Sens at Land’s End

So, I think it’s fair to say that the Vancouver Olympics are not going well. Everywhere you look, there’s some kind of delay or technical problem. I’m starting to wonder if the organizing committee spent all its time shopping at Lululemon and drinking expensive coffee instead of actually, like, organizing stuff.

People always say Canadians are so polite and love to apologize for things, and the fact is: this is our bad. We seem to have messed up. And even though Vancouver completely excluded my home province of Ontario from their “cross-country” tribute to Canada in the opening ceremonies and I could easily distance myself from the whole debacle, I’m going to be Canadian and stand by my countrymen by helping them apologize for their incompetence.

Opening Apology

We’re sorry we made you watch a kid flying around over a fake wheat field for five minutes. We’re sorry about the whole hydraulic cauldron fail thing. Finally, we’re really, really sorry we inflicted a Bryan Adams/Nelly Furtado duet on you and dragged out Sarah Mclachlan again. It could have been worse, though — at least she didn’t sing that I Will Remember You song (she’s probably saving it for the closing ceremonies) and at least she wasn’t Celine Dion.

Wet Apology

We’re sorry Vancouver has failed to live up to Canada’s reputation as a barren, icy wasteland. Really, though, this one’s at least partially on the IOC. They probably should have picked up on the fact that Vancouver tends to have warm, rainy winters before awarding the city the Winter Olympics.

Non-Zambonic Apology

We’re sorry the “Olympia machine” at the Richmond Oval is apparently a giant piece of crap. You’d think we’d be able to get that right, wouldn’t you? Weather delays are out of anyone’s control, but you would really think it’d be possible to avoid delays at an indoor venue. Apparently, not so much.

Luge Apology

The death of Georgia luger Nodar Kumaritashvili was an absolute tragedy and my heart goes out to the Georgian Olympic team and the entire luge community. Which is why I’m so disgusted by the comments from Canada’s luge coach, Wolfgang Staudinger. World, we’re sorry our luge coach is such an insensitive, heartless prick. Please note that this man is actually German. (Just like Dany Heatley!)

Pants Apology

We’re really freaking sorry Nate Holland of the USA snowboarding team doesn’t like our snowboarding pants or our “own the podium” slogan. Oh wait, no we’re not. How’s the view from fourth place, Nate?

Attitude Apology

We’re sorry for my previous statement. There’s nothing wrong with finishing fourth. Although, if you do try to force someone from another country off the course to benefit yourself and your teammate, you should probably be prepared for a karmic bitcshlap of some kind. Like, say, a big wipeout.

Fashion Apology

We’re sorry our speed skating outfits look so weird. They gave the contract to The Bay for some reason when we all know Roots does a much nicer job.

Advance Apology

We’re sorry in advance to whichever country has one of its hockey players’ brains scrambled by Chris Pronger. Lord knows he won’t apologize for it himself. Honestly, we don’t like him much either.

Moguls Mogul Apology

We’re sorry former Canadian and moguls skier Dale Begg-Smith is such a douchebag. Yeah, he was born and raised in Canada and he might actually be responsible for some of the spyware on your computer. We feel bad about that.

But we probably feel worse about the fact that this guy hates us so much that he may be trying to rob us of our best moment at the games so far. Australia, it’s your turn to apologize now, though I know you’re also not his biggest fans.

And, uh, I know I said I’m sticking with my countrymen on this one and everything, but I just want to note that I don’t live in Vancouver anymore, so … totally not my fault. I’m over 3,500 km away. Nothing I can do. Really.

Puck Lit reviews are probably going to slow down a bit now: I start back to school in just over a week, and won’t likely have as much time to read, which is sad but then again hockey season is starting up again soon anyway so I can go back to filling this space with posts about actual hockey. YAY!

Puck Lit Project Review #6: Cold-Cocked: On Hockey by Lorna Jackson

Plot Summary: This is another non-fiction book so there’s no plot per se, but basically it is the author’s chronicle of rediscovering hockey later in life and following the Vancouver Canucks through the 2002-2003 and 2003-2004 seasons. There’s also a little bit of her personal biography thrown in: stories about her attempts to learn more about her father’s service in World War II, her efforts at recovering from a long-term knee injury, and her sheep farm.

