russians isn’t too soft to win a Cup. Together, the Russian Five will make them eat their words and bring Detroit back-to-back Cups in ‘97 and ‘98— an increasingly difficult feat to achieve since the decline of the dynasties of the eighties— and another in 2002 with the by-then remaining two of the Russian Five, still led by little Stevie Y.

It’ll take almost twenty years for another team to achieve back-to-backs again.

Detroit wasn’t the only team snapping up players from behind the by-then shaky Iron Curtain. Jaromir Jagr got spared the ordeal of having to defect by a literal hair, but it was enough of a point of contention during the preparations for the 1990 draft that he could successfully ward off any unwanted suitors by lying that he wasn’t going to come to North America. In truth, there was only one team he wanted to play for, and it was the team whose captain he’d been carrying a picture of in his wallet since he saw him at the World Cup in Prague in 1985.

It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that Jagr rigging the draft in his favour handed the Pittsburgh Penguins their Cups in ‘91 and ‘92. Jagr and Lemieux were phenomenal together, and an already good Pittsburgh team was catapulted into the stratosphere by their play. Over the next ten years, the Art Ross was won by Wayne Gretzky once. Every other win went to either of the guys in the Penguins jerseys.

So Detroit and Pittsburgh are shaping up and buzzing, but there’s rumblings of something big coming.

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Part Three: Before And After

Let’s talk about The Next One.

Most things are defined by a before and after, aren’t they? I’ve been talking a lot about the before, but the whole point of the concept of The Next One is about looking for the after.

No, I don’t mean that Next One, or the other one. And not Sidney Crosby either. I’m talking about the first Next One. You didn’t think hockey media took over twenty years to come up with that moniker just for Sid, do you?

In 1991, the very first Next One was Eric Lindros. Looking at the cold stats now, you might wonder about how comparatively low he is on the all-time points list to the other names I’ve mentioned, but the second you see his points per game, you’ll understand. He really lived up to the moniker.

They called his line the Legion of Doom, and everyone was afraid of playing against Lindros. Big and broad and tough; a lean mean points machine. He was what they called a “power forward” at the time, which mostly translates to: the masculine hockey ideal. Good to take and throw punches, but a big and skilled guy that’ll light the buzzer.

Lindros is also a good guy by all accounts. Principled. Those principles were the root of the problem, I imagine, when he refused to play for the team that drafted him. He still won’t say exactly what his problem with the then-Nordiques owner was, but I trust that it wasn’t frivolous, the way everyone seemed to think it was. You don’t stir up that much of a media storm, warn the team in advance, refuse all the money in the world, and sit out your rookie season if you just hate Quebec City.

The then-Nordiques owner Marcel Aubut, for what it’s worth, seems to have turned out to be a real unsavvy character. He had to step down from being the president of the Canadian olympic committee in 2015 due to multiple sexual harassment accusations.

It was an outrage at the time, of course. Lindros ended up getting traded to the Flyers for a king’s ransom, but he was branded a diva instantly, and couldn’t shake the label for the rest of his career, even when his own front office almost killed him.

I mean that quite literally.

1999

In the early hours before dawn on April Second 1999, Keith Jones wakes up. Something’s wrong: the other bed in the hotel room is empty. His teammate is supposed to be resting after the rib injury he got last night against Nashville.

Jones creeps out of bed and into the bathroom. The best player in the league is lying in the tub. He got into the tub to warm up, but despite the warm water he’s cold and pale, pulse racing, gasping for air.

Jones goes on red alert immediately. He drags their trainer out of bed who calls their GM, Bobby Clarke.

Bobby Clarke got the silver spoon shoved down his gullet, and that’s saying something for a league that boasts as much rampant in-house nepotism as the NHL. He was one of the original Broad Street Bullies, a living Flyers legend and Hall of Famer who led them to their Stanley Cups in the ‘70s, only briefly giving up captaincy for a few seasons in order to be a playing assistant coach— yeah, you read that right, they couldn’t even wait for him to stop playing to make him a member of the front office. After he stopped playing, he was handed the GM job on a silver platter. He was pretty much the personification of an Old Boys’ Club, and Clarke’s generational shadow loomed almost as large over Eric Lindros’ tenure on the Flyers as his ego.

