Things The Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #50

 There will be a World Cup where Canada advances farther than Germany.

Things The Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #49

There will be a World Cup where Italy does not qualify, but Curacao and Cabo Verde do. (Not to rub it in, but this echoes back to an entry from a few years ago.)

Taylor Swift Beat Me To The "Stevie Knicks" Pun

We just saw the NBA and NHL championships handed out on consecutive nights. I don't have much to add to the Carolina Hurricanes win, beyond pointing out that they now join Colorado and Tampa Bay on the list of places that have now won a Stanley Cup, rebuilt, and won another cup with a different team, all since the last time a Canadian team won the cup.

Speaking of long championship droughts, congratulations to the Knicks on their first NBA championship in more than a half-century. That should give the Leafs some optimism. Maybe.

But that brings up one unsettling aspect of their win. We've now seen a few teams end long championship droughts in the twenty-first century, and the feelings around them are a bit different. Obviously, the Cubs spring to mind as a team that had a long and painful futility streak. When they won a World Series, there were generally good feelings from those who didn't have a connection to the team. We were glad to see their long-suffering fanbase have their moment of success. After all, they were the Loveable Losers, people who took their misfortune with good nature. You felt like they deserved a change in fortune.

Contrast that with the Red Sox a few years earlier. Their World Series drought was also measured in lifetimes, but there wasn't such an outpouring of joy to see them finally happy. I'm sure some of that was their rivalry with the Yankees, and thus taste-makers in the media capital weren't so happy to see them succeed. But there was also a feeling that the Bosox weren't such loveable losers; rather than being seen having a laid-back acceptance of their fate, they came across as a little too intense and taking it a little too seriously. Their continued failure gave the rest of the sports world a bit of schadenfreude, and watching them finally have their day didn't give us nearly as much joy. 

So when it comes to long-suffering fans, there's differing levels of sympathy. To bring this back to the Leafs, they'll definitely be the extreme counter to the Cubs. Yes, plenty of Leaf fans have a Cub-like humour to their futility, but for every one of them, there are twelve with dangerous levels of obsession. Even as a Leafs fan, I realize that if they ever win a cup, no non-fans will feel good for them.

So what about the Knicks? Well, I found that this was one of those Medium-is-the-Message situations. Watching them win - clinching on the road - it was easy to feel good for them. A hard-working team, coming from behind, it all seemed to parallel a fanbase that has remained passionate through thick and thin.

Contrast that to the previous game, where they won in an exciting, record-setting comeback. But that was at home. Normally it's great for a neutral observer to see a home team win, with a passionate crowd cheering them on. But a Knicks crowd is second only to a Lakers crowd in celebrity sightings, and the director of the TV coverage was intent on getting a reaction shot from every famous person in the lower bowl after every decisive play. You could just imagine him in the control room shouting out the names in succession to cut to the close-ups, "Sandler! Seinfeld! McEnroe! Stiller! Swift!" 

I have nothing against any of those celebrities, but it does make it harder to cheer for the team. If I'm envisioning the long-suffering Knicks fan as some janitor from Queens, then I feel really good to see their sports dreams come true. But if it's Jerry Seinfeld, then it's harder to imagine that this team's futility has left a gaping hole in his life. 

So I hope that future sports broadcasts will think about this. Aside from the fact that you should really have more cameras showing the game than the crowd, you should also think about how that shapes the view of the team.

It’s Okay, We Never Really Liked Hockey Anyway.

Well, it’s another year of The Great Canadian Stanley Cup Drought. Last year, I made a post about how long it’s gone on, but this year, I’m trying to be more positive. 

It was an oddity of watching Shai Gilgeous-Alexander lead the Thunder to an NBA title while Canadian hockey teams couldn’t make it to the summit yet again. That got me thinking: while the past thirty-two years haven’t been good for Canada’s NHL teams, it has been a great time for sports we aren’t traditionally good at. You know, non-winter sports. So here is my list of things that Canadians have (rather surprisingly) won since the last time a Canadian team won the Stanley Cup:

Athletics

• Men's 100 m Olympic gold (Donovan Bailey)
• Men's 4x100m Olympic gold (twice)
• Olympic Decathlon (Damian Warner)

Auto Racing

• Formula 1 world championship (Jacques Villeneuve)
• Indy 500 (Jacques Villeneuve)
• IndyCar championship (Jacques Villeneuve, Paul Tracy)
• DTM championship (Bruno Spengler)

Baseball

• MLB MVP (Larry Walker, Justin Morneau, Joey Votto)
• MLB Hall-of-Fame (Larry Walker)
• Batting title (three times for Larry Walker, one for Justin Morneau)

Basketball

• NBA MVP (Steve Nash twice, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander)
• NBA Finals MVP (Shai Gilgeous-Alexander)
• NBA scoring title (Shai Gilgeous-Alexander)
• NBA Hall-of-Fame (Steve Nash)
• NCAA Consensus Player of the Year (Zach Edey)

Football

• NCAA All-American selection (Chuba Hubbard)
• CFL Most Outstanding Player (John Cornish, Brady Oliveira)

Golf 

• Majors (Mike Weir, Brooke Henderson twice)
• Canadian Open (Brooke Henderson, Nick Taylor)

Mixed Martial Arts

• UFC welterweight championship (Carlos Newton, Georges St. Pierre)
• UFC middleweight championships (Georges St. Pierre)

Soccer

• Olympic gold (Women’s)
• Gold Cup (Men’s)
• FIFPRO Men's World 11 (For best player in the world at each position - Alphonso Davies)
• MLS MVP (Dwayne De Rosario)

Tennis

• U.S. Open (Bianca Andreescu)
• World Top Ten Rankings (Bianca Andreescu, Milos Raonic, Eugenie Bouchard)
• Davis Cup
• Billie Jean King Cup

So let’s concentrate on these positives. Nearly all of these achievements had never been done by a Canadian before that last Cup. Let’s not dwell on the fact that Steve Nash’s entire Hall-of-Fame career was during the drought, or that Bianca Andreescu, Brooke Henderson, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and Alphonso Davies weren’t even born the last time Canada won the Cup. Instead, just accept that we’re becoming more well-rounded sports-wise, whether we like it or not.

