Game 2 and Hockey Cultures

Taking a quick run around the blogs in response to Eric’s excellent-as-always roundup on Game 2 — the first game I’ve gotten to watch since Game 5 in the Eastern finals. Something about other priorities.

That was a good, old-fashioned beating the Canes handed to Edmonton last night, and the Caniac blog crew is mostly keeping their heads about them. I have one slight disagreement to make with Cason out in Tucson (does that rhyme?) over Laraque’s third period and the Canes’ non-reaction, though.

Seriously, that crap out of Dredy Locks Laraque was absolute thuggery. He takes a run at Wallin’s legs then boards Andrew Ladd when the boy’s head is down. And the Canes take it?

First problem: my initial reaction, like his, was that Laraque was out on an intent-to-injure mission. I have a small suspicion, though, that at 6’3”/240 with a pronounced tendency for mayhem, if he had really wanted to cause an injury, he’d have been successful. Furthermore, the Canes handled it exactly right. In the first round, Calgary began to lose control against Anaheim when Jarome Iginla let François Beauchemin goad him into a scrap. Any of our players on the ice are worth more than that goon. When you’re about to go up 2 games to none in the Stanley Cup Finals, you can let your opposition rage up to anything short of death or dismemberment. You’ve made your point already — it’s hanging above center ice in lights.

Conversely and predictably, the Edmonton bloggers are off the rails. Interspersed with the Cletus shots I guess we should expect now, as well as the whining about our opponents’ injuries (as if losing one of the top power forwards in the NHL in March, with 30 goals in 60 games, didn’t affect Carolina), Mudcrutch actually has one worthwhile thought about Caniacs’ reactions to Game 1:

Looking at some of the Canes blogs, they seem satisfied that their team picked it up in the third of G1. Casonblog is an example of this; he says “The Oilers were clearly the better team last night…until they weren’t”, whatever the hell that means. Comments from their players seem to indicate the same. From what I know of the Oilogosphere, I don’t think that the reaction to a win like that would be quite so positive.

He guesses partly right: Carolina has won this way enough that a 2- or 3-goal deficit doesn’t induce panic. We’ve seen it before, it has an OK chance of turning out well, and if it doesn’t, tough — we’ll fix it and try again in the next game. We know enough to be thankful for a win like that; besides, complaining about a win, any win, in the Stanley Cup Finals seems to beg the hockey gods’ wrath upon us.

Furthermore, though, it speaks to the character of the Carolina fanbase, and the environment we live in — an environment that extends to most of the USA, outside perhaps Minnesota and (as much as it pains me to say it) Detroit.

I don’t live in Raleigh. I live five hours away in Northern Virginia, where the Washington Capitals’ faint light blinked out in mid-April. I’ve not had a single co-worker inquire about the playoffs, despite the collection of pucks from rinks I’ve visited that sits atop my cubicle cabinet. If something positive were to happen to my team within the next couple of weeks, I’d wear my jersey to work, hang it up in my cube during the day, and people would give me a curious look and walk on by.

Compare that to if I were an Oilers fan in, say, Saskatoon. (Or even a Hurricanes fan, probably, if they weren’t playing a Canadian club.) I’d have been talking the game non-stop for the past two months, and with only brief breaks for the past nine. If my team were to win out, and I walked in with a jersey, I might well get a similar reaction to what happened to me last year the day after Virginia Tech beat Duke in college basketball: the first two co-workers to see me, dressed in full Hokie gear, stood and applauded as I walked into the office.

The Caniac blogosphere appears to be disproportionately populated by Caniacs living outside the Research Triangle. The series we’re watching barely gets noticed by our neighbors as they whip past channel 70 on their cable systems. And, to be honest, even in Raleigh where they are paying attention, hockey is a fun thing rather than a life-or-death passion. We have dedicated fans, don’t get me wrong, and we have people that understand hockey just as well as the folks north of 49, so we’re not n00bs here. The fact, though, is that hockey is not central to our culture the way it is across Canada. That lack of understanding in the general public means that even we diehards can’t permanently cross the line between fandom and neuroticism where our chosen game is concerned. That, in turn, enforces some semblance of rationality upon puckheads here that isn’t required under the Maple Leaf flag. When Virginia Tech loses a bad football game this fall, a bad mood from me on Monday won’t draw much comment. People know and understand. Where hockey is concerned, they don’t, and that requires us to stay on a more even keel if we want to maintain relationships and lives with those outside our bubble. That means we don’t have quite the latitude to flip out over a win, even one where our team escaped by the skin of its teeth.

That centrality and wide base of knowledge is what makes traveling to Canada to watch games so much fun, when your interview at immigration consists of a few minutes’ chat about the Erik Cole injury. But the converse is why the RBC Center is such an enthusiastic building at playoff time, why the Caniac Nation tailgates long before the game and into the night, and why our local fans go and meet the boys at RDU at 2 AM after a return flight from a road playoff game. Hockey has an innocence here it lost long ago in Canada. It’s not better or worse. It’s just different.