#One thing: the canadian teams might play in the US for the playoffs | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

chirpingfromthebox · 14 days

Text

youtube

I forgot to post about this back when it came out. But this was an interview with two prominent figures from the management side of the PWHL from a few days back. I was expecting it to be a bit dry, but they actually address quite a few prominent questions.

I was originally going to skip doing this one as it's somewhat long, but I've been seeing a number of things they talked about coming up in discussions here, so I thought y'all might be interested to hear what they have to say.

I'll transcribe what I personally found to be the most interesting elements that came up, but know I'll be cutting down some of the remarks and only doing some of the questions, so definitely watch the video for the full story.

Since this is already going to be a massive post I'll spare you my musings on the answers.

Transcriptions of some of the questions under the break.

At the table are Senior Vice President of Hockey Operations Jayna Hefford & Advisory Board Member Stan Kasten.

And I believe this was after Game 2 of the finals and before the start of Game 3.

For context on who these two are in a bigger picture, what little I know is:

Jayna Hefford is a HIGHLY successful and influential former Canadian hockey player who's been working in the field of women's hockey ever since she retired from playing. If I tried to sum up her career we'd be here all day, so let's just say she's in the Hockey Hall of Fame for a reason.

Stan Kasten comes from a background of running/managing large sports teams, though mostly baseball. He is even the current president of the Los Angeles Dodgers and also one of the co-owners. He seems to have had a brief foray into hockey as the president of the NHL's Atlanta Thrashers for a few years. The Thrashers no longer exist and I think they moved and became what are now the Jets? (I dunno, I shouldn't be your source for NHL history, that's for sure.)

--------------- INTRODUCTIONS ---------------

STAN KASTEN: I can’t describe the pleasure this is for me to be here [at the Xcel Energy Center in Minnesota]. The last time I was here I told you that I thought that day, the 13,000*, really convinced us that we were going to make this work.

[* the first home game for Minnesota had an attendance of 13,316.]

But even then I couldn’t have imagined how the year would play out. How we would set attendance records, sponsorship records, and viewing records. So our media strategy was a success. But of course the thing that made it work, really, was what I said opening day: we got the hockey right.

And that’s because of Jayna [Hefford] and her staff. You know, we didn’t know our playoffs ‘til after the last game on the last day. Who could have imagined that we’d put together a system that would've worked out that perfectly. You see how close and competitive the playoffs have been. And as exciting as this is for all of us, we can’t wait to get started on year 2, because we know with all Summer to prepare, it’s gonna be even better.

JAYNA HEFFORD: When we kicked off this league we had a few goals and—at least on the hockey side—one of them was to create parity across the league. And through the draft and the player dispersal, the player signings that we put in place, we were able to do that.

And to Stan’s point, I don’t think we could have wrote the script any better the way it played out and came down to the last game of the regular season to decide who was in the playoffs. We certainly achieved that.

Secondly, innovation and creativity was a priority for us. We wanted to find ways to improve the game. To make it more engaging for fans, to make it fun. We didn’t want to change hockey in the traditionalism of hockey, but we wanted to do things a little bit differently.

So implementing the Jailbreak rule, implementing the pick your own opponent, the Gold Plan*. All of those things are new. But I think right now, and of course we’re going to debrief post-season, but right now the response from all of those things has been overwhelmingly positive. So we will continue to try to be creative and think outside the box and present the game in new ways to people.

[* It didn’t come into play this season, so in case anyone isn’t familiar: The Gold Plan is the system by which after a team is out of contention for the playoffs during the regular season, any wins they get would be factored into where they’d be placed in the draft order for next season. It was designed to be an incentive for teams out of the running to still play their hardest and strive for wins.]

...

So excited to be here now for the next two or three games. And really it’s been a remarkable, amazing journey this last number of years, but really this last 8 or 9 months. And as Stan said, I don’t think I could have envisioned this playing out the way it did. The excitement around this, and the response from our fans, and response from media. So we’re just thrilled with where it’s at and I know this is gonna wrap up in a really great way in the next number of days.

...

--------------- LOOKING AHEAD, WHAT ARE THE CHANGES/CHALLENGES FOR NEXT YEAR? ---------------

STAN: We didn’t have our business staff in place until about 60 days before the season started. So we have a lot we can still do.

The most obvious one was merchandise. Having, you know, the amount of inventory that we needed was a challenge for us. Getting an online business started, in two countries, that was a challenge. So all these two country problems are different than other leagues.

By the end of the season we did really well on merchandise. But we have more coming and more designs and greater inventory. The one good thing is that we sold everything that we could make. I mean, it was just flying off the shelves when we could get it to arenas. And the online business has been strong also. Those things are challenging when they’re start-ups, and as I said, they’re start-ups in two countries, so we know how to do it now. It’s gonna get a lot better going forward.

JAYNA: And I think what everybody is waiting for is names and logos. So that’s one big thing that’s coming. So I think that’ll be really exciting to be able to build those brands and make those brands significant in the markets and communities we’re in.

STAN: It’s interesting how the name thing played out. We did not start out to do that, but because the lead time required in these things, we just thought it was better to just skip that for now and just go with: PWHL and the location.

And that has had an amazing unintended consequence of anytime anyone has talked about any of our teams all year, you had to say “PWHL.” So our league has gotten more exposure in the first year of its existence than any league in history ‘cause they kept repeating our name.

Again, we didn’t plan it that way; it just worked out that way. And it was about mid-season that I started hearing from fans and players, “You know, we kinda like the name the way it is.”

We’re gonna have team names. And I invite people to adopt those names too. But you can feel free to continue to call it what you’ve always called it. And we will be selling merchandise with both of those names. So these names aren’t going away because they have become popular. But for those of you who like team names, we’ll be addressing that as well.

...

JAYNA: ...Of course we feel like we have incredible talent on the ice every night now, but putting the best on the ice is about putting the best on the ice. And we know there’s a number of incoming players. So it will get more challenging. Good players will have a hard time making this league. But when you think about the product we’re gonna put on the ice? It’s gonna continue to get significantly better every single year as we welcome in newer and younger players. Then at some point we’ll look to add teams, when that depth of talent is at the right place in our minds. But right now it’s just exciting to look at all the new and fresh talent that’s going to step in.

--------------- WHAT CAN YOU DO TO IMPROVE DIVERSITY AND ATTRACT MORE BLACK FANS TO THE GAMES? ---------------

JAYNA: I think the first thing is representation. And we have some incredible athletes in our league that continue to be great role models, be active in their communities. And when you think of Sophie Jaques and Sarah Nurse and players that continue to give back and become something that young girls can look up to? I think all of our players do that for a lot of different communities of people.

And I think the one thing that’s really special about our league is- I feel it every game I’m at, it doesn’t matter what market we’re in, is that there’s a sense of inclusivity in our buildings. People are here and they’re excited and they’re happy and they feel welcome, regardless of who they are. And they feel free to be themselves. I’ve talked to many, many people that have never felt this way in a hockey rink. So we’ll continue to do that on the culture side.

I think what we want to do is continue to grow the game for young girls and I don’t think there’s any limits on who those young girls are. We want people to fall in love with the game. And I think we approach our business side and staffing side the same way. We want to bring people in who love the game and we want to bring people in that represent different communities.

--------------- WHAT ARE THE PLANS FOR NEW YORK TO POSSIBLY PLAY IN ONE VENUE INSTEAD OF THE THREE OR FOUR THEY USED THIS SEASON? ---------------

STAN: When the season is over we’re gonna review everything. Every city, every venue that we’re in, and we’re going to try to improve. We’re aware of the New York situation. It wasn’t ideal this year. But we’ll see what ways we can improve the situation. We’re not ready to say here today which way we’re going to go or what we’re going to do. But I can tell you that certainly one of the things we’re going to spend a lot of time looking at.

REPORTER: What do you guys think is the ideal venue situation?

STAN: The ideal venue situation is to play in the biggest NHL venue in every city. And merit playing there. We’re not always there yet in every market. But in big markets, as you might know, the big venues are there because there are a lot of events and a lot of teams in those cities. That gets into availabilities. We don’t want to be in a big venue, but have to play on a Tuesday morning, right? We wanna play on weekend nights or nights in general.

So it’s a complicated matrix of considerations that goes into where we choose to play, when we choose to play, what’s good for the team, what’s good for the visiting team, how we travel. It’s complicated.

It’s complicated with 6, it’ll be more complicated the bigger we grow and the more games we have. Those will be good problems, but we don’t ignore it. We’re thinking about all of it. And you saw in this year when we found an opportunity that we thought would work for our fans in cities where we could go to big venues, we did it. I would call them experiments and in general I’d say those experiments were all wildly successful.

--------------- WHEN CAN WE EXPECT NAMES AND LOGOS? ---------------

STAN: Sometime this Summer. I don’t have an exact time, but you should be counting the days.

--------------- HOW DID THE GATE RECEIPT REVENUE COMPARE TO WHAT YOU EXPECTED? ---------------

STAN: I will tell you that, yes, it exceeded what we thought we were going to- it exceeded our early projections. But that’s partially because we made the strategy decision to also greatly exceed our expected expenses.

Let me give you an example. You know how women’s hockey games have been broadcast in the past, right? Single camera from upstairs. It isn’t what we chose to do. We made the conscious choice to spend a lot of money to make it a major league professional broadcast. And I think all of you who watched our games would agree. That’s what we delivered. It was expensive. But we think it’s gonna pay off for us in the long run.

Additionally we didn’t hire three people and slowly build each franchise. We went right to 120 people by opening day and now we’re over 200 people. So that was a lot of expense that we didn’t expect right away, but we said, “you know what? We’re all in. So let’s do year 4 expenses in year 1.”

So yeah, and that resulted in a lot more revenue. And that’s why we think our decision to invest in the league, which is what I call expenses, was the right one. We’re on the right track. The investments we made are paying off.

--------------- WHAT CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT NEXT SEASON’S SCHEDULE, NUMBER OF GAMES, AND POSSIBLE NEUTRAL-SITE GAMES? ---------------

JAYNA: Well, in terms of number of games the league will go up to 30. And that’s in our CBA that 24 regular games in the inaugural season will move to a minimum of 30 next year. In terms of neutral site games, we do expect that there will be more of those next season. I don’t have a timeline for our schedule to be done yet, but we do expect more games, more neutral-site games next season.

--------------- WHAT WAS THE CONSENSUS ON THE OFFICIATING THIS SEASON IN THE LEAGUE? ---------------

JAYNA: I don’t know if you’ll ever get a collection of people that all agree on officiating in any sport, in any league. So we’re actually really happy with where we’re at.

We set out initially to find the best officials we could find. We worked closely with the NHL, the AHL, Hockey Canada, USA Hockey, to select the top officials. We obviously also adjusted the standard of play to this league. It’s not full body checking, but there is an increased level of physicality in the game. So I think we spent the early months of the season really trying to figure out where that line is and get people comfortable with it.