Jersey Chore

We’ve had most of a season with the new PWHL team branding now. Personally, I didn’t really miss them in the opening season’s cities-only identities. And some of the new ones are still not feeling quite right. So here’s my reviews of them:

New York Sirens

The Name

Pretty clever: has the double meaning of the sound often heard in New York, and the Sirens of Greek mythology. 

The Logo

Kind of disappointing. I realize it’s difficult to make a symbol for a team named after a sound. What would you do, show a mythological siren holding an air horn? Though the extra bits of letters at the side, to look like an alarm light was very clever.

Colours and Uniform

The teal is borrowed from the WNBA’s New York Liberty, which in turn is borrowed from the Statue of Liberty. Combine it with the dark blue and amber and it looks like a blending of the 90’s and today. Nice.

The use of multiple colours in the uniform is refreshing when so many teams have fallen in love with an all-one-colour look. So now you can enjoy teal without O.D.ing on it like in San Jose. Too bad the word, “Sirens” on the logo is the same colour as the home uniform, so from a distance, you just see these two disjointed chunks of white above and below it.

Toronto Sceptres

The Name

If you’re going to make a bunch of team names, there’s bound to be a WTF entry, and here it is. I have to admit, when I heard the name, my mind went to an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where she fights the old shamen who created the slayers, and defeats one by breaking his staff, which turns out to be the source of his powers, and she says, “I knew it. It's always the staff,” as if to comment on the phallic nature of so many symbols of power. So does it really make sense to name a women’s team after such an item? 

But I’m also thinking they need to read the room. There are places for taking a chance on an off-the-wall name, but Canadian hockey fandom in general, and Toronto in particular, is not it.

The Logo

That was well done; it looks classic without being dated, thus winning back some of the Canadian Hockey cachet that the name lost

Colours and Uniform

You had to go with blue, which was Toronto’s civic colour before the Raptors started dragging it towards the red end of the spectrum. Light blue was bold. But yellow? It’s a little St. Louis Bluesy to me. I normally hate it when sports teams describe their yellow as “gold,” but in this case, it might have been a good idea to darken and dull the yellow a bit and tell everyone it’s gold. After all, what else would you make a sceptre out of?

Boston Fleet

The Name

It’s pretty nice; sounds tough while also sounding modernly singular. Though it loses some marks for being recycled from the Alliance of American Football

The Logo

A "B" shaped like an anchor: The letter-that-looks-like-something is a classic sports logo strategy. And it gets a big bonus for looking like a sideways version of that greatest-of-all-hockey-logos, the Hartford Whalers. Of course, that means that I keep looking for something hidden in the negative space, and being disappointed that I can’t find it. At least it has the surreal quality in that it's an anchor — something you put in water — though it appears to be full of water, like a sporting tesseract.

Colours and Uniforms

Going green was a good choice. You’re copying a Boston classic, without just piggybacking on the local hockey team. And the light green accent is a bold twist on it.

But watching them on the ice, I keep thinking there must have been a mistake at the cleaners. Whose blue pants are these? Okay, there are tiny blue accents elsewhere in the uniform, but the pants still look out of place.

Ottawa Charge

The Name

Kind of generic, I mean, for a modern sports team name. All the possibilities offered by a national capital, and the name sounds like a USFL reject.

The Logo

It’s an O. No, it’s a C. No, it’s a wheel. It looks like you asked an AI to make a sports logo for a team with the initials, “OC.” Though you have to remember that it’s pretty hard to build a logo around the letter O, As some of the Senators’ alternate jerseys have shown.

Colours and Uniform

They’re not bad looking, but well… There aren’t many cities that have coordinated sports team colours. Really just Pittsburgh (Black and Yellow) and Ottawa (Red and Black.) But in Ottawa’s case, they even have a team named after their civic colours. The Charge tried to nod towards that colour scheme with various greys, and they look more like red and black on the ice, but I feel like yelling, “You had one job!”

Montreal Victoire

The Name

I saw some people comment that Montreal “won” the PWHL identities, and I think they’re right. “Victoire” is new, but sounds classic. It’s distinctly French, but doesn’t need explanation in English, like Nordiques did.

The Logo

Again, they won here. Looks good, looks timeless, looks like a bird, has a hidden “M” in it, looks sort of like the board for Atari’s Tempest. What more could you want?

Colours and Uniform

Did a better job than Toronto of paying tribute to the local NHL institution while carving out a new identity. The colours of dark red, dark blue, and really-old-newspaper looks great without tying it to an era. My only change would be to make the logo on the home uniforms reverse colour. Having it on a light-backgrounded shield so it shows up is a little busy.

Minnesota Frost

The Name

They won the first championship, and now they've got a great name too. It’s got the WNBA abstract-concept name style, but without sounding contrived. For most of the PWHL names, we can argue whether they’re better than the city’s NHL counterpart, but this is the only one where the PWHL team wins in a knockout.

The Logo

A nice simple letter in a distinctive style, that’s a classic approach. More for baseball, I guess; but it works here too.

Colours and Uniform

Purple is the colour of two of Minnesota’s most beloved institutions: The Vikings, and Prince. It's a nice color, though it doesn't make one think of frost so much as frostbite. It’s also nice that they included a contrasting lightish red, or magenta, or light purple. I guess it’s lilac. They put lilac in there and just dared you to complain. That's pretty bold.

Hyper Links

There's a new made-for-television golf event called TGL. It's a golf league, though I'm disappointed it doesn't stand for, "The Golf League." I've watched a few times, even though I'm not really a golf fan. I was just curious what it would be like. Strangely, I find it's like looking at an edgy work of art: I'm not entirely sure if I'm enjoying it, but it's so relentlessly weird that I can't look away.

The idea is to repackage golf in a smaller, more viewer-friendly format, with everything taking place in an indoor arena. The courses are all computer-simulated. The golfers tee off, hitting the ball at a big screen showing the virtual fairway. Then the computer figures out from the ball's trajectory where it would have landed. They either hit another drive at the screen, or, if the ball landed on the virtual green, they move to a big putting green, and putt from where the computer said the ball landed. The green can be warped and angled to simulate the lie.