Genre: Non-Fiction, Reflections on Hockey

Hockey Content: Obviously, there is a lot in this one about the Canucks and the players who were with the team at the time the book was being written, with Markus Naslund, Ed Jovanovski, Trevor Linden, and Todd Bertuzzi (this was the season of the Steve Moore incident) as the main players. Mostly, we get Jackson’s observations on the Canucks’ games as well as their fans and players. For Sens fans, new Sens/former Canucks Jarkko Ruutu and Alex Auld figure in briefly. There are thoughts on Dany Heatley, and there’s a chapter in which Alfie gives birth to quadruplets!

Okay, it’s a sheep named Alfie. Had you wondering for a second though, didn’t I?

Choice Quotation: “Right before puck drop, Hockey Night in Canada’s Ron MacLean … goes wistful and chokes out Canadian hockey’s season-ending uber-cliché: We all dream about playing in the NHL, we all dream about playing in the Stanley Cup finals. We do not. Ron is over-acting about a certain brand of boy raised in cold places where ice happens every year, everywhere. Do we all dream Ron’s dream? Most little girls don’t (Shaunavon redheads notwithstanding) and really not girls raised more rain forest than ice-covered pond. The NHL engine — media pistons pumping and spewing — is fuelled ineptly by such mythomania. It distorts our national identification with the game and lies about those who love it. And it excludes a population of fans willing to commit, to stay loyal, to spend money.”

My Thoughts: I was very happy to read this book because out of all the Canadian books that reflect on the game and what it means — a pretty huge genre, really — this is, as far as I can tell, the only one written by a woman. As much as I do enjoy reading the meditations on the game written by the men who’ve played it, I must admit that I started to feel rather annoyed and excluded the last time I read one of those “we love the game because we grew up playing on frozen ponds” things. I never played on a frozen pond, but I still love hockey, and I certainly don’t think it’s right to state that only those kids (boys) whose parents (fathers) built them backyard rinks truly understand and love the game. Women not only get left out of the myth of hockey, but Jackson is also quite right: the NHL often does a pretty terrible job of marketing to female fans (see this post at My Three Favorite Things for more on that), and it’s not like there aren’t any of us out there.

So, I think it’s about time a woman sat down and wrote a book about why she loves hockey. Cold-Cocked fills a niche I’d been wanting to see filled, and it fills it well. It’s a very good read. Jackson’s thoughts on the game and how women view it are interesting. She writes that a hockey season is like a story, which is something that’s occurred to me often as I’ve been thinking back on 2007-2008 and wondering what went wrong. We can’t possibly know what an individual game or goal is going to mean until we’ve seen all the games and all the goals. Jackson argues that women in particular read the game that way, and that we like the stories involved. We like to know the background, the context for what is happening. While I’m not totally convinced that male sports fans don’t take an interest in that sort of thing, I’m certain she’s right that women do. She interviews Trevor Linden at one point, and asks him why he thinks female fans are so loyal to him. Linden says he thinks it’s because many of them have grown up watching him play, which I think gets at what Jackson is trying to say: women sometimes become personally involved in a way that men maybe just don’t.

Connected to this is another part of the reason I think women love Trevor Linden, which is that he comes across as upstanding, smart, and gentlemanly. He’s that guy who you just know would never do you wrong. He’s like hockey’s version of Lloyd Dobler (somewhere, my friend the Doc who loves both Linden and John Cusack is nodding). And with this, we get at the other thing women enjoy about hockey that men — at least straight men — probably do not. Jackson is totally frank about her schoolgirl crush on golden-haired Markus Naslund and recounts her fantasies about some of the players (totally G-rated, okay). Not that I personally indulge in that type of thought about hockey players … not that I would ever daydream about a fun-filled afternoon playing Rock Band with Rick Nash at his house, which I might imagine being something like Sugar Mountain, with a fridge full of ice cream and cake and a cotton candy machine, and also probably a trampoline — if I imagined Rick Nash’s house at all, that is. Which I do not, and I certainly would not have such a weird fantasy about him anyway. But that is beside the point: it seems inevitable that if you put a bunch of really fit men on ice and have them perform heroic feats of hockey greatness for us, women are going to find some of them hot. It’s just a fact of life, like how guys are always going to check out the ice girls. It doesn’t make us any less knowledgeable about hockey, and it definitely doesn’t make us puck bunnies. We just see things differently, and I don’t quite get why that’s a problem for so many men. I like the fact that Jackson deals with this aspect of female fandom in her book, instead of trying to cover it up to appeal to the more “serious” (those are sarcastic quotation marks, by the way) male audience.