Now where we’re at I think players have figured it out to some extent. Of course not everyone’s going to agree on that. But the way I see the players playing the game now, and their awareness of positions they’re in, and to be ready for that physicality has changed. So, are we right there? We’re probably not right there yet. But we’re really happy with where we’re at, we think the officials have done an incredible job in the league this season.

--------------- ARE THERE PLANS FOR DRAFTED PLAYERS WHO MIGHT NOT MAKE THE PWHL ROSTERS? ---------------

JAYNA: I think trying to figure out what the right solution for that is in the short term is at the top of our list of things to do. You know, building one league in 9 months, but to build a whole ecosystem for hockey? It’s just not something that we can do right now. But we are thinking creatively around places that players could play if they don’t end up on our 23 or 26 player rosters next season. So it’s a bit of a work in progress. But in speaking to number of stakeholders there’s many many people that want to figure out a solution to this so that we can keep more women in playing the game at the highest level.

--------------- DO YOU LOOK AT THE LEAGUE AS A “WOMEN’S SPORTS” SUCCESS STORY OR HAS IT MOVED BEYOND THAT? ---------------

JAYNA: I think that we are very different from most men’s leagues. I think we’re very different than many women’s leagues. I’d like to see us stand on our own as a sports league. But in saying that I also believe that this time for women’s sports and the success of one feels like it’s a success for all. We’re all big fans and collaborate with folks in the WNBA and the NWSL, and it feels like we’re all working together to raise women’s sports. So I don’t know if that’s an appropriate answer, but I feel it’s a little of both.

--------------- HOW DO THE INVESTORS FEEL ABOUT THIS FIRST SEASON? ---------------

STAN: I have one investor, he is ecstatic.

...

--------------- WHAT IS THE POTENTIAL FOR DOING A BEST OF 7 GAMES SERIES IN THE FUTURE? ---------------

JAYNA: This is a little bit like getting asked about expansion 3 months in. Great question. Would I love to see a best of 7 series? We’re sitting here 1-1, you know of course I would. But I think we’re really excited about the format we have now. This is new for women’s hockey. Even the best players in the world who’ve won multiple Olympic gold medals have not played in a best of 5 series. I think we’re seeing that it’s challenging. There’s a lot of travel, there’s fatigue, the volume that they’re experiencing is huge

So I think we’re really good where we’re at right now. Somewhere along the line I could see us maybe expanding, but again, year 1? The two best of 5 series have been a really great format for us.

STAN: And that comes from someone who’s won 4 Olympic gold medals.

JAYNA: [laughing] I’ve never played in a best of 5 series either.

STAN: Exactly.

--------------- end of interview ---------------

#pwhl #jayna hefford #stan kasten #Youtube

39 notes · View notes

goaliekisses · 2 years

Text

It’s never only about hockey for Malkin. Never has been. If only it could be.

Instead, there was extortion to keep him playing for his hometown Russia club, Mettalurg Magnitogorsk. There was a clandestine escape to North America so he could pursue his NHL dream. There was learning English, and American/Canadian cultures. There has been playing second star to rival Alex Ovechkin in Russia and friend Sidney Crosby in Pittsburgh. There were major injuries. There were down seasons. There was marrying Anna and the birth of Nikita, each of which occurred during the 2016 Stanley Cup Final. There were the stressful negotiations with Penguins management on a four-year, $24.4 million extension that wasn’t finalized until after he decided to test free agency for the first time. There is choosing the best living situation for Nikita (Pittsburgh, Miami or both?). There is getting visas for his parents so they can see his 1,000th NHL game early this season. There is keeping that creaky knee ready for action. There is the war between Russia and Ukraine.

It’s a lot.

It’s a lot more than playing hockey.

Even when it’s only playing hockey, it’s more than that because Malkin can’t merely play hockey. An alternate captain with the Penguins, he wants to help his buddies Kris Letang, also an alternate, and Crosby, the Penguins captain, lead another Cup run. They are tied for the longest-tenured teammates in major North American sports history, according to Elias Sports Bureau. Their legacy is secure, but they want more, and they need each other at their best.

“Yes, it’s about team,” Malkin said. “I need to be a leader. I need to score points to be the best leader — the team needs me to score, of course, play the right way, for us to win.

“I know I’m still a good player. Last year was rough; I wasn’t strong. I had a good summer to train. I feel like myself for the first (time) in a long time. We have a good team in Pittsburgh. I want to win. I want to show I’m still a good player, show teammates we still can win.”

Crosby wants what Malkin wants, too.

They share a need to compete, as individuals and as centerpieces for a franchise that will one day retire their respective numbers. Since they teamed up in 2006-07, Crosby and Malkin have guided the Penguins to the most team points, playoff appearances and titles in the NHL. They’re Superman and Batman to their hockey generation and French fries and coleslaw on a sandwich in Pittsburgh. Sid and Geno are a modern-classic pairing as much as they were a smash-success duo. Also, they’ve become close — “like a brother,” Malkin said of Crosby.

Like a brother, Crosby can be protective of Malkin, and, like a brother, he supported Malkin this summer when negotiations with the Penguins had Malkin feeling as though he was becoming the odd man out in Pittsburgh. It’s likely why Crosby downplayed Malkin’s assertion that he must score like he did when he was younger to provide worth to their team.

“He puts a lot of pressure on himself like that, and it’s not easy,” Crosby said. “The thing about G is he doesn’t need to always put up big numbers to help us. When he’s best, it’s not always him getting points — he’s hunting the puck, and when he gets it you can’t get it off him. When he’s playing like that, it’s helping us even if he doesn’t get any points.

“But that’s tough to balance. When he scores, that’s obviously helping us. Goals aren’t easy to come by in this league, and not a lot of guys anywhere create chances for himself or people he plays with better than G. But a lot of times, people only look at your points, so I get why he might feel that pressure.

“He means more to us than that.”

ohhhh 🥺🥺🥺

#feeling tender emotions #sidney crosby #evgeni malkin #pittsburgh penguins #hockey

123 notes · View notes

jrsechelon · 2 years

Text

Thankful For

16. Balls Deep

Record: 0-11

Week 11 result: Lost to LilShupeScoresBIGPoints

Week 12 opponent: at Hyrule Empire

One thing to be thankful for: With every other team in the league having at least one win to Balls Deep's none, Balls Deep appears to have a firm grasp on the first overall pick in the 2023 EFL Draft. Whether they take two rookies coming out of college Bryce Young or C.J. Stroud, or someone else more established, Balls Deep will get to choose the player they want to attempt to lead their rebuild effort.

15. VanillaGorillas

Record: 3-8

Week 11 result: Beat Yuba City Sultans

Week 12 opponent: at Straight Edge Society

One thing to be thankful for: After holding back Justin Fields for most of the season, VanillaGorillas coaching staff has finally unleashed the full potential of their young quarterback in the rushing game. Fields has been the top rusher in VanillaGorillas' offense in six of their past seven games, and while they've only won one of those outings, last week's win was a massive step in the right direction which should help this team continue to build around Fields for next season.

14. Hyrule Empire

Record: 4-7

Week 11 result: Beat Black Mambas

Week 12 opponent: vs. Balls Deep

One thing to be thankful for: Be thankful you get to be alive to watch Patrick Mahomes play football. Even though this season wasn't what Hyrule Empire hoped for, it looks like Mahomes will lead this team forward moving into 2023.

13. Hahn's Hitters

Record: 4-7

Week 11 result: Lost to The Canadian Cripplers

Week 12 opponent: vs. Evolution

One thing to be thankful for: Better to get through the learning curve earlier than later. Hahn's Hitters may not grace us with a Playoff appearance this season-they should, however, feel good moving forward. Understanding the ins and outs of this league and how to build a formidable team will give them the proper knowledge to compete in 2023.

12. The Canadian Cripplers

Record: 4-7

Week 11 result: Beat Hahn's Hitters

Week 12 opponent: at Rainelo Hawks

One thing to be thankful for: The Canadian Cripplers' decision to utilize Christian McCaffrey in specific formations has allowed their roster to help boost his skill set. McCaffery isn't just part of this team but is a cornerstone in their offense and has undeniably sparked hope moving forward. Maybe they didn't have the season they wanted, but McCaffrey will certainly be a big part of this offense in 2023.

11. Rainelo Hawks

Record: 5-6

Week 11 result: Lost to Black Hole Son

Week 12 opponent: vs. The Canadian Cripplers

One thing to be thankful for: That they won the Super Bowl last year after going all in because their lack of depth is shining through this year, and it could be a problem for years to come if they don't correct some internal problems on and off the field. With a suspension to Kamara looming next season and Derek Carr not looking like the answer. AJ Brown might be their best bet moving forward in what looks to be a team in the waves of a rebuild one year removed from winning the Super Bowl.

10. The Busy Killers

Record: 5-6

Week 11 result: Beat Rice-A-Roni

Week 12 opponent: vs. Ultimate Savages

One thing to be thankful for: The Busy Killers are in prime position to push for a Wildcard spot and could score big when everything clicks. A big Thanksgiving divisional game for The Busy Killers can almost guarantee them a Playoff spot with a win. Dak and company look like a real threat when they are rolling in all phases of the ball.

9. Straight Edge Society

Record: 5-6

Week 11 result: Lost to Evolution

Week 12 opponent: vs. VanillaGorillas

One thing to be thankful for: After Joe Burrow was sacked 13 times in his first two games of the season, he's been able to remain a little more upright in the weeks since. While his 32 sacks are still second most in the league, he's not getting taken down six times per game anymore, and being reunited with star receiver, Ja'Marr Chase this weekend will be a big boost for this offense in a must-win position.

8. Black Mambas

Record: 6-5

Week 11 result: Lost to Hyrule Empire

Week 12 opponent: at Rice-A-Roni

One thing to be thankful for: Rookie wide receiver Chris Olave already has the potential to be a superstar should Black Mambas be able to clinch a Playoff seed. Other teams better watch out, with star quarterback Jalen Hurts playing lights out. This team has incredible talent and looks to be dangerous if they're able to get into the Postseason.

7. Black Hole Son

Record: 7-4

Week 11 result: Beat Rainelo Hawks

Week 12 opponent: vs. Yuba City Sultans

One thing to be thankful for: Davante Adams' contract keeps him in Las Vegas for the foreseeable future after trading their entire 2023 Draft capital and several star players away for Adams. Black Hole Son is banking on his big-play ability to continue as they fight for a Division Title and move into the Postseason.

6. Ultimate Savages

Record: 7-4

Week 11 result: Lost to Crocs

Week 12 opponent: at The Busy Killers

One thing to be thankful for: Clinching a Postseason seed after what many thought would be a difficult year. Ultimate Savages has an excellent front office. Even if they seem to take risks, they seem to pay off. With one of the more potent offenses in the league, Ultimate Savages will have another opportunity to fight for a Super Bowl appearance with the likes of Barkley, Cook, and Lamar leading the way.