Oh, and it's a team game of match golf.  With fifteen holes for some reason. There's a bunch of other rules that are still a mystery. They sometimes throw a hammer on the green, but I'm still figuring that one out. 

But the basic idea is that it's deconstructed golf: all the parts of golf, but dismantled and crammed into a new form. The shocking part is that I jokingly suggested something similar years ago: I saw a driving range with a mini golf course, and realized it could be a substitute for actual golf. And now, here it is, turned into a televised spectacle.

The whole thing is pretty bizarre. On the one hand, it's like the future we imagined, with people playing simulated sports, surrounded by a wildly enthusiastic audience. Throw in some mortal danger and it would be Rollerball.

But on the other hand, it's lacking in the polish you would expect future sports to have. I can't help thinking there is a weird inconsistency using technology in simulating real golf. Like you have this big mechanical surface that can morph itself into any hypothetical golf green, but it also has sand traps, and they're just plain old sand. Not computer-controlled magnets in the turf increasing the resistance to the golf club to simulate the resistance of sand. No, just a big pit full of sand.

One good thing is that many of the made-up holes are arrangements that would be hard to build in real life, like the tee and the hole are on opposite sides of a canyon. That's fun, but it loses something when it's just simulated, and you're not really watching the heartbreak of the golfer watching the shot come up short and bounce all the way down. Though it might be better if they got even more impossible, like the tee and green are on the roofs of different skyscrapers.

Of course, I'm now wondering what other sports could be deconstructed and remade like this. Auto racing would be an obvious possibility, since it's also a sport that takes up an inconvenient amount of room, and is difficult to watch live. You could have cars on giant treadmills, but that would be dangerous and loud, and even sillier. It would be better if they were just driving simulated cars. But they already have simulated racing; it's been part of eSports for a while now. While it does attract viewers, I don't foresee people packing an arena to watch it. Though it might be fun if — like the simulated golf — they had them drive on crazy, unreal courses. It would also be nice if the drivers could have a casual interaction with one another, like the golfers do in TGL. Maybe people would pay to see live racing simulation if they could hear Verstappen swearing at Hamilton, live and in person. (Lewis Hamilton is an investor in TGL, by the way.)

Of course, that introduces the idea that there would be some sort of interaction through the simulation; a way to get revenge within the sport. Okay, I've just reinvented Mario Kart, haven't I? But seriously, the world's top drivers playing Mario Kart: I would watch that.

Branding New Cadillac

General Motors has been awarded a formula one team. Michael Andretti had been campaigning for an American F1 team, but now he's stepped aside and the team will be more GM than Andretti. And it's going to be called the Cadillac team, as part of GM's eternal effort to associate the brand with something other than your rich uncle Wally's land yacht.

I'm wondering if anyone is taking bets on how long this team will last — or at least, how long it will have the Cadillac name. I'm thinking the over-under should be about 5 years. In recent history, there have been several examples of companies slapping their name on an F1 team, then changing their mind a few years later. Toyota lasted eight seasons, and Honda only three, and I don't see GM being more patient than them. It won't take long for the suits to ask why they're spending tens of millions to finish fourteenth.

The fact is that Formula One isn't a real great investment. It's not just expensive, but it's also hard to get to the top even if you're willing to spend with the big boys: You also need people with specific skills that aren't always available. Worse, there isn't much of a consolation prize: If you don't make it to the top, the whole world hears your name applied to the irrelevant car getting lapped by the champion.

So Formula One is a weird kind of never-ending investment bubble, where new people buy a team expecting great things, then realize there's not much reward in glory or publicity, and give up. But somehow, there's always more investors ready to take any team off the owner's hands and begin the cycle again.

Having said all this, Formula One has been more competitive this season, with four different teams winning races, so maybe this was the best time to buy into the series. But having said that, the other six teams had a combined total of two podiums in the 24 races, so there's still a big gap between haves and have-nots, even if there are more haves than there used to be. That will be the big challenge: those years in the wilderness without success before any chance at a publicity payoff.

May I Label These Envelopes Please

Did you know that there’s only three days in the year that North America’s “Big 4” team sports do not have any games? Okay, probably, because we’ve just had them: they’re the three days around Baseball’s All-Star Game. In recent years, ESPN used this break as an opportunity to have their annual award show, the Espys. But for some reason, they had it a few days early this year, so I was unprepared to publish another instalment of suggested awards. Previous suggestions are here from 2014 and here from 2015.

Baseball

• Most creative way to point out a no-hitter without actually mentioning it
• Least embarrassing ceremonial first pitch
• Least confusing score bug
• Most nonchalant front row spectator
• Most sweat-stained cap
• Most elaborate hairstyle hidden under a cap
• Most gratuitous old-time ballpark feature in a new stadium
• Best performance by a player asking the dugout to request a review

Football

• Best performance by a player introducing himself and his college
• Most innocent-sounding explanation for not signing Colin Kaepernick
• Most gratuitous use of cable cam
• Best performance by a coach angrily taking off his headset after a bad play

Basketball

• Best performance by a fan in the front row berating a player without provoking a fight
• Most subtle way for a commentator to question officials' competence
• Best wood floor pattern

Hockey

• Best performance by a league official pretending to care about concussions
• Most consecutive questions asked of John Tortorella without him losing it
• Most dramatic announcement of a goal-review result
• Most gratuitous pre-game ceremony (separate divisions for original-six and expansion teams)
• Best special effects in an animated virtual board ad

Soccer

• Most miraculous use of the magic spray
• Best performance by players wasting time taking a corner, throw-in etc.
• Best performance by in-studio analysts hyping a relegation game
• MLS fan group that looks most like it could win a riot against European fans
• Best interpretive dance moves while running up to a penalty

Tennis

• Best attempt to have a McEnroe-style tantrum despite the existence of review technology
• Best performance by a player packing up their bag and leaving after a loss
• Subtlest grunting

General

• Most money conned out of local government for a new stadium
• Least-awkward in-stadium marriage proposal
• The Ref-Cam Award for best dumb-sounding idea
• Highest office job given to a retired player with no experience
• Roughest play at an All Star game
• The Broken Clock Award for best prediction by a loud mouth debater. 
• Fastest performance of The Star-Spangled Banner
• Saddest story of a veteran dealt away from a championship team as part of a deadline deal
• Most realistic superimposed ad
• Most compassionate "oooh" by a crowd watching an injury in slow motion on the jumbotron
• The St. Joseph’s Cancer Center Award for strangest thing advertised on a sports broadcast
• The Eric Lindros Award for highest expectations placed on a prospect who hasn’t played in the big leagues yet.