Rating: 4 pucks out of 5. Jackson gives a great account of seeing the game through feminine eyes. I would recommend this book certainly to my fellow female hockey bloggers, who I’m sure would enjoy it, and to any male hockey fan who wants a different perspective.

I woke up just before 3:30 this morning and watched sexy kayak dude Adam van Koeverden race to silver in the K-1 500. Van Koeverden has become a great example for me of what Jackson writes about women liking a good story, not to mention a handsome face. Before he bombed the K-1 1000, van Koeverden was pretty much just a hot kayaking machine to me. I figured he was invincible. But seeing him absolutely lose the plot in his first final, and then seeing his complete and utter disbelief at how things had turned out made me much more invested in the outcome of his second race. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen someone look so genuinely lost on television before. Adam van Koeverden: awesome and unstoppable kayak juggernaut? Good story, sure. Adam van Koeverden: struggling after an unbelievably bad performance and unsure about his ability to bounce back? Now that’s compelling. In my barely-awake state, I cheered my head off for him. This is one of Olympic moments I’ll remember for a long time.

Every time I turn the TV on these days, there’s Canada failing to win yet another medal. I’ll be honest: I like watching the Olympics, but the main thing I’m getting from the goings on in Beijing right now is an intense desire to be watching the Vancouver 2010 games instead. Judging by the fact that a good number of the Olympic-themed TV ads I’m seeing on CBC feature references to winter sports, I’m not the only one who feels that way.

Watching these Olympics is also fuelling my need to see a real sport played. A sport I care about all the time and not just every four years. A sport that has sustained me through many a long winter (in Ottawa) and one long, stupidly winterless school year (in Vancouver). That sport is of course hockey, preferably hockey played by the Ottawa Senators. Sadly, there are still a whopping 37 days until the Sens’ take the ice for their first pre-season game on September 20 against the Rangers.

This hockey drought is really making me appreciate the times when hockey was there. Even the monstrosity that was last season was better than this no hockey state. With that in mind, I will now continue my series of 2007-2008 Season in Review posts, revisiting the dreary month of November.

Episode III – It’s Hard to Hold a Candle (November)

Ah, yes. November. A month that ended in five straight losses (two in shootouts). At the time it seemed like a fluke, but in retrospect I suppose it was our first signal that the Sens might not be invincible, and that the season could go badly. Things started off on the wrong foot with a 6-4 win over Atlanta that, as John Paddock said at the time, felt more like a loss: after building a 5-0 lead in the first two periods, the team allowed the Thrashers (mostly Ilya Kovalchuk, who had a hat trick despite having been treated to dinner by Dany Heatley the night before, the ungrateful jerk) to come within a goal in the third. It wasn’t pretty, and I wasn’t happy. More bad news for the Sens: Jason Spezza hurt himself in practice and missed the first six games of the month with a groin injury. This didn’t seem to slow the team down much, however, as they won five of those six games and, having won eight games in a row overall, set a new team record for longest winning streak. The one loss without Spezza was less than impressive: a 4-1 loss to the Washington Capitals (they get my vote as this season’s arch-nemesisisisis), who were struggling mightily at the time, having lost 10 of their previous 12 games. But it was only a couple of games after Spezza returned that things really got bad.  The losses piled up: 4-2 to the Sabres. 6-5 in a shootout to the Penguins, with our new friend Jarkko Ruutu scoring the winner. 4-3 to the Flyers. 3-2 to the Islanders, again in a shootout. And finally, 6-5 to the Predators in regulation to end the month. Two 6-5 losses. They gave up six goals against twice in one week. It was terrible, but it felt like an anomaly. I know now, of course, that this losing streak was actually foreshadowing how the season would end. If only I could go back in time and warn us all.