5. LilShupeScoresBIGPoints

Record: 7-4

Week 11 result: Beat Balls Deep

Week 12 opponent: vs. Crocs

One thing to be thankful for: It's been a year without Josh Allen, who had been with LilShupeScoresBIGPoints since he came out of college. This year, however, Tom Brady has taken the reigns. While Brady struggled heavily early on, he's been looking more like himself, and now really, all that's left is for Brady to go to work and get this team back in a position to compete for Super Bowl glory.

4. Evolution

Record: 7-4

Week 11 result: Beat Straight Edge Society

Week 12 opponent: vs. Hahn's Hitters

One thing to be thankful for: Evolution clinched their 15th straight Postseason appearance last week. If that isn't enough to be thankful for, there are two more things to be thankful for — wide receiver Tyreek Hill and quarterback Tua Tagovailoa— who are first in receiving and second in passing after 11 weeks.

3. Crocs

Record: 8-3

Week 11 result: Beat Ultimate Savages

Week 12 opponent: at LilShupeScoresBIGPoints

One thing to be thankful for: Not listening to the Draft analysts in the 2022 Draft and selecting Derrick Henry 1st instead of Johnathan Taylor. Henry has given this second-year team a real chance not just to win their Division this weekend but a realistic chance to play for a Super Bowl Title. Crocs' front office has done a remarkable job also, acquiring future draft picks to continue their success for years to come.

2. Rice-A-Roni

Record: 8-3

Week 11 result: Lost to The Busy Killers

Week 12 opponent: at Black Mambas

One thing to be thankful for: Rice-A-Roni may be the most thankful team in all football. In their first year, not only do they have a chance to win a Division Title this week, but they can still clinch the number one seed for the Postseason. Josh Allen, while he has made some tough mistakes, is in the upper echelon of quarterbacks and has Rice-A-Roni in an excellent position moving forward as they get ready for a Thanksgiving game against division rival, Black Mambas.

1. Yuba City Sultans

Record: 8-3

Week 11 result: Lost to VanillaGorillas

Week 12 opponent: at Black Hole Son

One thing to be thankful for: Not only did Yuba City Sultans' front office draft a balanced roster, which has far exceeded all expectations. They are in a place that gives them the best advantage in the Postseason. Holding onto the number 1 seed, they have every chance to make sure the road to the Super Bowl goes through East Rutherford. Yuba City Sultans may not be flashy, but they find ways to get the job done in the moments which count the most. Although they lost last week, the Sultans still is a threat and a team not to be disrespected and taken lightly once the Postseason comes in two weeks.

CLICK HERE TO VOTE

#nfl nflfantasyfootballleague nflfantasyfootball nflfantasy nflfantasyleague fantasyfootballleague fantasyfootball thanksgiving

0 notes

hug-your-goalies · 3 years

Text

The 2021 Cup winner based on ex-Sabre drama

If you're unaware, the last two Stanley Cup winning teams both featured ex-Sabres that left on somewhat controversial terms (ROR / Blues and Bogosian / Lightning). Not only do the hockey gods hate Buffalo, they also love to twist the knife. So which ex-Sabre will win it this year?

Jonas Johansson / Avs: Sabres fans have no problem with Jojo, but one of our reporters (John Vogl) called him the worst goalie he has ever seen. When I read that quote a vision of Jonas holding the Cup flashed before my eyes.

Brandon Montour / Panthers: Other than the fact that we overpaid to get him originally (thanks Botterill), there's no real drama here. We loved Monty.

Bogo 2: Electric Boogaloo / Leafs: Could you imagine if Bogo went from zero playoff appearances to two Cups in a row, and one with our most hated geographical / divisional rival?

Taylor Hall & Curtis Lazar / Bruins: Terry Pegula thought signing Hall would make the Sabres Cup contenders lmao. Instead he scored 2 goals and we're in last place again. Boston being a divisional rival makes it even more annoying. I miss you Lazar.

Eric Staal / Habs: I almost forgot he was a Sabre lol

So based on all this, I’m predicting Avs / Bruins final with the Bruins winning the Cup.

#buffalo sabres #i felt dirty writing that #One thing: the canadian teams might play in the US for the playoffs #and i heard one option is having them play in nearby US arenas #if the Leafs use Buffalo as their home they are 100% winning the cup #and it will be the worst

15 notes · View notes

csykora · 4 years

Text

hockey, a primer

Hockey is a quick game to start watching. Fundamentally there’s a goalie guarding the net, two defensive players guarding the goalie, and three offensive forwards attacking the other team’s net.

Unlike normal sports, hockey players break the rules a lot. Common infractions include smacking another player with your stick, pretending they smacked you with their stick, poking them in the dick with your stick when you are not on the ice, licking them (yes we need this rule) and tripping them. This happens every couple minutes, and the player is punished by having to sit alone for a couple minutes while the teams continue to play with an uneven number of players.

This is called the man advantage, powerplay, or, regrettably, the PP for the team who didn’t do a crime, and the penalty kill for the guilty team. There aren’t a lot of set plays compared to something like football, and what strategy there is in the game depends on this. Listen closely and you will hear someone’s dad already screaming more information about special teams into your ear.

You do not need to know the names of the formations used in special teams. Just watch how the puck gets from one person to the next, or how it doesn’t, and you will start to see the important things.

Rosters

Each forward line has two wingers, who are expected to skate fast up and down the sides of the ice and take the most shots, and the center, who manages the middle, passing the puck between the others and directing them into the right series of positions so the puck can be bounced to where it needs to go: they’re the brains of the operation (with the goalie also using their unique view of the full rink to direct play by banging their stick and swearing at the players in front of them).

Sometimes multiple players who usually play the center position are put out at the same time, with some of them taking up the wing position. This strategy is called a ‘two-’ or ‘three-headed monster’ in the NHL, because a ‘natural center’ is thought to be a smarter strategy player.

Defense is organized in pairs, so one person takes each side. Compared to forwards who mostly skate...you know...defenders have to be able to skate equally well going forwards and backwards, which requires a different skating stride. Their main goal is to isolate and disrupt the other team’s forwards, by positioning their bodies in the ‘passing lane’ between two opposing players so they can’t pass to each other or in the shooting lane in front of a player so they can’t shoot, or by knocking the opponent out of position.

Often you’ll see one defender will tend to “stay at home” guarding the net while the other swings out wide or follows the forwards into the other team’s zone as a second wave of offense.

A team has enough to make three pairs of D and four lines of forwards, which are numbered. Flashy stars are expected to be in line 1 and 2 (the ‘top’), workmen in 3 and 4 (the ‘bottom six’), and by tradition the 4th line in particular are your rowdy boys who lay the most hits and start fights. Everyone knows those ranks are kind of imaginary, but players getting moved up or down the hierarchy gives us Drama. Hockey players mate for life, and usually play with the same D-partner or linemates, but they can also be swapped around into different combinations when the coach sees fit.

Structure

The NHL plays a bonkers number of games. Most years, the hockey season starts in the fall and grinds with games every other day or so through the winter until the players are all dehydrated and exhausted, at which point the playoffs start. The Stanley Cup playoffs are four rounds of best-of-seven elimination series, and it’s often described as the most intense championship in sports. This year, we’ve just wrapped up made-up qualifiers to pick the teams that will start the first round of the playoffs tomorrow.

Please follow a smarter blog than me for current updates on the North American women’s leagues. I am going to refer to the North American women’s game, but I’m not the best source on it.

The KHL and ZhWL play a slightly less bonkers number of games, but make up for it by being weird as shit and incorporate live music, even live-er pyrotechnics, and swords. You can buy access to games for about a cup of coffee.

The EIHL is in Britain, and I don’t know when they play but they do, so if you’re one of the British people who ask me this question, good luck

North America vs The World

International hockey is played on a larger and wider rink than North American hockey. More space means that passing accurately and skating efficiently become more important, and it’s statistically less likely that players will bump into each other, so hitting is less important than in North American men’s hockey. The greater width means that wingers in the Continental Hockey League (KHL) and other national leagues are expected to control a decent chunk of open ice, not just the lane along the boards, so they’re more like North American centers, running the “three-headed monster” play all the time.

When men’s Team Canada plays on international ice, they’re able to fill their roster with centers, bridging the two styles.

Overpassing

Overpassing is a buzzword used to critique both women’s hockey players and Russian men’s hockey players. In North American men’s hockey, there’s a principle that the person who carries the puck into the attacking zone should be the one to shoot it, or make at most one pass: passing back and forth in the offensive zone ‘wastes time’ and increases the risk that the defenders will intercept one of those passes and take possession.

But this is something Russian men’s players are actually taught to do. They are expected to be more accurate passers, so the risk of the pass being intercepted should be low anyway. Shooting is almost guaranteed to give up possession, after which the other team will have a chance to shoot and score on you…so why not keep passing it around we either have a perfect opening or we run down the clock?

Women’s hockey players are similarly good enough skaters (young girls often come into the sport with figure skating experience and they all receive a high level of skate training) and passers that they can hold possession. They are trained to be very aware of how their teammates are positioned, and so they will pass more in the zone.

Think of it like this: North American men think, “I gotta shoot the puck to score goals before the other guy smashes me and takes it and scores goals with it!”, women think, “I’ve got a 50/50 chance if I shoot, but my girl over there is 100%” and Russian men think, “Aw, you want this puck? You wanna shoot it and score goals with it? Okay…catch me first.”

More on culture

Equipment

Skates

Skates have a firm boot and a blade which has two sharp edges with a hollow in between. They do not have toe picks, so skaters have to use a two-foot parallel stop or “hockey stop”

Hockey stops send up a cloud of snow so they’re a great way to be a dick to your teammates, and they make a swoosh swoosh SWOOSH sound that’s just great.

You will be able to see who is a great skater, trust your eye. There are lots of different ways to be a great skater that you can start to appreciate. Some people are fast on the straightaways, some people can pick up speed more quickly over short distances, some are more mobile with lots of fine turns, some have endurance.

Sticks

Hockey sticks are made of different materials with different levels of whippiness. They have a shaft, which is cut to measure from the ground to somewhere between your chin and your eyebrows. Forwards tend to go shorter for control, defensemen longer for reach. No player is allowed to carry a stick over 63” unless they have a height exemption, which is why Colton Parayko has to carry a Certified Big Boy card and his own teammate once got a penalty for coping a feel of his stick. The blade curves forward away from you as you hold it, and the blade and top of the shaft are wrapped with slightly grippy tape. Some people care a lot about tape.

Your dominant hand usually goes at the top of your stick to control it, with your non-dominant hand on the shaft providing the power for most shots. Your hockey-handedness is named after the side of your body the blade stick is on: if you are right-handed, your right hand is on top, left hand is on the shaft, and you have a left-handed shot.