By the time that night in April rolled around, Lindros was still suffering from concussion syndrome after suffering two concussions in quick succession. The NHL of the time was bad at handling those anyway, but the Flyers’ medical staff seemed especially lacking, and there was enormous pressure for Lindros to play through it. Clarke had started openly belittling Lindros for sitting out the few games he did sit out to anyone who would listen, publicly calling him almost everything under the sun: a momma’s boy, a drama queen, a diva— but most of all weak and not tough enough. Frankly, he stopped just short of calling Lindros a limp-wristed pansy into a live microphone. I suppose he wasn’t called a Broad Street Bully for nothing.

Keith Jones sits next to the bathtub while the trainer talks to Clarke on the phone. The trainer then talks to their team’s orthopedic specialist. When he returns, he says that they’re going to fly Lindros back to Philly together with another injured teammate and see what the problem is there.

Jones looks at Lindros’ pale, gasping face in the tub. He knows that ever since Eric’s concussions started piling up, the team doctors have been a little too quick to wave him off. He makes a decision that will save Lindros’ life.

It takes almost three hours of arguing with the trainer for them to finally get Lindros to the hospital, but when they get there, the doctors immediately wheel Lindros into surgery. He’s lost three liters of blood by then; that’s half the blood in his body. He was already in hypovolemic shock when Jones found him in the bathtub.

It turns out that what the Flyers’ trainer waved off as a bruised rib is actually a punctured lung. If they’d put him on that flight, he would’ve been dead before reaching the cruising altitude.

Before and after are the starting point for defining most things in life. I don’t know what it’s like to define “before I almost died” and “after I almost died” in the same way Eric Lindros probably does. I can, however, say that Eric Lindros defines the exact point between before and after in the modern NHL. In many ways, he’s at the heart of all of this; the centerpiece of NHL history before and after which everything is different. With hindsight, almost everything about him carries a touch of fate and magic to it, the way things in hockey do sometimes.

The first Next One. The first star to wear 88. A Flyers legend. The reason the Avs won their Cups in 1996 and 2001. The first turning point in concussion handling. The trade that changed all future trades. I could probably save myself the effort of writing most of this post and just talk about Lindros instead, but that would probably defeat the point. You’ll see what I mean.

You’ll be unsurprised to hear that after that night in April, Lindros and Clarke’s relationship deteriorated even further. After humiliatingly stripping Lindros of the captaincy, denying him a trade to the destination he wanted, and benching him for the 2000-2001 season, Bobby Clarke finally traded Eric Lindros. Lindros had four barely-treated concussions by then, and he never returned to full form or won a Cup, bouncing around a couple of teams before retiring in 2007.

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Mr. Hockey's Interlude

According to Simone De Beauvoir, a woman is a role that is grown into through a group of behaviours and social associations. Misogyny, therefore, is a tool to suppress those behaviours and social associations, to make the people who practice them stop doing so.

Calling someone soft in order to make them act tougher. Calling them whiny or bitchy in order to shut them up. Calling the pink thing gross in order for it to be neglected and discarded. It's always about changing or controlling another person's behaviour.

Let's try a social experiment. We'll create a limited social group that includes only men. No girls allowed, like an angsty pre-teen's bedroom. We want to see how long it takes them to reinvent womanhood, and by what means they do so.

Do they reinvent it through positive definitions? Or do they reinvent it by defining what manhood isn't? Scraping together the wood shavings left over from roughly carving the little wooden hockey player, taking the category broadly marked "other" and shambling together the closest approximation from there?

If they go with the photonegative definition, how many men fall into that definition? How many share traits of womanhood? How far will nitpicking for the traits go within the social group?

