Ellen Etchingham

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If you look at the roster of the Chinese Taipei national men’s ice hockey team, you can tell that not many of them are natural hockey players. In Taiwan, hockey is an exotic game, the people who play it drawn in by quixotic personal motives and accidents of life. It doesn’t, generally speaking, draw the best athletes in the country, and the roster reflects that. It’s full of hastily promoted teenagers and overage defensemen. The typical player is something like 5’7”, 160. You don’t even need to see them play to know that this is not an especially competitive hockey team on the global scale.

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John Tortorella, feigning shock and incredulity. This is why reporters don't like him.

The New York Rangers are tired. They have to be. To get to where they are, the LA Kings have played 13 games and 2 OTs, neither of them long. The Rangers, in contrast, have played 17 games and 4 OTs, including one triple overtime marathon. They’ve played more hockey than any team in the postseason, and hockey, as we all know, is a tiring thing.

It would be the easiest thing in the world for John Tortorella to admit as much. He could just come out and say, “Yes, the playoffs are a war of attrition, and we’ve attrited more than most, and yeah, we’re weary, but we’re going to try to battle through it anyway, the best that we can.” To say such a thing would be no more than an acknowledgment of a plain truth and the simple humanity of his players. It would be honest.

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VISUAL METAPHOR

In India, at Jagganath temple, there is an annual festival called the Ratha Yatra. The core of the Ratha Yatra is a parade, a procession of chariots through the streets, each chariot carrying one of the gods of the temple. It is considered a great blessing to see and be seen by the gods as they pass by, and believers will crowd close to the chariots in hope of benefiting from the sacred exchange of gazes. Sometimes, though, the pressure of the crowd and the zeal of the faithful will push people closer than it’s safe to get to a moving vehicle. Sometimes people fall. Sometimes people are crushed under the wheels.

Early European observers of this festival thought, fancifully, that the locals were deliberately throwing themselves beneath the chariots, committing suicide-by-parade. Whether this is actually true is seriously doubtful, but the misunderstanding gave us a rather lovely English word: juggernaut, a corruption of Jagganath, something that crushes anything that gets in its way.

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Patrick Kane, caught in the vile act of cheating on hockey with another sport.

It is not really all that surprising that Patrick Kane is in trouble again. I’m not going to go into the details of the trouble, because the details are as yet all gossip and hearsay, but the gist is that, just like the last time, and the time before that, and the time before, Patrick Kane got very drunk, told everyone who he was, and let them take pictures to send to Deadspin. He committed one of the most scandalous acts a man can commit in a hockey culture that considers the dull stoicism of Jonathan Toews to be normal behavior for a 20-something guy: he partied publicly.

As with every time Kane gets into trouble, there was a round of shocked responses followed by a round of snarkily unshocked responses. For every writer who is concerned about the children in a world with such role models, there is another ready to tell them that every 23-year old guy on the continent does exactly the same thing, and when the precious children grow up they’re going to do it too. This is modern hockey’s relationship with drunken partying: we reflexively condemn it, then question our own condemnation.

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Jean Beliveau, the man the truncated minor penalty was invented to stop. It didn't work.

In the beginning, when hockey was void and without form, and darkness was upon the face of the ice, there were no penalties. In the very first rules of the game, from 1877, the stated punishment for any infraction is the play whistled dead and a fresh bully (faceoff-ish thing). By the 1890s, hockey had developed a three-strikes policy for physical fouls, with two referee’s warnings followed by expulsion from the game. In 1904, we find the first evidence of modern penalties, which could be given in two, three, or five-minute increments according to the opinion of the officials, but also allowed a team to put in a substitute for the offending player. In 1914, under NHA rules, all penalties were increased to five minutes and an obligatory fine introduced as a gesture towards further deterrence, but punishments were still thought of as an individual thing- the bad man had to do his time, but his team suffered nothing.

It was the NHL that invented the power play. When the new League formed out of the shattered ruins of the NHA in 1917, it reduced penalties to three minutes but forbade substitutions. For the first time in the history of the game, teams were forced to pay a price for their players’ rule violations. Four years later, they shortened the obligatory time of a minor penalty to the familiar two minutes, and two years after that, they added the five-minute and ten-minute penalties to the officiating toolbox.

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Jonathan Quick, whose daughter might have some issues with competitiveness when she gets older.

We are digging in the corner.

She is big, taller than me and strong through the shoulders. A real athlete, I know from the dressing room, practitioner of every kind of winter sport I’ve heard of and a few I haven’t. In addition to hockey, her weekends consist of curling and snowboarding and skiing of both varieties, and I’m pretty sure she mentioned a triathlon not too long back. She asks speculative questions about speed skating.

This lady exercises every day of the week and twice on Sundays, and her body shows it. Me, I walk and sometimes carry grocery bags, and my body shows that. I know, when I get my skate on the puck a bare quarter second before she comes in behind me, that we are not evenly matched. I go for it anyway.

I have position but she has size. I get low, my only real option, pulling my body down to solidify my stance and hopefully catch her off balance. My odds aren’t great in any situation, but I figure I’m better off shoving against her ribs than up around her shoulders and jutting elbows.

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Ilya Kovalchuk was 18 when he came to Atlanta. He was enormous, even then, listed at 6’2” and somewhere north of 200 lbs, but still so boyish-looking that Waddell joked he’d let his 12-year-old daughter make the pick. If so, Chelsea was one ballsy little girl, because she’d chosen the first Russian hockey player to ever go first overall. He showed up, there, in a southern American city, with teeth so bad that nine of them had to be extracted and English so bad he responded to on-ice insults with blank smiles. He understood pretty much nothing about the place he’d come to, or the culture, or the language. He only understood how to play, and how to score.