That makes for a lot more natural left shooters than natural right shooters. Because you have the wall on one side and passes coming from another, it’s in some ways difficult for a left shooter to play on the right side of the ice. That means that the people who do have to play their “off wing” learn to switch how they hold their stick and will usually be very good at it, and can surprise the other team in certain ways, but there are strategic advantages to natural handedness, especially on defense. Coaches fantasize about having three pairs of perfectly matched right- and left-side defensemen, so right-shooting/left-handed d-men are hot shit.

The whippiness or stiffness of your stick helps you with your choice of less powerful, more accurate wristshots (which make the pretty ting! sound off the goalposts), medium one-timers and snapshots, preferred by forwards, or the big booming slapshots that defensemen use when they don’t much care for whoever’s between them and the other team’s goalie.

Pads

If you are going to shout an opinion about injuries, hits, fights, concussions, exemptions for young or small players, etc, please, you need to understand pads. This shit matters.

Hockey pads for skaters cover the lower legs and wrap from the shoulders across the upper chest and down the arms. This is why certain plays are held to be more or less dangerous than you might instinctively think. (More on weird injuries: here and here)

There are chinks in the armor at the knee/calf, wrist, and none at all on their belly, so a slash to the wrists or a blow/blade coming anywhere near someone’s stomach is very different than one landing elsewhere. The modern skate boot is also very stiff and ‘locks’ your foot in a certain position relative to your leg, so trips and falls can easily lead to foot injuries. Slashing, tripping, and especially kicking have a really good chance of hurting someone, which is why they are treated that way even if by good luck no one was hurt this time.

Pads are soft-cap or hard-cap: soft-cap is a thick layer of padding, hard-cap is a literal hard plastic shell armor. Hard-cap pads are illegal at major junior levels of competition and in rec leagues, because you can’t really feel through them: if you’re wearing soft pads and lay a hit on someone, you’ll both feel it, so there’s an upper limit on how much force you want to hit them with, but in hard pads you can smash someone into oblivion without hurting yourself. This is the same reason why you drop gloves before fighting: hitting someone with an armored glove on hurts you less but lets you hurt them more.

Concussions are a type of traumatic brain injury when a large force moves through the head and neck, causing the brain to slosh around in the skull. It is not just caused by direct blows to the head, but by intense movement of the head when the body is hit elsewhere. Men’s hockey is a leading sport for concussions in men, and women’s hockey is a or the leading cause of concussions in women. This is a problem, because concussions are bad. This is not just because fighting is allowed in men’s hockey, but because of the forces and collisions in both games.

Statistically, an individual NHL player lays hundreds of hits per season, and fights between zero and a dozen times. Across the league there might be about a hundred hits in each game, and there’s a fight about every other game. Each fight lasts about 6 seconds and involves about a dozen shots. So while fighting is not safe, about 60% of concussions are linked to the much more common shoulder and head hits.

I deeply, dearly do not care if you do or don’t like fights. It is fine. You do you. But if you say banning fights would cure concussions while ignoring the role of hits, I will hunt you down and smack your phone out of your hands with a foam roller.

Jerseys Because they’re standing on ice, which is slippy, players grab each other’s jersey sleeves or collars during fights to hold them in range and punch with the other hand. In the past, players would not only drop their gloves before a fight but try to strip their sweaters off as well: if you were totally topless, he wouldn’t have a handhold and wouldn’t be able to hit you effectively. Now, jerseys are hooked to hockey pants with an elastic “fight strap” to stop the stripping.

Also they’re fun to fuck with.

youtube

Hockey socks are actually two pieces: a normal sock that goes on your foot and in your skate and then a tube with no foot in team colors that you pull on over it. Some NHL players do not wear the sock in their skate. I’m not going to name names, but I feel very, very comfortable saying that it is only the men that do this.

Note: OMGCP is not a depiction of athletic practice, injuries and safety, or Northern North American communities/culture (much less Russian). I desperately do not care if you like it as what it is, but the plays that are presented as normal and the mechanisms of injury shown are not accurate, and might be dangerous to apply to real injuries. Please do not base your opinions of rule calls or injuries that affect the safety of real people on it.

Bonus facts:

Hockey is a sweaty, sweaty game. However much you are imagining: it’s more. Skaters lose an average of 1.5 liters of fluid in a game, and some lose 2 to 3 liters. Goalies lose about 3 liters every practice. Braden Holtby specifically sweats off 9 pounds. This is why you see them chewing bubblegum during the game, and why rubbing a glove on someone’s face is a playful (or not) insult

Athletes don’t eat pop “health food”. They do not eat salads every meal. Hockey players today are typically on protein-heavy diets during the summer and early season to put on weight (both muscle and fat, which plays an important role in hydration and metabolism!), then switch to carbohydrate-heavy diets to make up for the amount of energy they burn in the later part of the season. Many are on “low sugar” diets because…well, that was pop science in the era that their coaches trained in, but many are not. Exercise anorexia and overtraining are increasingly epidemic in the sport because of the focus on body fat and form that is institutionalized in many programs. More on body fat here: X

“Indian head” logos commemorate the practice of white settlers trading the severed heads or body parts of Native Americans for cash. This is bad. Support Indigenous and First Nations fans in changing the name.

#long post

301 notes · View notes

himbeaux-on-ice · 3 years

Note

Hello! I was wondering if you could please explain to me what Robin Lehner said yesterday about vaccination and competitive edge? English isn't my 1st language and from what I gathered NHL and PA promised VGK that if they get vaccinated the restrictions on them will lessen and they can freely leave their houses. And when they players got vaccines, NHL changed their promise and said players can't do that until all of the teams across the league are evenly vaccinated (shitty move from NHL, 1/2

2/2 as always). But what did Robin mean talking about competitive edge? I rewatched the video 3 times and I still don't understand :( Did the league make it a competition between the teams? "The sooner you all get vaccinated, the sooner there'll be no resctions on you?" I hope, I'm not completely missing the point, sorry about that. Big respect for Robin for speaking up and calling out the league. I'm really happy seeing players speaking up for themselves and their teams

Hi anon! I’ve spoken about this already a bit here and here, in case you haven’t seen those yet and think they might answer some of your questions. But I’m happy to elaborate further! I hope I can clear this up for you.

First, just as a note: Right now it doesn’t seem to exactly be clear what the NHL and NHLPA did or didn’t promise players in terms of easing restrictions, but it seems like Lehner was definitely given the impression by somebody that a team getting fully or mostly vaccinated was the ticket to not being under such strict isolation. The NHL for their part seems to be claiming they promised no such thing, but it’s hard to know right now whether that’s just them covering ass, or if there was just a misunderstanding somewhere in which what they actually said was not fully clear to the players. [Elliotte Friedman voice] More news may be yet to come on this.

Right. So as far as “competitive edge” goes, I can definitely explain that. You’re only a little off the mark. What he means in this case is that the NHL is concerned that letting more fully vaccinated teams live under a less intensely restrictive set of internal rules (regarding things like dining together, exercising together, sitting next to each other on planes and busses, having more group off-ice social time, sharing hotel rooms, having in-person coaching meetings again, etc) will lead to that group having an on-ice advantage in their play over other teams who are less vaccinated and still have to live under full restrictions.

Because the NHL is intensely obsessed with “parity of sport” (trying to make the conditions of competition the same for all teams regardless of outside factors wherever possible), they always in as many situations as possible want to eliminate any potential leg up one team could have over others. This is why we have things like the salary cap, rules about scouting players, rules about how draft picks are distributed that try to make sure struggling teams have a chance to draft well, rules against signing your best players for 20-year contracts so nobody else can have them, etc.

In general theory, being parity-oriented is good! It aims to make sure that the success of teams on the ice and in the standings is determined by the hockey play/skill alone as much as possible, not by franchise wealth or other things they did to get an unfair jump on the competition. And that should make the games more fun and less boring/predictable in most cases! As far as sports leagues go, the NHL has pretty good parity of play overall — there are only a few REALLY good teams and only a few REALLY bad ones, and everybody else performs within a pretty similar range most years. This is why back-to-back Cup wins are so rare in the current era, because due to all the rules to enforce parity there are relatively few teams that are THAT dominant over the competition for a long stretch of multiple seasons in a row, and the odds of any given team winning each year are much more similar. (As compared to like that period in the late 70’s when it was like “who won the Cup? oh surprise surprise it’s the Habs AGAIN 🙄” lol).

However, sometimes the NHL gets unrealistic in its pursuit of making sure everything is exactly the same for all teams. We’ve seen it already this season with the stubborn insistence on making sure the Canucks play a full 56 game season like everybody else, regardless of whether it is safe or reasonable to do so in the time they have left.

This time, the fixation on parity seems to be rearing its head in the form of the League insisting that even if a team has most or all of their players and staff vaccinated, they still have to maintain the same intense restrictions within team spaces as other teams which may be WAY further behind in getting everyone vaccinated, rather than getting to benefit from the lowered risk that being thoroughly vaccinated brings within a closed group like that. And they seem to be insisting on this not because it would be unsafe to change things for vaccinated teams, but rather because of concern that doing so might make that team perform better as a hockey team.

That’s the key part here: The NHL seems to consider getting to (safely) return to a mode of team life that is somewhat more similar to what these guys have been habitually used to pre-pandemic, to be something that could translate into an unfair on-ice advantage in the quality of their play, over other teams who are still doing it all “the hard way” under strict restrictions because they haven’t been vaccinated yet. And because of trying for parity, they want avoid giving teams that “advantage” by basing restriction changes around each team’s individual situation, and instead plan to ease restrictions for all teams at the same time at some point once all teams are similar levels of vaccinated.

Now, US teams seem to be getting vaccinated faster and faster every day, but Canadian teams probably have not started vaccinating their players or any team employees under age 50 at all yet, because Canada’s vaccination process has been painfully slow. So waiting on them to catch up could leave US teams who are already mostly/fully vaccinated still stuck in those restrictive mentally draining conditions for quite some time before the other teams catch up — again, not because it isn’t COVID safe to ease their restrictions if done properly (that doesn’t seem to be a problem), but because the League sees the improvements to their mental state and team morale/cohesion that would come from living a less restricted life together and getting to return to familiar off-ice hockey routines as gaining a “competitive edge” over unvaccinated teams, which would lead to them playing better hockey to a level that can’t be matched as a result.

Which, Lehner is right, is a pretty fucked up way to look at it! “It’s an unfair advantage for you to not be miserably alone and depressed by that and frustrated and doing everything with 16 extra steps you’re still not used to, it’s an unfair advantage to get to actually act like a team off the ice when playing a team sport, so no, we’re not gonna let you eat lunch together or share hotel rooms or whatever” is not exactly a compassionate argument!

Anon I’m also really glad Robin said something about it, and I was glad to see VGK captain Mark Stone put full and vocal team support behind him when asked about it last night on the broadcast too. The mental price of these intense restrictions is something that has been weighing on my mind ever since I first heard they would have to spend all their time on the road locked in hotel rooms alone when not playing and thought “oh god, five months of that is going to be psychologically devastating”. It’s a relief to hear it acknowledged.

