life update: it's bad

[goaltender]

straight up not having a good time but what can you even do about it.

sometimes i wonder a bit about the appeal of sports on a corporeal level, the way we approach health and injury and sacrifice and performance in the vacuum of professional entertainment, its evaluations of "optimized" bodies, what ultimately motivates our personal attachment to athletic systems and their human manifestations; what directs our judgment and what elicits our empathy...

i realize that it's a strange thing unsuited for universal appraisal because there is no singular fan experience to extract meaning of the Metaphysical Relationship from. it's weird, for me, without getting too much into the personal side of things, that at the end of the day i feel a fascination with the inherent violence of these professional commitments in a way very much inversely proportional to my own ailing health and practical distance from their realities. the truth is that to be a professional athlete is to center yourself in obsessive systems and structures, to subdue all superfluous notions of yourself and strip away any dimension of individuality in a manner so mechanic it would be (and is) alarming in most other contexts, but in the realm of sports is understandable and expected and most often respected. perhaps there is a comfort here, even when its morality is contested, that the demarcation of healthy behavior in an environment motivated by material productivity and excellence is so often blurred... that to hurt can still be a noble thing. i guess it's: we couldn't be more different on the surface but maybe when you push it far enough we're not so different after all. to control so much of yourself and your life but still be victim to the same luck of the draw, bound to probabilistic variability and superstition and the same breaks in mental conviction......

maybe this forgets the human nature of things too much. maybe in allowing it ambiguity it actually honors it. maybe it's a bit of both or neither at all. i don't know. can you respect something you will never actually live; can you truly understand it? at the end of the day, what does it mean to relate? our manufactured understanding-especially when fractured or tangential, when only really variably parallel: what do its projections impose?

while the language of physicality in k-pop is largely restrictive, sports are further out on the scale of athletic justification that they build enough on a requisite optimization, valued less through aesthetic recognition than a diverse scale of mathematical/performative metrics, to support its many physical and psychological extremes. that's not to say that any one experience is more miserable than the other, but i do find it interesting... the grind and the drive and the commitment. destroying and rebuilding yourself. whether you're a fan who actively plays the sport in question, or a fan who used to play the sport but never made it noticeably far, or someone with injury, or are a different kind of athlete or not an athlete at all to begin with, maybe someone who never had access to organized sport growing up at all, i think our moral framing is forcibly influenced by these past experiences, whatever proximity or distance we carry into our position as a "fan" or follower of a sport and its league(s). sometimes i think looking at hockey vs. f1 fandom kind of highlights these inevitable differences, how motorsport in its financial inaccessibility means the consensus fandom experience is practically much more detached, which in turn breeds more emotionally involved or at the least more visibly parasocial consumption of its primary media personalities... or perhaps it doesn't. i don't know. just thinking out loud.

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quick f1 thoughts. seidl to audi is sooo... i really like seidl frankly so it's a bit of a bummer on the mcl side but i'm also not that "alarmed" by the move (even considering its dramatically accelerated timeline) because it's clear that stella has been well-poised for promotion and mclaren seem generally transparent enough in their internal dialogue that they can minimize the consequences of leadership upheaval. this isn't to say that i expect mclaren to... well. i don't know. achieve the same level of performance next year? that's not even that high of a bar and it's not like i ever had big expectations for 2023 to begin with so i can just say that i still don't expect much.

honestly i don't know whether it's naive of me to be generally apathetic about moves within the mcl org that other people doomsday over but i guess my thought process is like..... hm. i think zak brown is fine and i will never truly understand dr fans. i think mcl will always be constrained by their identity as a customer team and of course lando can and should be ready to move to a better team if the writing is on the wall come an underwhelming 2024, but i can also understand why he signed the contract he did. i think all the things people worry about will come into play at some point or another but that a lot of it is perhaps irrationally positioned and makes no sense to speculate over given the team's current environment, like that person who said that palou is only the reserve driver so that mclaren can pressure oscar out of his seat because mclaren is turning into red bull!?!?! like my guy what does that even mean. suddenly it's illegal and toxic to Have Assets???