Memorable Moments: I have deleted much of this month from my memory already, but there is one moment I treasure. One moment which never fails to bring a smile to my face when I look back on it. Picture it: Long Island. November 28, 2007. The Senators have lost three in a row and the fans are beginning to lose hope. They’re now in overtime in a game against the Islanders when the Isles get a 2-on-1. The fate of the game hangs on the defensive play of that one man back for Ottawa. Who is that one man? Please, please let it be Chris Phillips or Anton Volchenkov. Alfie? Mike Fisher? Chris Kelly? No, it’s … oh crap, it’s Jason Spezza. Well that’s it, the game is over, we’re toast. But wait, what’s this? Spezza has positioned himself between the two Isles players and the net. He’s … he’s … he stopped them!! Jason Spezza has played a perfect 2-on-1! He saved the game! Spezza saved the game with a great defensive play! Savour it. Savour … oh, we lost anyway. But I must admit that I still have Spezza’s brilliant 2-on-1 saved on my DVR somewhere.

Eye on a Player: Jason Spezza was the centre of attention for much of November, as I recall, because of his groin injury. Even if he hadn’t been, he’d be my choice for hero of the month just for that 2-on-1. When Alfie sat out a game due to a sore groin, Spezza took on the role of groin injury mentor to his ailing captain, advising him not to rush back. "Groins are tough," he told the CBC. "You don’t want them to linger." For not rushing back from an injury, for playing a beautiful 2-on-1, and for coming up with one of my all-time favourite hockey player quotes — Jason Spezza, I salute you.

The Sun is reporting today that the Sens might make a draft day trade to move up from their 18th overall selection to something in the top ten, and in order to do so the thought is they’ll have to give up their pick and a roster player. It’ll be interesting to see if this happens, and, if it does happen, it’ll also be interesting to see what the reaction is from the fans at Scotiabank Place. I will be going to the draft, so I’m hoping to see some excitement. On the other hand, if one of my favourite players ends up getting traded while I’m there, I’ll be pretty disappointed. Distraught, even. I’m not saying I’ll throw myself off the third level of seats or anything, but it might ruin my evening. Take heed, Murray.

If they could somehow trade away the rights to one of their free agents (Wade Redden?) for a pick or maybe convince someone to take Ray Emery, that would be ideal. As much as I would like to see Emery gone as soon as possible, keeping him around until after the draft, just in case, seems like a wise move.

CBC’s website has a pretty good article about Uncle Ben Hartsburg today which quotes Bob Nicholson of Hockey Canada and Dave Torrie, who was Hartsburg’s boss in Sault Ste. Marie. Both have only good things to say about him.

“The key with Craig is he’s up front, he’s honest and he gives a real clear picture of what he wants his players to do,” Nicholson — who watched Hartsburg lead Canada to back-to-back world titles as head coach in 2007 and this year — told CBCSports.ca.

“The last two years as the head coach of the world team, he’s done an outstanding job with top-end players and with the role players and I think that’s because his message is clear and he doesn’t play games with anybody.”

I like the sound of this: a system, with clear-cut roles for everyone, is exactly what the Sens lacked for much of last season, which is why they looked like chickens with no heads out there a lot of the time.

Don Brennan writes today that Curtis Hunt of the Regina Pats might be brought on as an assistant in Ottawa. He also points out that current Sens assistant Greg Carvel previously worked with Hartsburg in Anaheim. It’s good to know they have that previous relationship. Hunt, meanwhile, was Hartsburg’s assistant with the Canadian Junior team, so there’s familiarity there too. I really like the way the coaching staff is taking shape at this point.

A final, non-Sens-related note: I don’t normally write about basketball (because … I don’t care about it at all), but I love Harry Potter so I thought this one was worth noting: Kobe Bryant has turned to the Harry Potter books for help in finding a way to beat the Celtics. The boy wizard earned praise from Kobe for his ability to deal with certain obstacles:

“He had more problems with Voldemort than we have dealing with the media after a loss,” Bryant said Saturday after practice.

Well, that’s probably true, because Voldemort is ultimate evil and will not hesitate to kill even his own followers. I don’t think the media even have wands.

But I wonder if Bryant has perhaps missed the point of the books a little. Surely the analogy would make more sense if Voldemort represented the Celtics, and the Lakers were Harry. In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, when Harry and Voldemort have their duel in the graveyard and the wands join and Harry has to force the spell back onto Voldemort’s wand — that is actually not unlike basketball (or hockey), if you think about it. You’re just trying to keep the other guy’s magic out of your end.