I’m not fully sure what the best solution is here, but that mental wellbeing factor absolutely must be discussed in all decisions. It would be fucked up if the League is treating that as something purely technical to be controlled like the salary cap, rather than as a key determinant of health and life (in the short and long term) that is just as important as COVID safety. The old hockey culture of “just suck it up” cannot cut it anymore.

Aside: I think it’s also worth mentioning while we’re here, that I think I do understand why players may be angry about have been talked into getting the vaccine because they thought it would lead to eased personal restrictions, and why I don’t believe that anger necessarily represents an “anti-vaxx” mindset. There are reasons they may not have planned on getting vaccinated just yet which aren’t necessarily “anti-vaxx” cult thinking (though that doesn’t mean they’re smart reasons lol) and would likely seem reasonable to players in-context. I’m gonna put that under a cut though bc this is already really long!

First, there’s the fact that we don’t know what medical conditions some players may or may not have which could make them hesitant to get some of the vaccines out of an abundance of caution. More prominently you also gotta remember, these guys are athletes currently competing their way through an extremely intense and extremely important part of the season as they try to secure playoff spots, playing sometimes as many as 4 games a week. Looking at it that way, it’s understandable why some of them would be hesitant about getting a shot at this particular time which we all know is going to whammy you with a nasty little bout of mild-moderate side effects that hit you like a bad cold for as much as a week. They probably don’t feel they can afford to be laid up with muscle aches, sinus suffering, fatigue, and all the other little fun (and eventually harmless in the end!) things that your body runs through while activating that initial immune response — because in the couple of days that it throws them off for, their team could play 3 or more REALLY important playoff-clinching games, which they could end up underperforming in or having to sit out.

If that is the situation you’re in, and you already feel like the current League restrictions are doing enough to protect you, you can see why you would say “I think I’ll wait and get it during the offseason/during the week break between regular season and playoffs, and just suck it up for these last few weeks dealing with the same ol lonely isolation restrictions I’ve already gotten used to dealing with all season long, rather than be hit with that curveball of possible temporary vaccine side-effects during this time when I need to give it my all every game.” That may sound like a selfish mindset, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that is how at least some of these athletes are approaching it, especially ones who may be single guys without families at home to worry about protecting. (Lehner, for the record, has a wife and two young kids).

BUT, if the League told you (or it sounded like the League told you) “Hey, if enough of your team gets vaccinated quickly, we’ll be able to lift some of the internal restrictions for you guys and let you like hang out and do stuff together within the team again”, and if you were REALLY struggling with the mental stress of that isolated living style, you might weigh the two options against each other and say “Okay, I’m willing to power through a week of potential side-effects and get vaccinated with the fellas if it means I won’t have to be so goddamn miserable and depressed every day.” and then you get the shot(s).

And if you did that, and THEN the League said “lol no, even though your team is fully immunized you still have to sit in your room alone every night and eat by yourself and not leave your house, because it’s not fair to other teams if you guys are no longer mentally miserable like them”, well now you find yourself in the worst of both worlds — still stuck in isolation, AND you’ve still got to play through all the potential vaccine side-effects that will leave you a little off your game during some of the most crucial games of the year.

Plus, that leaves you not feeling like you got to give informed consent — you agreed to get vaccinated (ie undergo a medical treatment) under the expectation that there would be certain rewards to be gained in terms of relief for your mental health, which made you decide it was worth the potential dent in your performance for a few games and any other worries you had about the vaccine, because the prospect of that relief was so worth it. And now, you are told by the League “that payoff you expected never existed, we never promised that, what are you talking about? we can’t change things for your mental health because that might make you better at hockey than the depressed unvaccinated teams”. I can understand how that turn of events could leave someone, as Robin expressed, feeling like they were “tricked” or “forced” into making a choice that they may have done differently otherwise. They felt that they were promised something in return that they didn’t get.

Note at the end of all this: Again, we still don’t know whether the NHL and NHLPA actually made any promises, or if they simply weren’t clear enough in communicating expectations to teams and the players misunderstood what was said to mean something else. Regardless, using the idea that being freed from having to be miserably isolated to an even greater degree than most of the US general public is an “unfair competitive advantage” to now justify not allowing reasonable adjustments to the restrictions for fully vaccinated teams is fucked up, and treats mental wellbeing as just another gameplay-impacting factor to be controlled rather than a deeply impactful part of a person’s overall wellbeing which can even threaten their life. The players must be treated as people.

#long post #asks #anon #robin lehner #vegas golden knights #covid 19 #nhl #hockey

25 notes · View notes

slapshot-to-the-heart · 4 years

Text

Four Times Nathan Proposed and One Time He Meant it

Hi! This is my humble contribution to @nolypats and @hockeyboysiguess campaign for Nathan MacKinnon for Hockey Boy of the Month. Please see their blogs for more info, also just because they’re amazing writers. This is my first time trying a 4+1, I thought it would be nice to put something out before the next chapter of Flatbush & Atlantic. It was genuinely so much fun writing this, so please let me know what you think!

Wine pairing: Rotari rosé. @hockeyboysiguess and I have started to pair all of our writings with their own wine, bearing in mind that neither of us knows anything about wine. It’s all about the VIBES.

4 times Nathan proposed and 1 time he meant it

The first time (February)

Jordan knocked on the door, a glass dish balanced precariously on her hip. She and Nathan tried to have a standing date night every week, something that wasn’t grabbing lunch when they were both free or meeting for coffee before she had to head to work and he went to practice. That was, unless there was a game. Or a roadie. Or a team event. So needless to say, the two had been a little strapped for “couple time” recently, and they were both feeling it. She had an article due the next day, a co-write about the use of illegal dark money in a recently-elected congressman’s campaign. Nathan had a long practice that morning and wasn’t feeling too up to anything that would require him to move too far from his couch.

He opened the door, giving her a quick kiss. “I pulled up a few movies I thought you might be into, but didn’t want to pick anything until you got here.”

“You’re so considerate, I think I’m going to swoon,” Jordan said.

Nathan shrugged. “I’ll catch you if you fall.” Deep down, he really was a romantic, though the boys would chirp him endlessly if they knew.

Jordan padded into the kitchen, setting the dish onto the counter and opening up the cabinet right above the toaster oven, grabbing two plates. Even apart from date night, it wasn’t uncommon for them to eat in; partly due to the fact that there were few things in this world Nathan loved more than being able to fly under the radar, something that was a little bit difficult to do when you wore the A for the Colorado Avalanche, but partly because in his own way, it was letting Jordan into his life. “What movies were you looking at?”

“Depends what you’re feeling,” Nathan replied. “We’ve got...Star Wars, Captain Marvel, and 10 Things I Hate About You.”

Her ears perked up. “The one with Heath Ledger?”

“That’s the one. Sound good to you?”

Jordan had always had a penchant for movies of the late-90s and early 2000s, especially if they were romcoms, and especially if said romcoms starred Julia Stiles. As a little girl, there was definitely more than once where she had herself entirely convinced that her life would turn out exactly like The Prince and Me. Minus, of course, the fact that the beginning of Paige and Edvard’s entire relationship was built on lies. Mainly, she was just really into crowns and big poofy dresses as a little girl. “Sounds good to me!” She said brightly. “You want a brownie?”

Nate craned his neck to look at her in the kitchen, looking expectantly at him with one hand holding a spatula. “You made brownies?”

Jordan giggled. “I did. I take it that’s a yes?”

“That’s a definitely, please, my God give me one right this second or I might combust.” She slid the plate onto the side table a minute later, grabbing two napkins. “Are these normal brownies?” Nathan asked, picking one up and inspecting it with a semi-confused look on his face.

“They’re triple-layer, it’s an old recipe for slutty brownies from when I was in college. Bottom’s cookie dough, then Oreos, then fudge brownie on top of that.”

Nate raised an eyebrow. “Slutty brownies?”

Jordan swatted at his shoulder. “I know it’s a weird name, just give them a chance. I know you’ve been feeling a little down with the losing streak, and thought you could use a pick-me-up. They were my go-to for breakups, always seemed to help the girls feel better, so I thought it might work for you too.”

He wouldn’t admit it, but Nathan’s heart skipped a beat with Jordan’s words. “Guess I’ll have to see,” he said, taking a bite out the corner. His face melted. “This is...literally the best thing I’ve ever tasted. Seriously, it’s so good. So good. Oh my God, marry me.”

Jordan flushed, turning to take a sip of water so he wouldn’t see. “I’m glad you like them.”

The second time (May)

It was 11:38 on a Friday night, and Jordan and Nathan were at a bar. To be precise, Jordan, Nathan, and pretty much the whole team were at a bar, plus what seemed like the entire population of Denver. Springtime meant playoff season for the NHL, and winning a series meant going out. Jordan normally had to pass whenever the team decided to hit up a bar or club after a win; as much as she would have liked to go, she was a journalist who kept a 9-5 job, which meant that she had to at least get some modicum of sleep if she was going to be able to function in the newsroom without an injection of caffeine straight into her veins. But it was the weekend, and she’d be damned if she was going to miss out on this.

For the most part, the fans weren’t making a fuss; there was the occasional picture taken or pat on the back for winning the conference semifinals for the first time in twenty years, but nothing out of hand. Sipping her Dark & Stormy, she looked fondly over at Nate, who was having what looked to be a very animated conversation with Burky. Already two and a half drinks in, Nathan was starting to act a little tipsy; while he was normally more reserved about public displays of affection, he kissed Jordan more than one as the night went on. Not like she was complaining. Picking up a refill from the bar, she scooted back into the booth next to Nate. He planted a messy kiss on her cheek. “Where’d you go, Jo?”

Jordan rolled her eyes. “Unlike some of us, I can’t just snap my fingers and have alcohol appear at will. I had to actually go to the bar for another drink,” she teased.

Nathan threw his head back laughing. “‘S’pose you’ve got a point there, babe.” He slung one arm over her shoulders. Jordan unconsciously leaned into his touch. “What’d you think of the game?” She wasn’t able to make it to every game, but was lucky that she could get down to the Pepsi Center more often than not. The Avalanche had beaten the Flames in 6, after dropping the first two games in Calgary and being pegged as another likely sweep, they had come back to win the next four and the series.

“Just trying to stroke your own ego, eh, MacKinnon?”

“Picking up some Canadian slang, eh, Murphy?”

She tilted her head. “Maybe, maybe not. But the game was amazing. You know that. You did amazing, Nate.” In the 3-1 win, Nathan had scored two points, an assist and an absolute beauty of a power-play goal that just barely squeaked into the top left corner above Rittich’s shoulder.

“Sure, maybe I do know,” Nathan admitted, “but it’s one thing hearing it from fans and the media and even my teammates. It’s another hearing it from you.” Jordan loved Nathan, but he wasn’t always the best at expressing his feelings out loud. She was the first one to say “I love you, to introduce him to her parents, to take just about any step forward in their relationship. It was something he was getting better at, slowly but surely, and it meant the world to Jordan that he was trying so hard. Maybe it was the liquor, or the atmosphere, or the excitement of the night, but it meant just as much to her to hear it as it probably did for him to say it.