i truly find rbjt hilarious btw. also vasseur.... well vasseur to me is interesting from a theo perspective, and i do think theo not going to sf alongside ll is a dumb move and from what has been shared so far it seems that fv was largely the one to veto it so i'm just ? and with ferrari now it's doubly like What's the look here supposed to be with sauber and his f1 aspirations??? it's easy to say that an fda transfer would be unrealistic given his jr investments but honestly anything is possible with ferrari.... at the very least it does seem unlikely that he'd be considered for haas unless he has like a monster dominant season and [redacted] flops but man 🙃 the grid is fr decently stacked next year so i just don't get it. being a french driver is like even when you have the relative budget and leadership support you are beholden to political chokeholds in the goofiest ways lol

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Okay guys......... i like slaf now 😩 habs development program is certainly intriguing to me and even though i don't really follow the team enough to actually know much it's cool to see the adam nicholas effects on slaf this season, just like how he and msl had immediate impacts on cc's deployment and playmaking abilities coming in last year. people manufacture slaf/swright rivalry/bust (30 games in... lmfao) narratives a lot even though it looks like both orgs are working with the chips they have in mostly logical ways and both guys are spoken of as similarly "coachable." like obviously it's too early to know where any of that will go but i do genuinely think slaf is showing a decent road to improvement week by week which is personally satisfying.... what the fuck have the rags been doing for the past 5 years tbh.

frankly jh86 wishes. actually speaking of jh86 i do literally think he's him after that insane shift during the islanders game (who the fuck says i'm just going to skate 7:30 minutes to end the game score a goal on the man advantage continuously drive play and set up prime scoring chances and oh also haul ass back into my zone to save 2 empty net shots while i'm at it. like bro ok......) but i'll stop there. i think devs are fun and i really enjoy their young core and i like john marino more than i necessarily should and i keep trying to commit to reading this one 1371 fic because i love the pairing in theory and i just need to Get into the story and...... where was i. yes devs are fun and i'm nh13 enjoyer*. and yet it was also so deeply satisfying to watch dallas scrape out the win over them LOL 💚 sorry about your 3-game loss streak get better soon 🤷‍♀️

btw why are the stars always up on the chopping block when it's time for another team's player to cement a major individual scoring narrativeTM.... first of all do i look like i care about dperron's 1000th game??? no honestly it's fine and i respect that ovi got his 800th with the hatty in chicago because yes it's all very narratively rife and simultaneously hilarious. but why must 801 and 802 be meaningful as well 😩 every day the narratives are stacked against us. also every time i see dstrome in that locker room celly video i'm literally like Who invited my man blud. i simply cannot witness it

*i think i might love the nh13 narratives a bit too much t__t to me nico is such a good example of young leadership and self-improvement gone right and how the locker room's "buy-in" culture has been directly bolstered by his unerring belief in the team's raw potential. the fact is that it's worked so well because he's been able to both direct the players through pure character and leadership ability but also represent them on a base level with his play and perhaps unassuming but genuine rise as a 1oa pick. it's weird to compare him to other 2k17 draftees a bit, especially when you look at the gaping chasm between like his and np's predicaments-of course knowing that their environments were vastly different, because it's just like... i don't know. even as someone whose 2nd favorite player is cm8 it's boring and annoying when people are like haha quinn hughes will never be NORRIS WINNER CALE MAKAR xD miro heiskanen WHO 🤭 and so on because it's like. first of all do not speak on miro like dat. but second of all yes even if cale was the true steal of the draft and no one brings the same objective production that he does to the avs, the devs are Nico's Team. and his accountability, belief system, etc. are perfectly suited for a group so young and arguably rough around the edges and truly who knows what he would have looked like in the flyers system. and you can hear this a lot in how much he repeats that the team is GOOD during this season's interviews, because you know that he truly believes it, that his belief will make the rest of the team believe it, that he objectively refuses for it to come into question. just as no matter what anyone else says "jack is a star" and "this is nico's team now" etc. etc. ughhhhhhh.

btw i would like a certain swiss rw in the bay area to reunite with one of his countrymen in an unnamed state on the east coast located south of new york and home to the top team in the metropolitan but let's not go there right now.

also read a fun lil article about the stars rebuild process and thought this nill analysis was interesting:

But one of Nill’s biggest flaws continues to show. He has always been slow to plug holes when needed, whether it was goaltending and defense under Ruff or secondary scoring under Bowness. [...] Nill believes in loyalty and patience. His philosophy has been good enough to rebuild without tanking, but can he go all-in if the right opportunity presents itself?