20,000 Leagues All Over Me

In many ways, I reject traditional masculinity, but in other ways I embrace it. One obvious way is sports. I counted it up, and I now have items of clothing to indicate my team of choice in no less than seven different sports leagues. (MLB, NBA, NHL, CFL, NFL, MLS, and the latest addition, the National Lacrosse League.)

That's nearly all of my teams. Okay, there are some leagues where I have a favourite team based on something like a weird name. (Forced to choose a team among Indian Premier League cricket teams I'd go the Kolkata Knight Riders, but I can't pretend to be passionate about them.) Among teams I truly care about the only ones missing would be the family soccer teams, Aston Villa or Birmingham City. And I point that out not entirely as a gift idea for friends and family. 

But now I realize that this manifestation of my masculinity is about to get even more complicated. And ironically, it's because of the rise of women's sports. I jumped on the bandwagon of the Toronto PWHL team, but since they don't have a name yet, I have a reprieve before buying any merchandise. But as soon as they become the Toronto Narwhals or something, I'll be heading to the stores. And now Toronto is getting a WNBA franchise, so that will need another piece of clothing with their presumably non-plural name splashed across it. 

The fact is that we're entering into a more complex sports world. The days of just hockey in Canada and just baseball in the US are long gone. We've even moved beyond a Big-3 or Big-4 team sports. I'm wondering how that's going to change fandom in the future. Because at the same time, the ways of spending on your team has increased too; clothing is just one aspect of it. Above, I was just talking about cheap t-shirts and hats, but if you're going to go for the replica uniform route, you could be spending a thousand dollars on your full collection of teams, before we even get to the jackets, lamps, novelty home scoreboards, etc. And that's before we consider how much you might bet on your teams of choice. 

So I'm thinking that sports fandom could get watered down: The days of looking into the audience and seeing half the fans in the team uniform could be numbered. After all, it wasn't that long ago when such fans were a lot less common.  Maybe we'll return to those before-times of more casually-dressed spectators, and the current era of monochromatic crowds will seem like an awkwardly-obsessed outlier.

Or, we could see fans concentrating more on individual sports. Instead of just automatically maintaining fandom of all the teams from the local metropolis, fans may choose to specialize. That would be odd, because now we just assume that teams from different sports in one town are kind of allies, since their fans are mostly the same people. But if they have to fight to be the object of local fans' obsessions, that could get ugly. You think it's hard to back a team between Lakers-Celtics or Dodgers-Giants, how about when it's Dodgers-Lakers? Rich teams fighting over entitled fans? That's no fun. I'd be willing to keep buying sports merchandise just to keep that from happening.

Somebody To Shove

I've been watching the new Professional Women's Hockey League, and it's been pretty fun. Fans have really embraced it, and given games a lot of energy. and atmosphere that comes through even on TV.

One thing that's changed since previous women's hockey is an increase in physicality. Women's hockey has generally avoided it in the past; most women's hockey bans bodychecking, and the marquee events have been international tournaments that are more likely to crack down on physical confrontations outside of the game itself.

But the PWHL has been far more permissive of things, both during and after the play. This has generally been welcomed by announcers and journalists.

I'm less enthusiastic about it: granted, I'm not a fan of hockey fights, but I can understand what people see in it. After all, fighting has been made into a number of other sports, from boxing to mixed-martial arts. So — putting aside any moral considerations for the moment — there's clearly an appetite for it. And hockey's lax rule enforcement is just asking for vigilante justice. Having said that, I've noticed that many fights come down to one of three motivations, each of which makes the fight seem irrelevant: 

• Enforcers fighting each other, not because of any beef between them or their teams, but just to justify their employment. 
• Interminable fights at the end of a blowout, as the losing team tries to "send a message," not realizing the message is, "look everyone, we just got out ass kicked."
• Revenge for a hard play that was totally legal, but pissed the team off.

Of course, the classic provocation for fighting is revenge for a cheap shot. Personally, I'd rather have a sport where the rules were enforced, but if that's not going to happen, then I can certainly understand why players often take the law into their own gloveless hands.

But hockey's anarchic nature has created one offshoot that I truly don't get: the pushing and shoving that follows so many stoppages in play. It really slows the game down, while providing little entertainment value. 

For one thing, watching people push each other is not very exciting. Fighting may have been turned into several sports, but you notice how there is no sport of pushing and shoving? Well, there's a reason for that: there isn't much pay-per-view money in the Ultimate Shoving Challenge.

But the other, even worse aspect is that the shoving is so artificial; fighting as revenge for a dirty play is at least connected of the game. But the shoving is meaningless playground-level tactics: players hit after the whistle to provoke the opposition, or accidentally-on-purpose bump into each other to start something. It's as believable as a Three Stooges routine, but treated with deadly seriousness. I got more than my fill of that on the playground back in the day.

Yet I seem to be in the minority on this one. Lots of people in the hockey world can't get enough of those post-whistle scrums. I think they see them as a substitute for the fighting which has become a rarer part of the game. But you’d think that given how important fighting is to hockey culture, and that these shoving matches are a pale imitation of fights, that they’d be seen as a wimpy, half-hearted substitute. But no, hockey culture embraces the shoving and the elementary school posturing that comes with it.

Which brings us back to the PWHL. We haven’t seen actual fights there, as the full-face masks will strongly discourage that sort of thing. But there's a great amount of the post-play shoving. Commentators tend to like this and get really excited. I can’t always tell if this is genuine enthusiasm for the scrum itself, or just the superficial assumption that this makes it more like the men's game, so it must be a good thing.