Half an hour and several drinks later, the last few people left were trickling out. Most had carpooled to the bar, leaving their cars back at the arena to get the next day. Jordan would have ordered Nate an Uber and then just hitched a ride with someone else back towards her apartment west of downtown, but Nate was pretty far gone. And he was a cute drunk, all things considered, but she was on her way to sobering up and felt an obligation to at least get him in bed safe. Their car pulled up, Nathan clumsily ducking in ahead of her as she shut the door behind him, buckling first his seat belt then her own. They walked through his front door fifteen minutes later, Jordan dropping him off in his bedroom to get undressed before grabbing a glass of water and a bottle of Advil. Nathan was in his boxers when she walked in, struggling to pull a t-shirt over his head. Jordan laughed, walking to his side of the bed before gently tugging it, handing him the water and two Advil. “If you take it now, it’ll help with the hangover later.” Kissing his forehead gently, she turned to leave.

“Where are you going, Jo?”

She stopped at the door. “Home?”

“I want you to stay.”

She sighed gently, smiling at him. “Okay, I’ll spend the night.”

“No,” Nathan interrupted, grabbing her wrist lightly as she turned to grab one of his old World Cup shirts to sleep in. “Forever. I want you to stay forever.”

The third time (August)

It was the middle of August, and Jordan and Nathan were in Canada. He had invited her earlier in the summer to visit for a few weeks, and as soon as she got the time off approved, she booked her flight. Getting to Springhill wasn’t the easiest — she flew to Toronto, had a layover, flew to Halifax, then got picked up by Nate for the two hour drive to his hometown. He had flown out in June, about a month after the Avs lost to the Kings in the conference finals, so the couple hadn’t seen each other in nearly two months. Jordan wasn’t about to complain about a few more hours. His parents had been so generous letting her stay for two weeks, and hadn’t batted an eye when Nathan had moved her into his old room. “Just don’t wake us up,” his mom had said, causing Nathan’s cheeks to turn scarlet.

Jordan had met them a few times before; they had flown out for the All-Star game the previous January and had gotten together during the team Moms’ and Dads’ trips. And if she was around when Nathan was FaceTiming them, she always popped in for a few minutes to say hi. But she still hadn’t quite expected the ceaseless hospitality she had been offered over the past week. Maybe Canadians really were just that nice.

Halfway through Jordan’s trip, they decided to throw a barbeque. And by they, that meant it was Nate’s idea and he roped them all into helping. Jordan had already been introduced to a few of his old friends, they had gone out for drinks to the one bar in town on her second night, but she was excited to meet everyone else. His dad Graham was keeping an eye on the grill, Nathan had filled the cooler with drinks, and Jordan was helping his mom carry out the fruit bowl and salad to the backyard. Nathan ran up to his room to change right as people started trickling in, and came back to a yard full of family and friends. He craned his neck, trying to figure out where Jordan had wandered off too, before his sister pointed to where she sat with a few of his cousins.

Nathan opened his mouth, about to ask her something, when Jordan quietly brought a finger up to her lips. “She’s sleeping,” she whispered, gesturing to her arms, where a tiny baby was nestled, eyes firmly shut.

He remembered that his cousin Rachel had had a baby not too long ago, but didn’t realize she’d be old enough to travel yet. “Is this Natalie?” he asked quietly, sitting in the chair next to Jordan. Rachel nodded. For a few moments, Nathan was lost in the scene, lost in how damn perfect Jordan looked with a baby in her arms. They had spoken about those sorts of things — future things — enough to know that marriage and kids were something they both wanted, but this was the first time it had hit him, like really hit him, that that could be them down the line. Over by the fire pit, his mom watched, a soft smile on her face.

Nathan stood in the kitchen with his mom a few hours later, drying off dishes from the party. Handing a plate to him, Kathy shot a curious glance at her son, as if a thought had just popped into her mind that hadn’t been there before. Nate looked back at her, confused. “What is it, mom?

Kathy nodded out the window, where Jordan was laughing at a joke his dad had just made, balancing the last round of dirty plates to bring in on her arm. “When are you going to put a ring on it, Nathan?

Nathan wasn’t particularly prone to blushing, but he had been doing a lot of it lately. “I—uh—” His mom rested a hand on his shoulder with a knowing smile. “Okay, I’ll admit that I’ve been thinking about it.”

Kathy was beaming. “I knew it. When?”

“When am I going to propose?” She nodded. He shrugged. “I don’t know when it’s going to happen, Mom, but it’s going to. I’m going to marry that girl.”

The fourth time (November)

Jordan grimaced, breathing in sharply as she braced her elbows on her desk. Elisa, her friend who worked in the cubicle beside her, looked over, a concerned expression on her face. “You good, hun?”

Jordan nodded mechanically, opening a drawer and pulling out a bottle of ibuprofen, swallowing three with a gulp of water. “Yeah, I should be fine. I should be starting my period in the next day or two, so I’m pretty sure it’s just cramps.”

“Are they usually this bad though?” Elisa had always been a worrier.

She shook her head. “No, not since I went on birth control a few years ago, but who knows. The ibuprofen will help, and it’s probably normal anyways. I’m sure it’ll go away.”

It didn’t go away. Two hours later, when Elisa was finishing up the last paragraph of her analysis of the Broncos’ new coaching hire, Jordan suddenly shot up from her desk, running at breakneck speed towards the women’s bathroom with a queasy look on her face. Elisa followed, bursting through the door to the unmistakable sharpness of vomit. She knelt down next to Jordan, pulling her hair back with the spare scrunchie she kept on her wrist. “Jordan? Are you okay?”

Jordan shook her head. “I feel awful, El.”

Eliss touched the back of her hand to Jordan’s forehead. “You’re warm. Have the cramps gotten better.”

“Worse,” Jordan admitted, wiping at the beads of sweat that had started to accumulate on her forehead.

Elisa pulled out her phone from her back pocket. “I’m calling an ambulance. I don’t think this is cramps, Jo.”

Jordan didn’t have the strength to argue, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to anyways. The ambulance arrived ten minutes later, carting Jordan off to Denver Health Medical Center. “Any chance you could be pregnant?” one EMT asked.

“I could be, but I shouldn’t. I’m on birth control and my boyfriend always uses protection,” Jordan said weakly. The EMT made a scribble on her paper. She barely registered pulling into the hospital, nurses pulling her into the ER, or a doctor wheeling in an ultrasound machine. She was conscious enough to recite her name, date of birth, and insurance number before being taken into the operating room, and then a mask was placed over her nose and her world went dark.

The first thing Jordan did when she woke up was check the clock in her room. It was 3; from what little she remembered, she had been taken to the hospital sometime a little after noon. “Oh, thank God,” she heard from her left side. She recognized that voice. It was Nathan’s voice. He grabbed her hand — the one that didn’t have an IV drip in it — and kissed it quickly, smoothing back the pieces of her hair that had come out of the hair tie. “Elisa called during practice, and she told me what happened, but she didn’t even know what happened, and then I left and drove over here, but then—”

Jordan laughed softly, feeling a dull pain in her lower abdomen. “It’s fine, Nate, I’m fine. What happened, anyways? I don’t remember anything after I went into surgery, I have no idea what it was even for.”

“You had appendicitis, your appendix was about two seconds away from bursting.”

Jordan let out a low whistle. “Glad that didn’t happen. Hey,” she added as an afterthought, “I thought visiting hours here didn’t start until 4?” Jordan had visited a college friend of hers who had had a baby a few weeks prior, and could have sworn that she wasn’t let in until later.

Nate smiled sheepishly. “Yeah, they do. I couldn’t even figure out what room you were in at first. They wouldn’t tell me anything, so I told them I was your fiancé.”

“Oh, did you now?”

Nathan rubbed his thumb over her finger. Her ring finger. “I mean, it’s pretty much true. All I’ve got left to do now is ask you.”

“And get the ring,” Jordan added.

“Nope.”

+1 (January)

Family skates had quickly grown to be one of Jordan’s favorite parts of the season. She had loved the first one, but had felt just a tiny bit out of place; her and Nathan had only been dating for a little over six months, and it seemed like almost everyone else had known each other for years. But she’d forged some amazing friendships with other WAGs over the past year, trading babysitting duties for pies and meeting to watch the game while the boys were on a road trip, sharing new Spotify playlists and learning how to support each other along the way. The team had become her second family, even though her parents only lived an hour and a half away.

Jordan had been a competitive figure skater throughout high school and into college, so she was no stranger to the ice. She obviously couldn’t get out nearly as often as she had before, but her skates still fit and she could still land a triple salchow after warming up. She and Nate had been skating around for an hour or so, taking a break after some “friendly competition” where Josty had made the mistake of challenging Jordan to a race around the rink. She beat him by two seconds.

Jordan unscrewed the top of her water bottle, taking a few grateful sips before putting it back in her bag. “Babe!” Nate called from a few rows away, where some of the younger kids were gathered next to what looked like pastels. “Want to face paint?”

She smiled, raising her eyes playfully as she popped on her blade guards and walked over towards the bench. “You sure about that one, MacKinnon? I’m not much of an artist.”

He nodded enthusiastically. “It’s okay, I bet you’ll be great!” He was so sweet for believing in her.

“Alright,” Jordan said, straddling the bench and picking up the box. “What would his highness like for the design? Bear in mind you’re working with a beginner here.”

“Butterfly!” He chirped excitedly. “There’s been a whole bird and insect theme going on here,” he pointed at the kids’ cheeks, covered in bees, ladybugs, and one demonic-looking...crow? Was it a crow? Did they even get crows at this time of year? “and I wouldn’t want to break the trend.”

“We couldn’t have that,” Jordan agreed. Ten minutes later Nathan had a very blue, barely-acceptable-looking butterfly on his right cheek, but he was beaming like the sun as soon as he pulled up his camera to look at it. “I love it, Jo. Thank you,” Nate said, giving her a quick kiss.

Activities wrapped up not too long after, and Jordan and Nathan walked out of the rink hand-in-hand towards his car. They had moved in together two months earlier, and Jordan had been more than happy to move out of her tiny studio into Nate’s giant apartment, where you could see the Rockies from the rooftop on clear days. Plus, his building allowed dogs. As Nathan drove home, one hand on the steering wheel and the other tangled with hers by the center console, Jordan looked over at him, with the little blue butterfly on his cheek, and she suddenly felt so unbelievably happy. So unbelievably full. It went without saying that she loved Nate. She loved him like she had never loved anyone before, and never would again.

