If you haven't been following the series, it took exactly one game for Bruins fans to work up a Canadiens-level hatred for the Canucks. This was surprising because Vancouver isn't Tampa Bay, Columbus, or any of those other microwavable insta-Bettman hockey cities that any Original Six fan base instinctively hates.
Reading Simmons on hockey fandom is a terrible idea, because hockey most of all brings out the caricature in him.
He knows the NBA, NFL and Major League Baseball (well, at least the AL East), his attempts at soccer commentary are so transparently dumb they're easy to dismiss, and he mostly stays away from college sports. When hockey comes up, though, he's not quite bad enough to ignore, but neither does he know nor respect the game enough to offer good ideas.
That leaves material that, were it within the hockey bubble, would be easy to file away as an irrelevant hybrid of Don Cherry-ism and less-knowledgeable NYT-style Original Six trolling. Since non-hockey people pay attention to Simmons, though, memes like his February 2009 gossip that 15 NHL teams would go under by mid-2011 can damage the game to the casual (i.e. front-running) sports fan.
That leads us to today, as he revels in jumping back on the Bruins bandwagon and does a couple different drive-bys on Sun Belt hockey fans in the process. The second is unintentionally revealing:
My dream scenario: two of the WTFDTCHAHT's move to Quebec and Toronto8, giving us 10 Canadian teams (I'm including Buffalo... (8) WTFDTCHAHT stands for "Why the f--- does that city have a hockey team?" I'm looking at you, Nashville. And you too, Phoenix.
If Simmons had paid attention to hockey at all since the Predators joined the league in 1998, he'd know a couple things.
First, the Preds play more-or-less the style of hockey he turned away from. They don't exactly trap, but their team identity has always been stifling defense, and they've never been able to secure the kind of sniper that makes SportsCentre and turns a middling team into a major Cup threat. They won their first playoff series in twelve seasons this year.
That hasn't mattered, though, because Nashville's fans are loyal. Despite one duplicitous owner, another a straight-up fraud, a would-be purchaser undermining the franchise with the municipal leaseholder and local media in an attempt to move it to Ontario, and no great success on the ice, they've shown up — which is a good thing, because unlike Simmons, they don't get to quit and come back when things get better. If they bail, their team dies just like Atlanta's, and no nation of bleeding hearts will cheerlead for their second chance like Canada's decade-plus rally around Winnipeg. Instead, Simmonses will mock them as undeserving of hockey, then go back to watching the NFL and acting superior when their city's team makes an occasional run.
There's nothing inherently wrong with bandwagoning. It's an aspect of casual fandom, often the difference between a team or a sport surviving versus thriving. Hockey's biggest problem is its dearth of precisely this kind of fan. But it's off-putting for a bandwagoner with roots in an easy place to love the game to denigrate those of us walking the hard road.
Simmons gets to take hockey for granted. He can skip out for 15 years, then fly back East and pound the glass with his dad like nothing happened. But we in the South don't, and Simmons's Boston-bred ignorant superiority complex shines brightest when he recommends leaving us behind in favor of the castles he's built in the air while watching baseball.