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Good morning, folks.
I hope you all have been keeping well.
I had planned to be back from vacation earlier in the week, but I ended up having a personal matter to attend to so I didn’t return to the office full-time until Thursday.
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Perfect timing: the NHL hockey season is finally over.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I sure hope we never again see a Stanley Cup awarded in July.
Well, truthfully, I didn’t actually see it awarded.
Unlike my boss, who is a serious hockey fan and has some sort of ritual with the hockey gods where he’s required to at least see the Cup awarded, I was out Wednesday evening visiting with some friends — one in particular needed my assistance with something — and missed the final game of the 2021 season.
I’m sure the gods will understand.
I did watch some replays of the Tampa Bay Lightning Cup victory on Thursday morning. That kinda counts, right?
I also watched a few post-game interviews, including the boozy and boorish one by Tampa Bay forward Nikita Kucherov.
In case you haven’t seen it, a shirtless, beer-swiiling Kucherov went way off script in his post-game availability. In between belches and banter with the media, the Russian winger sang the praises of Tampa goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy — named the Conn Smythe winner as MVP in the playoffs — by dissing Marc-Andre Fleury and Connor Hellebuyck, the past two winners of the Vezina Trophy as the league’s top netminders.
Kucherov also whined that Vasilevsky “is robbed every year by the NHL for not getting the Vezina.”
The poor guy actually won in 2018-19, but hey — don’t let the facts get in the way of your drunken blather.
If that was all he said, you could probably give him a pass — but he really showed his true colours when, for no particular reason, he decided to take a shot at Habs fans.
“I didn’t want to go back to Montreal,” Kucherov said. “The fans in Montreal, come on. They acted like they won the Stanley Cup last game. Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Their final was last series.”
Habs fans were certainly exhuberant, to say the least, about their team playing in the Cup final. It had been awhile. Not to mention, the pent-up energy from a pandemic lockdown and losses to Tampa in the first three games — and well, you could kind of understand the jubilation when they went nuts celebrating a Game 4 overtime victory.
What do you care what they did anyways, Nikita?
Tampa fans were understandably pretty jacked up as well, after not being able to see the Lightning win the Cup last season in Edmonton.
This is what fans do. And because of them, Mr. Kucherov, you got to earn close to $10 million this season.
Perhaps because hockey players are typically rather vanilla or cliché in their comments to the media, there were many who hailed Kucherov’s presser as epic and legendary.
Some called it honest and funny, suggesting it was these types of moments that can go a long way to help further humanize the sport.
And, one scribe suggested that if you win the Stanley Cup in back-to-back years, you have therefore earned the right to conduct your post-game media availability in any manner you choose.
Sure, let’s entitle and enable them even more. What else are you allowed to do because you’re a two-time champ?
Put me in the camp that would call Kucherov’s comments crass, classless and unnecessary.
Wearing your emotions on your sleeve and expressing honest opinions is one thing, but putting down other people in your moment of glory shows you can’t buy or win maturity.
Nobody likes a sore winner. Unless, I guess, if it makes “good copy.”
That friend I was assisting on Wednesday had said to me at one point, he had no interest these days in watching spoiled millionaire hockey players and their antics.
With any luck, the hockey gods were.
As always, folks, you can reach me by replying to this mailing or by sending me an email here.
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