At the same time, Nate’s heart was beating faster than it ever had in his life. He wasn’t scared, he wasn’t surprised, but he had just realized something. He already knew that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with Jordan. Nathan had realized that months ago. And he hadn’t been lying at the hospital, he had already bought the ring. But Nathan wanted everything to be perfect when he proposed; it couldn’t be rainy outside, because what if she wanted pictures? It couldn’t be too soon after her older brother’s wedding, because then she might think that was the reason why. It couldn’t be in the summer, because then he’d go back to Nova Scotia for the summer and his mom might scalp him for leaving his fiancée in another country. But, Nathan realized as they pulled into the underground lot, there never was going to be a perfect time. He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he wanted to be Jordan’s husband. There shouldn’t be anything stopping him. There wasn’t anything stopping him.

“I’m going to run to the bathroom,” Nate said as Jordan slipped off her shoes. She nodded. Nathan went up the stairs, but past the bathroom. He walked into their bedroom, into his closet, to the shoebox that had his old atom league medals. He grabbed the velvet box, opening it and taking one last look before taking a deep breath and putting it in his pocket.

“You want to watch SVU reruns?” Jordan asked as he ambled back into the living room.

His mouth opened and closed like a fish. “Uh—can I say something?”

Jordan looked over. “Yeah, go ahead? We can totally watch something else if you’re not feeling Law & Order, I think I saw Chopped on the Food Network, or Jurassic Park is halfway through…” She trailed off.

Nathan shoved his hands in his pockets, turning the ring box over and over. He bit his lip. “You know how much you mean to me, right?” Jordan nodded slowly. “When I met you, I wasn’t looking for anything. I had just had my heart broken by someone who I thought would be my forever, but then you came into my life and suddenly...suddenly, it all made sense. I thought I knew love, I thought I knew what it was to be in love, but I didn’t, really. Not until you. You bring me down to earth, Jordan, when I’m too far in my head. I know you’re on my team even when we’re losing, even when it seems like nothing in my life is going right I know you’ll always be there to pick me up when I fall. And I don’t ever want to take that for granted. You challenge me in the best way, you always push me to be a better partner, a better teammate, and a better man. I wouldn’t be where I am today if it weren’t for you.” Jordan was tearing up, starting to figure out where his whole speech was going and hoping beyond hope that she was right.

“I know I’m not always physically here, but I promise to always be there for you, Jordan. I’ll hold you when you’re crying, I’ll buy your favorite chips when we’re out, I’ll pay the utility bills because I know you’re terrible with remembering dates. It was eight months in when I realized you were the one.” Nathan bent down on one knee. One of Jordan’s hands was over her mouth, the remote having long since been abandoned on the couch. “I can’t wait to see where we go, Jordan. I can’t wait to get a nice house with a big backyard, go down to the animal shelter saying we’re only going to adopt one dog but come back with three. I can’t wait for the day you tell me you’re pregnant, and we get to hold our child for the first time and I get to see you be a mother. I can’t wait for us to start our lives together. I can’t wait for you to be Jordan MacKinnon.” He opened up the ring box. “Will you marry me?”

Jordan fell on her knees, hands on both sides of Nathan’s face. “Yes.”

#hockey imagine #hockey smut #nhl imagine #nhl smut #nathan mackinnon #hockey #hockey imagines #hockey writing #nhl #nhl imagines #nhl writing

231 notes · View notes

hockeylvr59 · 4 years

Text

It Started with a DM || Jake Debrusk

Requested: [ ] yes [x] no

Authors Note: Just another little something that demanded to be written. I was honestly debating on whether or not to write it and then JD went live today and obviously it was a sign.

Warnings: features quarantine as a setting, some cursing.