That’s the only thing that matters. Nill’s trade for Lundkvist was out of character. So maybe he has it in him to learn new tricks. But this all depends on how much he believes in this team.

unrelated thought process but speaking of bowness: seeing bones's success in wpg has definitely got me circling back a bit to the idea of like... how coaching at the nhl level is much less about one's reactive ability/keenness to examine and adapt to individual strengths and much more about finding a roster that matches regimented systems from the get-go if that makes sense? i don't know if this holds any weight or is just like deeply obvious but i guess people often talk about how coaches can come in and change a culture and restructure play and say it in a way that's very complimentary toward the coach's "vision" but in a lot of ways it's more that his systems have and will always remain the same, and it's ultimately a question of Does this team as it currently stands already have deficiencies that can be addressed by the known variable we're bringing in with him? aka 1:1 matchmaking. which with the jets' fragmented defensive play and lack of accountability or whatever meant they'd be in a better position to respond to the bones treatment... so i don't know.

Last but not least i think the sabres are just so much fun. like i love this graphic. i love that they lead the league in gf. i love high-event defensively ridiculous hockey in 2022!!! and i'm obsessed with tage thompson's trajectory as an unpredictable anomaly who in the past year has single-handedly brought chaos and terse discourse and unrest upon the advanced hockey analytics stats nerds community. plus their 2nd line is fun too 🤷‍♀️

great year for baby goalies btw. i would support pyotr a lot more if he had literally any other nickname

Comments

[lowhours]

[enjoying this like my morning newspaper] so true OP....

re: the opening ruminations on injury / physicality of sport... main thing that stands out to me rn is the point about "fandom" not being a universal experience + also the frustrating/seductive distance of what we're watching from the outside in. (even though the boundary between outside/in can be more ambiguous for some).

it reminded me of a book i've been meaning to read for years and wasnt able to get a copy of: " Game Misc0nduct: Injury, Fand0m, and the Business of Sp0rt " with letters subbed into the zeroes. I just found an epub of it if you are at all interested! not to just throw a book at you when you're obviously reflecting on something from a more personal standpoint.

hockey gossip of the week:
the jh86 7:30 icetime doubleshift thing make me want to frow up speaking of bodily empathy for athletes. gnarly.

i kinda somehow hadnt put together that 2017 draft class hischier + np + [wwe music] by god it's Cale Makar is the same 2017 draft class of starsNewCore. i feel like that overall draftclass was talked about as very thin on the ground / nothing special / mostly a high-floor low-ceiling cohort, but most of them are hitting their stride rn and its kinda like well seems fine now.... i guess draft class narratives will always be about no.1 and no.2 for better or worse [dizzy emoji]

not like i know heaps about nhl coaching but the idea of matchmaking and picking coaches based on what your team currently lacks definitely rings true from what i've heard imo, rather than coaches coming in with a fresh slate ready to innovate based on what they think a team needs or will be good at. in general i think the coaching merry-go-round is very weird but i guess it makes sense... it's as much about giving players a fresh face and sense of vitality and new purpose as it is actually any demonstrable improvement in strategy lol. why did cassidy leave the bruins etc..... i feel like as much as bowness stood out for having NUTSO game management and score effect responses (defensive line matchups and turtling with a lead etc) he did seem to genuinely be a Good Room Guy and well respected. or maybe starsroom was just nice to him idk

literally all hail THE TAGE though. a global phenomena. v enjoyable newspaper edition op!!