But to me, it’s a worst-of-both-worlds situation. Of all the physical aspects of the men’s game, they’ve imported the least entertaining.

Cuphead Deals With The Devils (Among Others)

With the All-Star break in hockey, I thought it would be a good time to look at a concept I'd wondered about. The history of hockey is kind of weird because there were so few teams for so long: We're told that certain teams are really great because of all the Stanley Cups they won, but many of those were in the original-six era, when you just had to beat five other teams. You would actually have better odds of winning a cup then, than you do of winning a division now.

So I devised a game to test the accumulated achievement of each franchise. Instead of counting how many cups each team has won, I counted how many teams they defeated to win their cups. In other words, each cup is worth points; specifically, one point for every other team in the league at the time. So a cup win in the original-six era is worth 5 points, while last year's win for Vegas was worth 31 points.

Here are the results (not counting non-NHL teams that won in the early years):

Rank	Team	Total Teams Defeated
1	Montreal Canadiens	231
2	Detroit Red Wings	147
3	Pittsburgh Penguins	128
4	Chicago Blackhawks	107
5	Edmonton Oilers	100
6	Tampa Bay Lightning	89
7	Colorado Avalanche	85
8	New Jersey Devils	81
9	New York Islanders	80
10	Boston Bruins	74
11	Toronto Maple Leafs	63
12	Los Angeles Kings	58
13	New York Rangers	48
14	Philadelphia Flyers	32
15	Vegas Golden Knights	31
16	St. Louis Blues	30
16	Washington Capitals	30
18	Anaheim Ducks	29
18	Carolina Hurricanes	29
20	Dallas Stars	26
21	Calgary Flames	20
23	Ottawa Senators (original)	14
24	Montreal Maroons	13

So what does this prove?

• The Habs still come out on top. While many of their wins were for just five, the sheer number of them, combined with their many cups in the seventies, gave them an easy win.
• The big beneficiaries were teams that won multiple cups post-1980 for twenty-odd points each. Pittsburgh and Edmonton were vaulted past most of the original-six teams, while Chicago has esteem they never used to have. That fits with how someone my age sees the league: the prestige of those franchises outweighs the prestige given to original-six teams merely for being old.
• Unsurprisingly, the big losers were the Maple Leafs. Only two of their cups scored more than five points, and they were from before the original-six era. Thus, they fell behind Tampa, Colorado, and New Jersey. Having said that, a single win now would push them past all those teams.
• The Rangers did better than you might expect. Yes, they've only won once in the past eighty years, but their three cups in the early years were before original-six, when there were more teams.

What A Show, Eh?

See, if the Blue Jays had succeeded in signing Shoehi Ohtani, then that headline is the pun we’d all be getting tired of. Aren’t you glad we dodged that bullet? No, me neither.

It's been a weird offseason for the Blue Jays. It started with a sense of doom:  The team has kind of painted itself into a corner: Several players have expiring contracts, and the team’s offence needs improvement, but there isn’t a lot of offence available in this year’s free-agent class. There was a sense that there was little to look forward to.

Then, unexpectedly, the Jays made a major push to sign Shohei Ohtani. This is a team that has rarely gone after the top free agents, and then they go after the biggest free agent ever. Even though the contract was expected to be at least three times the biggest contract the Jays had ever signed. Nevertheless, as the rumour mill’s list of suitors dwindled, and the Blue Jays slowly rose to the top of the list of potential destinations.

And then, suddenly, it was over. It was like reality reasserted itself, and Ohtani signed with the Dodgers just as everyone expected. Of course, it's entirely possible that the chances of his signing with the Jays was always remote, and it was exaggerated to drive the final price up. For Jays fans it was doubly a let down, missing out on Ohtani, and him signing with a super-rich team, as if to emphasize that fantasy time was over now. Okay, it was refreshing that it wasn’t a super-rich team in the Jays’ division for once. I heard some people suggest that Ohtani’s contract decision was a missed marketing opportunity for Major League Baseball, and they should have made it into a televised spectacle, like LeBron James' first free agency. But it seems to me that would be a disappointment, seeing as the result was so predictable.

(And fittingly, my first attempt to spell Shohei was autocorrected to "Sorry")

The whole experience was very strange, and I'm not sure how to describe it. It was like we jumped into an alternate universe, then got pulled back to reality. The effect was similar to watching this video, which hinges on the odd fact that Tom Brady was drafted by the Montreal Expos:

Unfortunately, the timelines of that alternate reality don't quite line up, since Larry Walker left as a free agent a few months before the Expos drafted Brady. But that's part of the experience I'm trying to describe: surreal dreaming, and now back to a dull reality where you realize that dream wasn’t really possible. But after being allowed to dream, it seems extra depressing. 

On a practical level, the Blue Jays are back in the predicament that began the offseason. But on an emotional level, this incident contributes to a long-running frustration for Jays fans: we'd just like to know what type of team we have. There are big-spending teams like the Yankees and Dodgers, cheap teams like the Rays or Royals; some teams spend strategically, like the Cardinals, and some spend wildly, like the Mets. The Jays, on the other hand, seem to jump between personalities. 

They spent big in the World Series years, then turned into a small-market team for a couple of decades. That was at least predictable. Since then, it's been a crap shoot. They might spend big, or not. They might try patiently building a team of talented youngsters. Or they might go after the biggest free agent in the history of sports. I just wish we could adjust our expectations.

Winning (More) Time

How about this NBA in season tournament? It’s an idea borrowed from soccer and grafted on to a North American basketball league. It's a new and unprecedented idea in basketball <does some research> Oh, the WNBA has already done it three times? Well, I'm just going to blame their lack of Canadian teams for that, rather than examine my own latent sexism.

Anyway, I would have thought hockey was the sport where an extra tournament makes the most sense. As many have pointed out, hockey playoffs are infinitely more intense than any regular season game. So artificially creating even more playoff hockey would sound like a good idea. I mean, except for the whole hockey culture-hates-change thing.

But I actually like this idea of the NBA in-season tournament, and the biggest reason is that it gives some intrigue to the NBA's neglected middle. So many teams get trapped in that Catch-22 of not good enough to contend for a title, not bad enough to draft the superstar they need to contend for a title. So the only intrigue for fans of those teams is whether they'll just miss the playoffs, or get in and get smoked in the first round.

