I don’t have any affection for Connor McDavid. I think he’s a wizard on the ice, and I don’t dislike him at all, but I’m not a McDavid fan. He inspires extraordinary neutrality in my heart.
Why do I bring this up? Because in the NBA, if a player won Finals MVP but lost the series, my instinct would be to make fun of him for the rest of his life. If Giannis Antetokounmpo or Luka Dončić did this, I would laugh and laugh and laugh. Even if it happened to Shai Gilgeous-Alexander or Steph Curry—both of whom I really like—I would instinctively make jokes. With McDavid, I don’t want to make jokes. It feels too sad.
What I think’s happening here internally is that I generally want good things to happen to hockey people, and I generally want bad things to happen to NBA people. JJ Redick flaming out in Los Angeles would be hilarious. The Suns continuing to self-destruct will be hilarious. Watching a goalie spontaneously combust in a playoff setting? That is torture.
I don’t think I’m alone in this. Anthony Edwards might be The Internet™’s favorite athlete right now, and when his Timberwolves choked in the Western Conference Finals, there was no shortage of trolling chucked his way. With McDavid, the response is mostly somber, even from those who don’t like the Oilers.
Why do we do this?
This is a working theory, but I think we respect hockey. I think we treat it with a reverence we don’t apply to other sports. The physical toughness. The sacrificial instinct. The reckless audacity necessary to play a contact sport while zooming around at twenty miles per hour. All of it creates an aura around the game of hockey that does not exist around basketball, especially in its American professional form. We don’t respect the NBA. We like it a lot, but we don’t respect it. Maybe this is why it’s so popular online, where sincerity and respect are so awkward. Maybe it’s why hockey’s tough to market to younger generations, raised to mock with a cutting edge the way their ancestors were raised to nobly storm the beaches on D-Day. The NBA is Drake vs. Kendrick Lamar. We are there to see someone humiliated. The NHL is more like Inglorious Basterds. It’s entertaining and often hilarious, but it’s also clearly worthy of respect.
We know how much the Stanley Cup means. We know how good Connor McDavid was this postseason. We have and will make fun of him for plenty of other things at plenty of other times. But not for this. Not right now. This was beyond the line.
Etc.
- The Panthers may have won the Stanley Cup last night, but the Sens stole the show, with news of the Linus Ullmark trade breaking right before the puck dropped. More on this tomorrow in Disco Inferno, but we wanted to acknowledge that the hockey world still runs through Ottawa.
- It must be said. Tennessee’s dogpile was weak. Those guys acted like they’d been there before, and they had not been there before. It used to be that the College World Series provided the best dogpile in all of sports. That? That looked like an MLB team celebrating a combined no-hitter in April. That was sad. Does Tennessee hate baseball? Has college baseball lost its soul?
- I didn’t realize Vladimir Guerrero Jr. had ever said he wouldn’t play for the Yankees, but I’m sad he’s walking that back. I do get it, though. The Yankees are all about guys who aren’t as good as they’re supposed to be and hit bombs. That’s Vladdy Jr. in a nutshell. God bless the man. (Specifically, by making him go to the Mariners.)