And how will they treat the men who exhibit those traits?

The keen-eyed will have spotted that there's been a glaring omission so far. I've left him out of most of this for two reasons: first, I figured that the past fifty years of men's hockey history was enough to cover and that we didn't really need to get into Original Six Era hockey. Second of all: even amongst his extraordinary peers, the perfect little wooden hockey player Gordie Howe was an outlier.

He was, of course, the perfect specimen. The first power forward over thirty years before the term "power forward" was even invented. Big for his era, tough, so skilled he seemed ridiculously advanced to his peers, like a time-traveller from the future talking about computers to the man working the printing press.

He was a good, humble Saskatchewan farm boy by all accounts. Trusting. Earnest. Well-mannered. His most impressive feat by far was his longevity, which is matched so far only by Jaromir Jagr's, despite their polar opposite personalities. Nowadays, he's best known for lending his name to the Gordie Howe hat trick: a goal, an assist, and a fight in a game.

Like a little spinning ballerina in a music box, somehow people keeping coming back to the little wooden figure of Mr. Hockey. If everyone's getting called a girl, after all, someone has to be the man of the house. The benchmark of masculinity, as if it's something that can be measured by standing up against a wall and seeing if you're tall enough for the ride. They wonder why everyone looks so small compared to the big, glossy picture in the Hall of Fame. Why no one is as tough any more.

Gordie in real life was only six feet tall; the same size of 17-year-old Wayne Gretzky walking into that rink in Edmonton in 1978. He actually only managed the Gordie Howe hat trick twice— no one wanted to fight him all that much after he proved himself in his first ten years in the league.

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Part Four: Long Live

The early 2000s were a chaotic time for the NHL: hockey had turned out to be a team sport after all, and while generational talents still existed, they were few and far in between. It was becoming somewhat of a consensus that the generational diva wasn’t worth it.

Eric Lindros, who dramatically refused to go to the team he was drafted to, never won a Cup for the Flyers. Jagr, the best-paid player in the league, couldn’t win a Cup without Lemieux, and worse, he couldn’t save the Penguins from looming bankruptcy. He had to be begged by ownership to let them trade him: without his salary on the books, they might be able to keep the team afloat.

Curiously, Cups were being won by team efforts instead of simply the team that had the best player. Wayne Gretzky’s retirement in ‘99 had left an eerie hole in world. There were whispers of some incredible talent coming out of Europe; and in 2004, the first two overalls were both Russian— unheard of.

But Russians as cornerstone generational players? Who knows if they can hack it in the big, tough NHL. Most of them are too soft.

Right before the 2004/2005 lockout, it seems that the consensus stands: the generational player is dead.

2005

—Wait, wait, here’s another one, might be the next big thing since Gretz, but god, isn’t he too small? I swear Gretz was taller; this guy must be smaller. He must be. Fat lips, chubby cheeks; he doesn’t look enough like a man— looks more like something you’d like to see on its knees when you get home, haha, am I right fellas?

Aren’t I right? He looks like he doesn’t hit, right? He must not. He must not have over a hundred penalty minutes as a rookie. He must not; he’s too skilled. He’s too fat-lipped. He complains to refs too much. He must not be able to hit at all. It’s been more than five years since Gretz retired, so my memory might be a little blurry, but I swear he wasn’t this small, this conflict-avoidant. Almost like a girl.

What’s his name? Sidney? Barely a man’s name; and how much he whines? May as well be a girl. Almost sounds like Cindy.

Boy, isn’t that clever enough to put on a poster.

Sidney Crosby’s biggest crime was debuting in the mid-2000s. I wish I was joking more than I am, but that’s the long and the short of it. Homosexuality had just about been legal long enough that it was a viable option to publicly admit to without fear of the death penalty or imprisonment. The first celebrities had come out and were living like they were normal people and not ostracised freaks. Elton John was still rich despite living with a man, and his songs still slapped. Britney was three years out from getting hounded so much by paparazzi that she would shave her hair off live on camera.