This tournament will offer them a bit of hope, and thus, more reason to pay attention. Yes, the favourites for the in season tourney will be the same as the favourites for NBA champion. But as a single-elimination tournament (after the brief round-robin) there's some randomness thrown in. With one game to decide who goes on, there's more chance of an upset, and those good-but-not-great teams can dream of riding a hot streak to glory.

It also addresses one of the big, but rarely-mentioned aspects of modern team sports: there are a lot of teams, but not much glory to go around. If your league has thirty or so teams, you’re going to be waiting a while for a championship. Unfortunately, our ideas of what to expect from team success were set in an era when there were half as many teams. We expect to win lots of championships, when really, we can expect to see just two to three in an average lifetime. Having more titles available is one way to make it more tolerable as you wait that couple of generations between championships. 

I know, lots of pundits will complain that it’s not a real title. There will be plenty of hot takes the first time a team raises an in-season tournament banner — especially if it goes to a team that’s never won a championship. There have been plenty of complaints when a team commits the sin of celebrating a win in the play-in games to get the final playoff seeds. But I don’t think there’s any danger of watering-down the importance of the overall championship — just look to European soccer to see that. And the in-season tournament will be worth something — I know those hot takes are even now looking for a way to compare it to a participation trophy, but it will be a difficult thing to win. You could make the argument that a single-game-elimination tournament has too much randomness to be a good test of merit, but that argument would invalidate March Madness, so I don’t think we’ll hear it too often. And having special courts with wild colours for the tournament, thus distracting all the hot takes, was a stroke of genius.

Swilce? Tayvis? Traylor?

I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but Taylor Swift is dating Travis Kelce, star tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs. You probably have heard this, because it’s created a perfect storm of American popular culture, combining the hype of football and the ubiquity of pop music. The Yin and Yang of American culture have been suddenly pushed together, and both sides are acting kind of awkward. 

As someone who watches football, but shies away from popular music, I’m only seeing part of it. But the football half is pretty embarrassing. On the one hand, a lot of people want to talk about it, but aren’t really sure how, so they just make a lot of bad puns on Swift’s songs. And that got old really fast. I don’t know if something similar is going on in the pop world. Oh God, I just realized, they must be making endless “tight end” jokes. My condolences.

It’s also embarrassing the way the football world is acting like a nerdy kid who gets a chance to sit at the cool kids’ table. That’s a bit surprising, given the grip that football seems to have on American culture. But even football has room to grow, and suddenly getting exposure with a young and female demographic has them seeing dollar signs. So now the NFL is passing notes in class asking if the cool kids have said anything about it.

But more than anything, this incident shows how we, as a society, still haven’t figured out how to handle the current culture. The celebrity industry wants to make this the story of the century, but many of us have got the message that obsessing over people we don't know is a bad idea, even when we are fans of them. The fact is, there isn’t much for any of us to say about two people dating, when we personally don’t know either one. Whether you’re a fan of one or both or neither, there’s not much of a reaction you can have, other than wishing them luck. Again, the football world is demonstrating this well, with football analysts suddenly being asked to say something about the couple, but not really having anything to add, and instead just making the umpteenth "Blank Space" joke.

Part of the problem is that we just don't have universal touchstones in society anymore. There are few things that everyone cares about, but the media keeps excitedly hoping it will find one. Even Swift on her own is a good example of it. Her fame has reached a level where the media is assuming she is a universal obsession. But we don't really have universal obsessions in a world where we're so free to choose our personal culture. The most anyone can hope for is fandom from a dedicated and large minority, like Swift has. (Or, for that matter, football has.) But that still means that most people don't have a strong connection. So although you’ll see some examples of fans crossing over into both cultural worlds — like those who famously flooded retailers with orders for Kelce’s jersey — more people are just aggravated with the expectations to suddenly care about the other side of American culture. 

My Cup Runneth Away From Me

People make a big deal about the Maple Leafs’ half-century-plus since their last Stanley Cup win. While that’s bad, I have to point out that in a league that had 20+ teams for most of that time, not winning the championship in 56 years isn’t that embarrassing. You know what is embarrassing? It’s now been thirty years since a Canadian team has won the cup. 

That’s quite unlikely statistically, given that the Canadian teams have made up between a fifth and a third of teams during that time. We have a tendency to focus on the Leafs’ drought because we love piling on the misery for Leaf fans. But consider this: the last Canadian cup win (Montreal, 1993) is now closer in time to the Leafs' last Cup win than the present. And since the last Leaf cup win was also the last season of the Original Six, the 1993 cup win is now also closer in time to the Original Six era than the present. For that matter, the Canadian cup drought (30 years) is now longer than the Original Six era itself (25 years.)

But wait, I’ve got lots of these: How long is the Canadian Cup Drought?

• It's more than one quarter of the NHL's existence.
• When Montreal won that cup, they had to beat the Quebec Nordiques in the first round.
• Long-time coach Randy Carlyle was in the league in 1993 — as a player.
• He was one of five players without helmets.
• That season, there were a bunch of neutral-site games. They included games in Dallas, Phoenix and Miami.
• Gary Bettman had been on the job four months.
• Martin St. Louis, Paul Kariya, Chris Pronger, Marian Hossa, Daniel Alfredsson, Roberto Luongo, and Daniel and Henrik Sedin had not played in the NHL in 1993, and Jayna Hefford, Angela Ruggiero, Hayley Wickenheiser, and Kim St-Pierre had not played for their national teams yet. They're all in the Hall of Fame now.
• Speaking of the Women’s national teams, the Women’s World Championship had only been held twice. The Americans still hadn’t come close to winning it.
• Only two NHL arenas from that season are still in use.
• Fourteen American teams have won the cup since 1993. That includes four cities that didn't have teams in 1993. Regardless of who wins this year, Las Vegas or Miami will become the fifteenth and fifth such city, respectively.
• Worse, during the drought, both Colorado and Tampa Bay won a cup, rebuilt, and then won another cup with a totally different team.
• Since 1993, Canadian teams have won championships in the NBA and MLS, despite the fact that in 1993 there were no Canadian teams in the NBA, and the MLS did not exist.

