goaltender | 04/08/23 (Reply)

i've come to realize that so much of why i love sports is that i just love watching Systems Execute and i love player development and witnessing "growth" before any binary measure of win-lose success, or i love watching how robust mentalities reward and inform that development, and i think there's obviously room for focusing on pure personality and human connection as driving components of these structures but it's hard for me to be like... idk. i guess it's all very secondary to me and i do feel so boring about it sometimes LOL.

anyway i need to write a dlevi section for this post T__T things have been so hard but i tell myself "no one has ever died from []" all the time when i'm trying to work through something tedious and inane but unfairly difficult for my personal capacity and i love hearing the affirmative language he uses so much even in the aftermath of a 7-6 SO win because you can feel the strength of his personal convictions. i think it's interesting because f1 fans are way more prone to labeling someone as a mentality monster and that language is much less common in hockey because there's less of an individual focus on The Celebrity... and of course personality, mentality, outlook, drive, compete, Dawg/60 etc. are not all the same thing and there's tons of overlap and divergence when you get down to it and examine any two definitions in parallel, but i liked the point with the pdocast when they talked about how mentally destroyed soup has been and the minutiae of the language used by goalies who are... hmm, again i'm trying to be specific with the language /i/ use as well but i guess there's a separation you afford yourself in always using language that points toward the strength of your mindset and therefore your innate resilience, and i think it's really refreshing to hear him be like Well Shit Happens in a way that's absurdly positive and well-articulated and "you have to look at the opportunities and not the missed opportunities," because maybe this attitude will wear down with time as the sample size grows but the composure in how he expounds what would be a point of frustration for a majority of goalies makes you want to believe that it won't. i guess i think guys who are most impervious to pressure are the ones who exist within a singular anticipatory moment instead of chasing the accumulation of their effort.

the thing with levi is that this is all still so ambiguous because the NHL is the NHL and it's hard to translate his adjustments entering other leagues into this context, but at the same time granato IS putting him in because he trusts him to win games RIGHT NOW, and if that doesn't mean something for next season then i don't know what does. obviously there are things he needs to work through in training camp, communication issues and rebound control and acclimating himself with the d-core and maybe there is some merit to putting him in rochester first, but... i honestly don't know. it's just been such a fun story because you feel the palpable trust and belief between the team and him and it brings me back to the stars interviews from today's SO win because it was like, asking roope how having otter in the net makes them feel and he easily segues into like yeah he always has our back and i wasn't worried because i knew he'd make the big saves etc. vs kivi being like Well actually. It's kind of the same if wedgie is there because he's good too! whereas with the sabres it's like... keklol because portillo literally fucked out of the sabres system because he knew there was no place for him with levi which imo is an indictment of his competelevel but whatever, and then the other options are upl comrie etc. and just........ a lot of their struggles have actually been entirely on team defense and they aren't even that bad but to see the way dlevi has been blatantly and loyally embraced relative to everyone else in the goalie system is super interesting. though sometimes you wonder how much of that belief is rooted in objectivity and how much of it is really just manifestation and craving something with enough hype behind it to finally latch onto lol

another thing i feel insane about re: dlevi is the fact that he should be a hab. HE COULD HAVE GONE HOME!!! it is truly embarrassing that i'm obsessed with two quebecois goalies but i can't get over him straight up being like (in his intro video posted BY the sabres) yeah the bell centre always plays fix you by coldplay when the players skate out of the tunnel and i wanted to be a hab soooo badly growing up and i wanted that to be Me so i listen to this song every night before a game to ground myself. crying a little bit...... marc bergevin when we get you

also random hab thought no offense but i hate when an nhl player is clearly asian and there's 0 info about it like work with me here. it doesn't actually matter but i'm nosy lol this post brought to you by sean farrell blatant wasian face

tangentially some canucks stuff, i will officially shut up about Quinn4C because everyone is finally aboard the train so lol BUT I ADMIT I DO FEEL VINDICATED! when you've been saying this shit all year while everyone was like No it can only be petey and then he headlocks athanasiou and people are like ok he can be captain i guess... i'm jk but truly i do think the fan reactions were sooooo :') hm how to say.... like let me first talk about the horvat thing first, while i believe ideas of fairness or unfairness are difficult to encapsulate in sports and of course every player is entitled to their own relationship with the Fans and surrounding sports culture and the media or whatever, i, purely personally, think it sucks to say all of that shit when imo vancouver fans as a whole were unerringly earnest in loving him and most people backed him over miller and so much of the market struggle has been contingent on corrupt ownership and alienated FO decisions. like it's obvious he CaresTM and is sensitive because he was responding to trollbait on twitter and the venmo thing but i'm just like man i have limited sympathy for guys who—and obviously his extension is a huge overpayment but i think there's additional moral nuance wrt the idea of overpayment and fair compensation etc. that don't impact the baseline truth of this, so EVEN if he were being underpaid or basically "meeting value" or whatever—make millions of dollars a year and then believe themselves entitled to imposing superficial constraints on the expectations of their fanbase. i mean he's from london???? what excuse do you really even have