Enter Sidney Crosby, the NHL’s newest golden goose. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but he’s smaller than he should be. His hands are soft and skilled, he’s been outshining everyone since age 12 and earlier. Can see the ice like no one else. But can he really make it at that size? People suspect the game’s gonna be more physical than he can handle.

He’s… pretty. In a different way to the blond twink that walked into the Oilers’ rink in 1979. Back then thin, blond and skinny was hot; Twiggy was still shaking up beauty standards. In 2005, doe-eyed brunettes with fat lips are everyone’s wet dream. Angelina Jolie is all the rage.

Hockey is televised now. it’s a big deal: Wayne Gretzky made it so. Gary Bettman used him to make it so. And Bettman wants to make the game even bigger. The easiest way to do that is to use a star player for it, the way the NBA has successfully done with the likes of Michael Jordan. Bettman needs to bring the generational player back.

The problem with that plan is he's run out of those. Gretzky’s retired; Yzerman’s about to be, and Mario Lemieux is un-retired, but hanging on by a thread. Bettman needs new blood. There’s a Russian that seems marketable too, but that doesn’t sell to the US. he needs a North American. He needs The Next One. He needs Sidney Crosby.

Sidney Crosby suffered very publicly well-known avenues of verbal abuse. I barely need to list them here. Being guilty of being drafted in the mid-2000s, he heard every type of slur on and off the ice. He sure wasn’t the first; Eric Lindros can attest to that. But he might’ve been the first to suffer at this scale. It’s a whole different type of harassment when you can use social media for it.

More than that, he had a tough time on his own team. Here was this kid whose name was held like gold in everyone’s mouths; what the fuck was this snot-nosed brat gonna do? What if he was a diva, like Lindros, or enough of a gold-digger that it could bankrupt the team, like Jagr? So the big, burly hockey bruisers that were raised in the NHL of the late nineties didn’t like Sidney Crosby very much, especially the ones who had to reckon with him being groomed into their future captain.

It all culminated in a perfect storm in terms of publicity. There’s a lot of irony in how much of a raging spitfire Sid was in his first couple of seasons. It didn’t matter a lick in anyone’s eyes, but by god did he try for them to have eat their words by calling him soft. It seemed he couldn’t do anything in a way that would stop people from talking about him like that. By which I mean:

His mouth. His ass. Too small, too soft. A whiner, like a little bitch. Too uptight. Too much of a goody two shoes. A robot. There's a stick up his ass.

They talked about him in a way that’s most succinctly summarised as: as if he were a young woman too close to the “virgin” end of the virgin-whore spectrum within the early 2000s pop culture definitions of womanhood.

And Alex Ovechkin made the perfect other end.

He didn’t go by Sasha, he went by Alex. He didn’t need a translator; he spoke English. He was loud, flashy, exuberant. He liked American cars and food and clothes. He wasn’t like the Russians that defected in the nineties.

It made for a perfect rivalry. More than that, it made for a perfect raunchy teen comedy. The slut and the virgin. In American Pie terms, Sidney Crosby kept talking about band camp and Alex Ovechkin was the hot foreign exchange student whose webcam everyone wanted to hack.

The weirdest part was that no one could stop talking about them like that.

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Part Five: Curtain Call

Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for coming out to see our show tonight! Before the final act, let's get all our lovely generational talents so far up onto the stage. For your entertainment, here they are: the seductive Spanish Russian, the meek princess, the hard-working hot fat-lipped nerd, the Diva, the gold-digger, the slut, and last but certainly not least: the virgin! Flanked by our wonderful dashing gentlemen Mr. Hockey and Le Magnifique, they are your: National Hussy League!

Okay, so I’ll spell it out: skill is soft. Not fighting is soft. Being short and slight is soft. Being a foreigner is soft. Not growing a beard is soft. Soft means whatever slur-du-jour you want it to mean, but in the end it mostly means: like a girl, where like a girl means: bad. Worse. Lacking. Weak.