For the first ten years of the drought, you could explain it through economics. Between a low Canadian dollar and the lack of a salary cap, most of the Canadian teams could barely stay in business, nevermind create or keep a winner. And two of the teams that had the money to compete — Montreal and Toronto — seemed content to shuffle along with mediocre teams and hope for the best. 

After the 2004-05 Lockout, the salary cap was installed, and the Canadian dollar recovered, putting teams on an even footing. And somehow that still didn't help. The salary cap is now 18 years old, the economics will even support a competitive team in Winnipeg, and we still can’t win a cup.

For a while I thought Canadian teams' lack of success was due to their tendency to tweak a mediocre team rather than go into rebuild mode. Canadians have a belief that hockey is all about heart so you just need to squeak into one of the last playoff positions then rely on the players' character to win the day. So there's always pressure to trade a draft pick for that one gritty winger. The result was that Canadian teams stayed in the good-but-not-great level. 

I'd also heard the explanation that the lack of media oversight of American teams was an advantage here. The General Manager of a Canadian team is constantly being asked about how they're going to make the team better right now. Whereas an American GM has to answer maybe three media questions a year, so if they want to undergo a thorough rebuild, there won't be much complaining. Once again, Americans have just the right amount of enthusiasm for hockey. 

But no, that's not it either. Toronto went through a complete rebuild, and to some extent most of the other teams have rebuilt, and the new highly-skilled teams have been no more successful than any hastily-thrown-together team of gritty veterans.

Another explanation you often hear is the difficulty of getting free agents to come to, or stay in, Canada. The reason being: your choice of weather, taxes, or the media fishbowl. But I don't buy that. For the most part, Canadian teams have been able to keep their stars together for several cup runs. Yes, there are nightmare examples like Johnny Gaudreau and Matthew Tkachuk leaving Calgary, but that probably had more to do with Coach Darryl Sutter's toxic culture. As for signing big-name free agents from elsewhere, that's not usually a route to success in the NHL. Even successful American teams are mostly home-grown and traded-for players. 

So I'm running out of ideas. One explanation I've heard is that even when a team like Toronto commits to skill, they still hedge their bets by complimenting the skilled core with traditional big old slow guys who hold the team back. So, let’s go with that for now.

It may well be that we're just cursed. That sounds reasonable - we've surely disrespected the game as much or more than the Red Sox selling Babe Ruth. And whoever the gods of hockey are, I suspect they are truly vengeful. 

Things The Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #43

Eventually, the NFL will just drop the pretence, and make the Pro Bowl into a flag-football game.

This Team Is A Pinto With 50,000 Miles On It

The big news in hockey this week has been the slow-motion firing of Vancouver Canucks' coach Bruce Boudreau. It's been rumoured that he was on the way out for a while now, and then it was leaked that the team was interviewing replacements, all the while with Boudreau trying to go about his job. It was a surreal, and - most observers agree, cruel - situation.

Although the team's behaviour was roundly criticized, I can't help but think that Canadian hockey journalists are still missing the bigger picture. For one thing, few people have mentioned that this is the second straight season with a mid-season coach-firing for the Canucks, something rarely seen in even the worst-run franchises. 

Then there's the question of the replacement. The coach that management really really wanted is Rick Tocchet. He has six years of experience, but his only playoff appearance was the Covid season where the playoffs were expanded so that three-quarters of the league qualified. Boudreau, on the other hand, has made the playoffs in all but one of his ten complete seasons. Yes, I know, it's become a standard of business that new management wants "their guy," but this stretches the concept to new depths.

My point is that if an NFL team were acting like this, then right about now I'd be writing a post about how I'm sick of the term, "dumpster fire," and we should really come up with some more metaphors for deep organizational incompetence. I don't know, "moldy basement," maybe? But in hockey journalism - in Canada, anyway - people aren't willing to call it what it is.

I see a parallel with how the media talks about players. I've noticed that even if they talk about a play being "dirty," they're unwilling to label the player who does the deed as a "dirty player." And this continues even when it's not his first offence. He's still a Good Hockey guy with lots of Character, just one who happens to make dirty plays on a regular basis. And now the same attitude applies to franchises. The Canucks are a First-Class Organization, that just keeps making stupid or immoral decisions. 

The Basketball Diagrams

In a recent commercial, I noticed that the Raptors’ Fred VanVleet was wearing a T-shirt with an odd triangular logo that looked like one of those adaptors they used for record holes. But after a few times seeing the ad, I realized that the symbol looked like an “F” and a “V,” so I wondered if it was his personal logo.

Years ago, I made a post about athletes with their own logos, so this shouldn’t surprise me. But still — much as I identify with VanVleet as a fellow vertically-challenged person, and admire his fighting back from many challenges to become an important member of a top team — he is the second-string point guard. In contrast, the athletes I found with symbols were among the best ever at their respective sports. But I did a little digging, and was surprised to find that most of the Raptors line-up have their own logos:

It turns out that although those earlier logos were created by equipment manufacturers to associate products with the athlete, today’s players are often taking it upon themselves to create a symbol for themselves. Indeed, Fred VanVleet will sell you one of his logo shirts, so he’s essentially doing for himself what Nike et al will do for the biggest stars in the game. Also, Kyle Lowry invited logo designs, but he’s still going with clothing that just has “7” on it at least for now.

In case you’re wondering where the rest of team is on this, Danny Green doesn’t have one, but his podcast does. And coach Nick Nurse has a hat with his initials on it, though that was supposedly a gift. I’m left wondering how Marc Gasol got left out of the fun. He’s a newcomer to the team, but he was a star for Memphis for many years, so I’m left wondering if this is unique to the Raptors.

I’m sure a star studded team like the Warriors all have their own logos. Well, the famous ones, anyway; their bench probably just has “Hello my name is” stickers. So I’ll look at Eastern Conference rivals the Milwaukee Bucks. Not surprisingly, their star Giannis Antetokounmpo has one, though it’s not real creative. And better still, I found a mnemonic for spelling his name. But what about his less-famous teammates? I went looking, and I couldn’t find one for Eric Bledsoe or Brook Lopez, though Khris Middleton has one that I don’t entirely understand.