when i say quinn4c and stuff like that, it's not even that i think there's some Emblematic Significance to being named captain or that i think he necessarily "deserves" it, like i don't think that getting a C is something that Rewards behavior or attitude or action, i think it's more like...... you are a product of your market and you are The product IN the market, or you possess and generate a product that feeds back into the market, and to me what makes that appointment any kind of important is that vancouver and toronto and canadian cities will always have the media and fanbase and sense of adulation and coverage and whatever that they have, that these are universal constants. and maybe in a southern american market or in california or wherever whoever gets the C doesn't really matter as much because it doesn't actionably inform the dynamic of the locker room and the cohesiveness of the system isn't being threatened at every pressure point, BUT... the reality is that vancouver will always be like this. That's how toronto is. that's how montreal is. and you need, or want, or are trying to find, someone who GETS IT, and what getting it looks like is the true variable here, it's what needs to be identified, but i think if growing up steeped in the leafs system doesn't offer you the opportunity to internalize this obligatory perspective then i don't know what will. so i think quinn hughes gets it. and sure, maybe he'll still become a new jersey devil down the line... but in the current moment, the Right Now and hearing fans cheer him on in the box after taking a guy down and grinning wryly at the media and saying it's been a long year when they ask him about losing his temper, letting himself naturally "grow" into the gaps of a fractured system, he objectively gets it. i don't think there's any real emotional or celebratory payoff to getting it, in being named captain, i don't think it makes his role on the team Inherently special, i just think it's a responsibility he relishes in a context where relishing the responsibility is already half of the battle, and also not just relishing it but embracing or at least acknowledging the dynamics that inform the context behind it—you can't be the face without understanding the weight it bears, etc., without knowing what to give and to hold onto, how to spin enough personality into remarks without letting them turn inflammatory (most of the time). we so often frame his honesty as self-wounding or as a kind of frailness and i definitely don't think that like he's So calculative he always understands exactly what he's imparting (e.g. pearson stuff), but i think there's a level of resignation and also *voluntary participation* in the symbiotic relationship he's tasked with engaging in with the media if that makes sense.

obviously qhughes is just a Competitor at the end of the day and he and petey and other guys will jump ship if given the opportunity and depending on what the circumstances of their contracts are. but again so much of performance requires trusting in the process or living in a singular anticipatory moment, and i think whether he leaves or stays depends way more on pure metrics and team success and playoff capability than any reflection of sports culture, media, the environment, his brothers, vancouver itself, etc... which feels like an obvious thing to say but i don't know. i do think it's meaningful. but that's just how i feel

also speaking of Just Giving Anyone the C i do find it so depressing that logan couture is the sharks captain lmfao i think of pavs retaining de facto leadership status on the stars roster all the time and pdb stressing how much he influenced the culture in san jose and how so much of it fell apart after he left. i do think pavs is interesting because he's KindTM in a way that feels extremely understated despite also being universally remarked upon, like he just carries this eternal air of sort of no-bullshit impatience and of being far removed from the logistics of any locker room dynamic even though he also helps and drives forward the rookies in so many tangible ways. it's interesting that it's like...... jbenn pavs robo wyatt as this square of (veteran canadian captain) (veteran american captain) (new american franchise star and future captain) (canadian rookie who plays with captain 1 and lives with captain 2) because there are so many mirrored aspects to the roles they occupy on the team and what they're expected to grow into. plus you still have tydel and logan and so many other components to all of it but Hmmm i don't know. Eras.......

i actually have more dlevi things to say but before i move on One last insane interjection: not to enable dimfilip shippery discussions but why does mbr*wn literally look like michael bunting. My god they have the same initials too... why is michael bunting an ep r*nks*de north american prospect scout!!!!!!

also obsessed with otter toe save and demonstration of Hip Flexor Strength literally being the product of his off-season lesbian mobility trainer. by the way the avs are pissing me off but it's fine. i don't even really have a strong preference on 1st round matchup except for obvious selfish reasons that i won't expand on here

anyway this interview (ft. vancouver canucks legend aidan mcdonough) was so much in general but the opening question absolutely kills me lmfao like i've watched this entire interaction 5 times why is this guy so ridiculous

Watch on YouTube

(is milk weirder than goalies?)

(explain)

(is he normal?)

why did they say any of that. i'm losing it. anyway i actually liked a lot of the answers here and found both their philosophies generally insightful. also aidan going off about his on-ice pet peeves made me lol

i do find Separation of goalie and team and the nuances of interteam but also intrateam segmentation interesting in the context of blame and credit and mutual trust and who really deserves what at the end of the day. dlevi is so hyperfocused on >You are playing for The Boys and then i'm like, what amount of stressing "we deser... they deserved the win and i just did my job" is natural rookie minimization and how much of it is actually positionally dependent and will persist as a tenet of his game philosophy? who knows.

i need to be normal LMFAO this post ended up being way longer than i intended and i could probably go on about other stuff for like another 5 paragraphs.... good night i'm going to finally start watching cooking for the maiko house T__T

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04/08/23 (Reply)

04/08/23

not bad for a