This all started because I kept seeing the phrase: "the first male hockey player to suffer from misogyny". But trying to figure out which man’s had misogyny wielded against them—and making a competition out of it— is pointless. Truly, there's almost no man that hasn't. Misogyny is ubiquitous in society, and even all-male sports leagues aren't exempt from that. It might be the virgin-whore dichotomy, it might be putting them up on a pedestal, it might be an objectifying kind of sexualisation.

It’s all forcefully stamped pink. In the way pink means: "ew, it’s pink".

2015

Connor McDavid’s biggest crime wasn’t going to the Oilers. It was going there about 35 years after Gretzky.

35 years is the exact span of time for no one to be left who really, properly remembers. That Wayne was small and slow and slight. That he looked like a girl. There’s only statues and banners left now, and even Zdeno Chara looks small next to those. Wayne Gretzky does, too.

Connor McDavid is the fastest player in the league. He’s tall. He started being able to grow a full beard before he hit 25. He's the physical ideal. Everyone in the league’s afraid of playing him. For some reason, he just can’t win a Cup or make it out of Gretzky’s shadow.

I wonder if he’s met Eric Lindros.

Auston Matthews isn’t just tall, he’s big. Wears a mustache and has the type of receding masculine hairline that makes reporters leave out words like soft or elegant.

They use words they used for Alex Ovechkin, instead. Big, flashy, loud. Times have trucked along, so he’s barely not getting slut-shamed. But they really, really want to call him Papi for some reason.

Everyone keeps wanting Nathan MacKinnon to be someone else. He just isn’t, so they can’t figure out what to do with him. He’s not small, he’s not frail, he’s got a remarkably broken nose, he’s fast, he’s skilled. He’s truly an all-rounder. He had a sophomore slump, and that was his second biggest crime; being a normal young adult man, by which I mean: a failure.

The biggest was making himself eligible for a Lady Byng in 2017. Why would they hand out the Hart to anyone who can’t rack up a respectable amount of penalty minutes like a real man?

Some days it seems like Leon Draisaitl went to the Evgeni Malkin school for alternate captains. A little more blunt, owed either to his inherent Germanness or the fact that it’s easier to afford to be, these days. Their professional personalities are mostly where the similarities end. They’re still the two NHL players most likely to be called “bitchy”.

Funnily enough, I don’t think it’s ever occurred to Mitch Marner how much he has in common with Sidney Crosby. I wonder if it’s occurred to Sid to commiserate.

To be fair, it’s been a long time since either of them were rookies getting crushed under the vicious, jealous pressure of older, bigger men in positions of authority. I suppose being the focus of derogatory media frenzies is still up for grabs as a topic of conversation.

Then again, I’d wager they’d probably both prefer to use the opportunity to talk about dogs instead.

2024

The Olympics, by their original definition in ancient Greece, only allowed men to compete in sporting events. Women have been allowed to participate since the second iteration of the modern Olympics in 1900. For years, very few disciplines were offered, and few women participated.

In 2020, women were allowed to bear their countries' flags along with men for the first time. This year, 2024, was the first year there was almost full gender parity, meaning almost every discipline was offered in the same format for both men and women, and there was almost an equal amount of athletes in both genders participating.

The Battle of the Sexes was the title given to a significant sporting event in the mid-twentieth century in tennis that broke the barrier for tennis to develop a mixed-gender discipline.

There was a huge movement around that time and afterwards to end gender segregation and allow women in men's leagues. The idea was to create true best-on-best tournaments and also to give women access to better pay and worker's rights in those leagues. Somehow, tennis is the only sport where it really stuck.

Chess is still a gender-segregated sport.

The inaugural season of a professional women’s ice hockey league has happened at least four times. The most recent was last season's inaugural PWHL season.

The season openers for their second season are this Saturday. I recommend giving them a watch; the world's best ice hockey player plays for the Montréal Victoire. Her name is Marie-Philip Poulin.