So this is a weird Raptors tradition, like Jurassic Park or Drake. Hopefully they can spin this into a new way of winning over free agents: sign with the Raptors and no matter your role with the team, you get your own logo, and as many endorsements as you have time for.

Put On My Thinking Cap

Normally, I’m a believer in the concept of the salary cap. But I’m now noticing things that are kind of unexpected. Basketball has a salary cap, but teams are thinking more and more in terms of building through big fee agent signings. The most extreme example being when the Knicks traded young superstar Kristaps Porziņģis so they’d have more money to go free agent shopping this summer. In contrast, Baseball has no salary cap, yet dozens of free agents remain unsigned at the start of spring training because there’s little interest from teams.

How did we get here? Mainly it is a result of the NBA’s relatively low maximum on individual salaries. That is, it’s low compared to the total salary cap, and the small number of players on a basketball team, and the very small number of players who make a difference in a superstar-focused sport. It’s a real distortion of the market: if salaries were free (other than the limit of the salary cap) star players would be paid much more than they are now: In the NBA, a superstar is a huge advantage, so teams would be paying large percentages of their cap for one player to build around. That would drive the salaries of star players through the roof, with the result that no team would be able to fit more than one or maybe two under their cap. Super teams with many superstars wouldn’t exist.

The irony is that now things are looking bad for small teams. As others have pointed out, if a player can only make so much money from salary, then that means there’s a big financial advantage to play on a team that’s either in a big city or is already successful, so they’ll have more chances to do endorsements and supplement the salary. So strangely, while the salary cap may help smaller-market-teams compete, artificially keeping the maximum salary low is hurting them.

It’s a very different dynamic than other sports: in baseball and hockey, there’s a huge emphasis on youth. In baseball, young players are a way for small-market teams to compete without breaking the bank, and in hockey, it’s a way to get value out of the cap. You wouldn’t see anything like the Knicks trading a young star to get cap space so they can sign veterans. On the other end of that trade, people were complimenting the Mavericks on getting two great young players to build around. But I’m wondering what good that is. They may end up getting crushed by a hastily-assembled team of veterans.

Meanwhile, baseball had its own strangeness: no one wants to sign free agents. That’s strange in a sport that used to be dominated by rich teams with expensive players. Many people are blaming this on collusion, a conspiracy of the owners agreeing not to sign anyone. That's happened before, so it's hardly tinfoil hat territory.

But I have to disagree. I don't have much faith in the morality of team owners either, I just think there's a simpler explanation. The fact is that with modern statistics, we know that a good-but-not-great player will only add two or three wins for a team. And while it’s true that more wins generally means more fans (and thus more money) a small improvement like that won’t make a big enough difference to be financially worth it. Say you’re a .500 team: signing one of these “good” free agents would mean spending $10 million a year to go from 81-81 to 83-79. There’s no way that makes financial sense. Sure, you could pay for several of these players to improve the team enough to get into the playoffs, but then you’re talking about spending about $50 million a year just to get into the wild card game.

Baseball’s high costs and hard-to-make playoffs have lead to an all-or-nothing approach by the teams, in which they either spend big to make a great team, or emphasize the farm system to slowly groom a winner. That means the market for mid-range free agents is very small. Teams waiting for the youngsters to develop don’t want free agents because they aren’t trying to win at the moment, and once those youngsters are ready, they don’t want many free agents, because they have a team full of young, talented, and inexpensive players. And the few rich teams have spent most of their money on superstars, and have little need for good players. So if you’re a good player at age 30, there simply aren’t many people looking for your services.

So now the business of sports is even stranger than it normally is. Basketball has a salary cap but may be about to grind into a no-parity rut, while Baseball has no salary cap, but is very frugal, but still has no parity. And I continue to think that the NHL may actually have the best system.

Lotto Super 7

All sports have a physical component to them. We tell ourselves it's all about heart, effort, practice, character, hussle, intangibles. It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog. But we know that those things can only do so much. All things being equal, I'm betting on the big dog.

But no sport has that physical side shoved in our face quite like basketball. There are examples of small people in the game, but there are far more examples of tall folks that clearly don’t have the athletic ability of most professional athletes, but are nevertheless able to make meaningful contributions in the game.

So I wondered: if you were seven feet tall, what are your chances of making it into professional basketball. I mean, it's clear that there are plenty of tall players in the sport that could never make it without their extra vertical advantage, but how much of a difference does that make?

I googled the question, and got a reference to a widely quoted article claiming that it's 17%. However, this other post points out that there are a few problems with that:

1. The calculation is based on comparing the number of Americans who are seven-feet tall or more, with the number of seven-footers in the NBA. But most of the seven-footers in the NBA are not American.
2. The heights you see quoted in NBA statistics are measured with shoes on, while most people measure heights without shoes. So really, there are hardly any seven-foot-tall players in the NBA.

So we don't really know the percentage, but it's probably on the order of 1%. In contrast, another study looked at Americans 6'6" to 6'8" (or, Michael Jordan to Lebron James) and they had a 0.07% chance of being in the NBA. And among all Americans, less than one-in-a-million are in the NBA. So whatever the number, a seven-footer is orders-of-magnitude more likely to make the NBA.

But still, it’s not like they’re just grabbing random tall people and shoving them on the court. Even among the tallest, they’re getting particularly athletic people. But the standards are not nearly as astronomical as it is for your average person. To put it in perspective, in my high school, there were about a hundred boys in each grade. Imagine you just had to be the best athlete in your grade, and that would be enough to get drafted into the NBA. That’s essentially the situation for a seven-foot-tall individual.

But when you think about it, their lot isn’t really any different from anyone else. After all, if you were, say, six-feet tall and wanted to make the NBA, you’d have to be blessed with your own set of physical gifts, like speed and agility. But in that case, your genetic traits are not nearly as obvious or measurable. And they can be augmented by exercise and practice, allowing us to believe that their success is more than just a genetic lottery. But basketball’s big men shove it in our face that their ticket to success came largely from their DNA.