Word Count: 3,828

~~~~~~~~~

Being quarantined alone was well, to put it simply, lonely. As a freelance photographer, you were for the most part out of work. You didn’t have a significant other to keep you company, there wasn’t space at your parents’ for you to go home, and your apartment didn’t allow pets. On top of all of that, sports were canceled. Specifically hockey.

The combination of all of this left an empty hole in your heart and lots of time on your hands. Missing hockey was the whole reason you started watching twitch streams. If you couldn’t have hockey at least you could have hockey players playing video games. You’d started with Zach Hyman and Mitch Marner because Toronto was on a shortlist of teams you were fairly indifferent about. But after a week or so you found yourself watching David Pastrnak because he was on almost daily around dinnertime and it gave you something to listen to while you cooked. Watching Pasta’s streams had led to your introduction to Jake Debrusk and it was silly how the sound of his voice and his laugh brought a smile to your face. It was even sillier because you were absolutely not a Boston fan. Especially not after they knocked your Hurricanes out of the playoffs last season.

Still, each time that your phone received a notification that Jake had come online you immediately stopped whatever you were doing to watch. You weren’t part of the group that regularly played with him and Pasta, nor did you even really participate in the chats, you just watched. And for a couple hours each time, you felt a little less alone. For weeks this continued, with you only popping in to chat to wish Jake’s sister a happy birthday when he let her take over his stream for a little bit. To be honest you were just grateful for something to do. Never did you expect to log on one day to find a whisper sitting in your inbox.

Jdebrusk: Hey. Saw you’ve watched quite a few of my streams. Just wanted to reach out and say thanks.

You weren’t shocked by the fact that he could see a list of viewers, you kind of expected that. What shocked you was the fact that he actually cared enough to reach out to some stranger who he had never actually interacted with before. You weren’t sure what had pushed you to respond, maybe it was the Southern friendliness or maybe it was something else but after typing and deleting a response multiple times you finally pressed send and then immediately closed your browser in a failed attempt to not freak out.

Yourusername: Pretty sure I should be thanking you for sharing your time with us and making things a little easier.

____

With no one you followed coming online to stream for a few days, you didn’t even check the site to see if Jake had responded. But when you next logged on and saw a message notification once again you found yourself getting nervous for no reason as you opened it.

Jdebrusk: Well you’re welcome. Feel free to join in the chat anytime. Streaming has helped keep my family from driving me insane.

Yourusername: I’m more of a lurker. It’s just easier. And family can be a lot but be grateful you aren’t just staring at 4 walls every day.

Stepping away from your computer you grabbed your camera and attempted to go for a walk to take some aesthetic shots. As you slipped your memory card into the computer a while later, you noticed another notification.

Jdebrusk: Fair enough. You quarantining alone?

Yourusername: yep. But I guess it could be worse. I could live where it’s snowing in May.

Jdebrusk: Can I ask where you’re at?

For a split second you debated giving up this information but it didn’t seem like giving away your state could hurt.

Yourusername: North Carolina.

Jdebrusk: Nice! Cool state. Been there a few times.

Yourusername: I’m aware. No need to rub in sweeping my team, Debrusk.

Jdebrusk: And she’s got a sense of humor ladies and gentlemen. Well, or he...I guess I don’t even know that. AWKWARD.

Yourusername: She works.

Jdebrusk: Cool cool. So a hurricanes fan huh?

Yourusername: Yeah. My family would probably disown me if they knew I was talking to a Bruin.

Jdebrusk: Yowza.

Yourusername: So if anyone asks I’m only here for Rocky appearances. ;)

Jdebrusk: She’s only here for my cat. Got it.

You couldn’t explain why talking with Jake felt so easy but it did. When he came on to stream next you chirped him through whispers the entire time and seeing his reaction in real-time as he read them had you giggling uncontrollably. By the time he got off, you were just waiting for his comments to come streaming your way. Instead of some long-winded rant brushing off all your jabs you just got a single comment in response.

Jdebrusk: It’s not fair that you can chirp me and I don’t know anything about you.

Yourusername: What do you want to know?

Jdebrusk: I mean your name would be a good start. Age might also be important...you’re not like 12 right?

Yourusername: Would I be quarantining alone if I was 12? I’m 24. Y/N.

Jdebrusk: right. Right. Y/N from Carolina. Who likes cats. Got it. Are you a student or…?

Yourusername: Freelance Photographer.

Jdebrusk: Alright. Nice. Do you do like weddings or nature stuff or what?

Yourusername: A little bit of everything. @wildflowerphotography is my company name if you want to go on insta and see some of my work.

No reply followed and you tried not to dwell on it. Instead you poured a glass of wine, lit a few candles, and settled into your bathtub, trying to relax for bed. Still nagging thoughts lingered in your brain. Was sharing your company page too much? He probably wasn’t asking for you to promote yourself, he was just being polite right? Though you hated yourself for letting it bother you, you were the type of person who overthought everything...which thinking about it was probably why you were still single.

Your anxious thoughts lingered and you tossed and turned all night before finally pulling yourself out of bed the next morning. It was only as you dug through your company dms, responding to a few potential clients that wanted you to take socially distant photos for them that you stumbled upon a familiar username.

Jdebrusk: You took all of those? Holy shit that’s talent.

The timestamp showed the message was sent only twenty minutes after you gave him the username and you sighed to yourself before chuckling at the fact that Jake was too lazy to switch back to twitch to respond.

Wildflowerphotography: Thanks. I’m really proud of them all.

It was still early in the morning so there was no way he was awake with the two hour time difference so after making yourself some breakfast you took another short walk, trying anything to get your mind off of the loneliness that felt worse today than most days. Your mood had definitely been a rollercoaster recently with higher peaks and lower lows than normal. It was something you were trying to manage the best you could but sometimes it was just hard.

With the rest of your afternoon spent binging a random tv show you didn’t even look at your phone until dinner time, but waiting for you was another dm from the Canadian hockey player.

Jdebrusk: You should be.

Jdebrusk: So listen...this is probably weird but can I get your number so I can stop wading through a bunch of dms and whispers I don’t care about and just talk to you?

It was a fair question but to be blunt, today was probably the worst day for him to ask because your anxiety-riddled brain kept wanting to know why he even cared about talking to you. You didn’t know what he was looking for from all of this but your mind immediately assumed the worst. So instead of just being open with him, you blew him off, completely ignoring his message. And when he logged onto twitch next, though you wanted to watch, you forced yourself to avoid that as well.

Three days passed before another message appeared.

Jdebrusk: You okay? You didn’t watch the last stream. I’m sorry if I fucked up. I’ll back off if you want...I just want to know that you’re okay.

The concern he was expressing was honestly something you didn’t expect and you found yourself crying as you read it over and over. Jake was nothing but a joyous person and the last thing you wanted was to bring him down with the mess of your own mind.

Wildflowerphotography: you didn’t fuck up. I just...this is all on me okay.

With your phone left open to your message string with him you watched as little dots appeared before vanishing repeatedly. Eventually a new message appeared simply containing a string of numbers composing a phone number. Jake was putting the ball in your court and a few minutes later the part of you that was aching to hear his voice won the mental war and you found yourself dialing the number.

“Y/N?” Jake questioned the second he answered and a shaky sob slipped from your throat at the sound of him speaking your name for the first time. “What’s going on?” He murmured and by his tone you could tell he was both confused and concerned. You wanted to speak, wanted to pretend everything was fine but you’d already gone over the edge and it was too late for that now. Another sob spilled through your body and you faintly heard Jake mumble a curse. “Do you want me to just talk to you? I’ll just keep talking okay and you can hang up if you want.” He offered. And talk he did, you weren’t even sure what he was telling you, you were more focused on the grounding sound of his voice itself rather than the content of the words he was speaking. Eventually your breathing steadied out and the elephant sitting on your chest lessened allowing you to murmur his name.

The second he heard your voice he paused mid-story.

“Thank you.” You whispered into the phone.

“Are you okay?” He inquired, his voice tentative like he was worried anything he said would push you back over the edge.

“Better.” You admitted. “Not great but better.”

“I’ll take better.” He insisted. “It’s nice to actually hear your voice.” He added, causing your cheeks to flame up unconsciously. You opened your mouth to apologize again for your breakdown only to be stopped as he insisted you not do so. “But really...are you okay?” He repeated his question and you sighed.

“It’s been a rough few days mentally for me.” You admitted. “But I will be okay.” You added.

“Okay enough to stop ignoring me?” He teased and when you let out another shaky breath he backtracked. “It’s okay, I get it. I was just worried. You don’t have to talk to me ever again if you don’t want to.”

“I do want to.” You breathed. “Talk to you that is.” As if he sensed you had more to say, Jake remained quiet, only the sound of his breathing coming through the phone.

“I guess...you should probably know that I tend to overthink things. I want to talk to you. Hearing your voice makes my entire day. I just...I guess I’m just confused on why you want to talk to me. What your intentions are, etc. And you...you don’t have to answer that just...that’s where my head is at.”

Jake was silent for a minute before his voice reached back through the phone.

“I’ll be honest, I don’t know what this is either. But I’m intrigued by you and I guess my intention is just to get to know you better if you’ll let me.” Jake’s honesty was refreshing and you nodded even though he couldn’t see you. “And if I can make your day just by talking...well that’s a pretty sweet bonus.”

______

Quarantine continued to drag on, paused only by some carefully planned photo sessions with your distance lenses getting extra abuse. You continued talking to Jake, mostly through text but with the occasional phone call. He’d whine about the crap he was getting from his sister when he’d disappear to talk to you but he’d insist that it was worth it in the next breath. Between the streams, the phone calls, the texts and the memes he’d send you, suddenly you felt a lot less alone, at least emotionally.

A month since your first phone call had passed before Jake sent you a text that made your heart stop.

JD: So how come I send you pictures all the time and yet I still don’t know what you look like?

For weeks he had been sending you photos of him snuggling with Rocky or hanging with Jordyn and there had even been a shirtless workout pic or two which had left you debating whether a cold shower was appropriate. At the same time, you hadn’t worked up the courage to send him any photos in return other than ones you took of nature on your walks or snippets from photoshoots you’d done. Trying to downplay it all you sent back a teasing response.

YN: What can I say I’m a behind the lens person.

JD: Y/N...c’mon I just wanna see how beautiful you are.

Leaving him on ‘read’ you sighed and bit your lip not sure how to respond. You were afraid if he knew what you looked like that he wouldn’t want to talk to you anymore and you weren’t sure what you’d do if you lost something that had sort of become a saving grace in this crazy time.

JD: Is this one of those insecurity things? Is that why I haven’t seen you yet?

It was starting to amaze you how well Jake could read you. It had been a long time since anyone was able to see through the walls you put up, see behind the camera that you hid behind, but it had only been a month or so and already Jake was starting to read the silences between the words.

JD: Do you want me to get Jordyn to pump you up? A picture isn’t going to change what I think of you…

YN: You don’t know that.

JD: C’mon YN give me a little more credit than that. You know I’m not that shallow. I like you okay. I like the woman that chirps me. I like the woman that listens to me and always knows what to say. I like the woman that sees me as Jake and not Boston Bruin Jake Debrusk. And since none of that is based on your physical appearance I’m going to like you no matter what you look like.

YN: Promise?

JD: Yeah Y/N, I promise.

Scrolling through your camera roll you attempted to decide on which of the few photos of yourself made you look at least somewhat pretty before biting the bullet and attaching it to the text conversation. The moment you hit send you winced and your anxiety didn’t ebb until your phone rang in your hand.

“You’re stunning.” Jake’s voice breathed lowly the second the line connected. “Just as beautiful outside as you are inside which I wasn’t sure was even possible.” By now you knew when Jake was trying to play something up versus when he was being genuine and his voice now was 100% the latter. But taking compliments about your body was never something you’d been good at so you didn’t know what to say in response.

“I hope you believe me.” He added. “I knew you wouldn’t believe a text even if I sent it 100 times so I hope you can believe me, hearing me say it.”

“I...thanks Jake.” You finally mumbled. You did believe that he was being honest, he had no reason not to be with you living thousands of miles apart, but at the same time, you still felt uneasy about it for reasons you’d never fully be able to explain.

___

Tearing down the last barrier of anonymity seemed to open up a new world between you and Jake. If it was even possible you communicated more frequently, adding facetime calls to your usual methods. Seeing the way he looked at you while you talked sent heat flooding through your body and you quickly came to the realization that you were falling hard for him.

That knowledge was terrifying and once again you wanted to pull away, protect yourself from getting hurt. But then Jordyn stole her brother’s phone and called you, raving about how when all of this was over you had to agree to meet her brother in person because she had never seen him like this over anyone. Talking with Jordyn reminded you that Jake didn’t have to go to all of this work, didn’t have to deal with your crazy emotions if he didn’t think you were worth the time and effort. It may be a pandemic but surely there were women in Edmonton willing to break social distancing rules if it meant scoring someone as wonderful as Jake. But yet each and every night he was on the phone with you, taking the time to get to know all of the things that make you tick, your likes and dislikes, your hopes and dreams.

And it wasn’t just Jordyn that knew about you. You’d been on the phone with Jake when both of his parents came outside and when he’d asked them to come back in a minute because he was talking to you, they just called out your name in greeting and waved.

“Your parents know my name?” You’d asked and Jake ducked his head shyly before replying. “I mean yeah…” He stated. “My mom can’t wait to meet you.” You were sure from Jake’s point of view that it was probably comical how wide your eyes went at his statement.

“Jake what...what is this...are we just friends or…?” It wasn’t a question that you ever anticipated asking but it was out there now. From the other side of the screen, you watched Jake adjust his ball cap over his overly long hair.

“Fuck...Y/N…” Jake started and you opened your mouth to assure him that friends was fine, that it was what you wanted too because if you didn’t put your heart out there than you couldn’t get hurt. Before you could speak though Jake continued. “No...we’re not just friends. I think you know that as well as I do.” He admitted. “I don’t know exactly what we are. I...I was hoping to meet you in person when I asked if you wanted to be my girlfriend. I know...I know that none of this is ideal because even when this is over there’s going to be the whole long-distance thing but...I can’t deny that I have feelings for you y/n. I don’t want to deny it.”

“I don’t want to deny it either.” You said softly, fingers tucking a strand of hair behind your ear. “I mean...if you’re willing to put up with my emotional baggage…” You shrugged.

“You have feelings for me too?” Jake questioned, his normal confidence suppressed. “I have no problems supporting you through dealing with your baggage if you’re willing to do the same with mine. I know I’ve fucked up in the past as a boyfriend and I don’t want to do that to you.”

“I think I’m kinda sorta falling for you.” You stated anxiously, unable to meet Jake’s gaze through the screen until he breathed your name.

“So can we agree we’re something more than friends and that we’ll figure out the details as part of returning to the new normal?”

“Yeah...we can agree to that.” You nodded.

_______

The new normal had finally arrived and that meant that you were going to see Jake in person for the first time. The two of you had been “more than friends” for what felt like forever now but had realistically been a few months but with each passing day you knew you wanted more. You still didn’t know how it would all work with him playing in Boston and you owning a company in North Carolina but you were ready to figure it out together if it meant that you could finally have him for real.

Jake’s plane was scheduled to land in ten minutes and you were running so far behind. Your senior picture photoshoot had run over and traffic was a mess. You’d texted Jake apologizing but upon getting your text he’d quickly waved your concerns off declaring that he’d just get an uber and meet you at your apartment. It would be a better first meeting anyway because you wouldn’t be time-restricted by parking or pick up zone rules.

When you finally pulled into your parking lot you checked your phone to see if Jake had arrived yet. It wasn’t until you reached the front steps of your building that you noticed someone sitting there, bags beside them. He looked up at the same time that your brain processed that it was him and he was really there and tears instantly prickled in your eyes. As you rushed to close the distance, Jake stood to catch you as you threw yourself at him.

No words needed to be said as you tugged his mouth down to your own, kissing him for the very first time. It was nothing like you had expected but at the same time it was everything and at that moment you knew that this was it, you were in love. It had been such a long wait, but the feeling of his arms wrapped around you, his lips against yours was well worth it. It was cheesy but you knew that the physical chemistry was only this strong because you already knew each other inside and out and now that he was here, now that he was finally yours, things could only get better.

Being with Jake despite the distance wouldn’t be easy but now that you knew the way he felt, the way he tasted, the scent of his cologne, you were willing to do whatever it took to make it. If you could fall in love during a global pandemic, you could do anything and it would make a great story to tell the grandkids one day about how they only came to exist because of a direct message on a streaming site while the world was quarantined.

#jake debrusk #jake debrusk imagine #boston bruins #boston bruins imagine #nhl imagine #nhl imagines #hockey imagine #hockey imagines #bbruins #030 #tw: quarantine

311 notes · View notes

shinymooncolor · 4 years

Text

Hi lovelies.

Hockey is back. ❤️

And so here is another sweater weather chat. It’s split in two. So stay tuned 😘

All the love in the world for @lumosinlove and each and everyone of you! This fandom is truly a remarkable place 💖

Sweater weather chat #12 part 1

Dumo loses a bet. Sunny has a lot of stories. Sergei once had blue hair. He also fought a German suit. Snuck a few of my nhl heroes in here. See if you can spot them. Nado is dying from anticipation. Blizzard wants pictures. Olli is trying to stay on topic. Alice has questions. Sirius has no comments. We jinx the cup a tiny bit. I took some liberties with rosters and timelines for international hockey. No people were harmed in the making of this chat. Danes really are pesky meatball thieves. I love germans (just needed a bad guy).

Friday 7.22 pm

Prongstar: hey dumo. Not backing down from the bet?

Dumodad: no. I honor my word. You guys won. What do you want? Suicides, my car, my wife’s cooking?

Talkiewalkie: damn dumo. Pimping out Celeste

Dumodad: like the lot of you aren’t half in love with her or Anya. You’re not subtle

Krisvolley: I’d marry both with no hesitation. Between Anya’s piroggi and Celeste’s brownies, I’d be set for life.

Nadotheman:fuck you’d have to fight me and Kuny both for that krissy.

Russiangod: I already son of Anya. I take sergei’s place

Sergei_81: am not even 40 yet. Also you all boys. Can’t handle women. They need men.

Logantremblayzzz: it’s weird guys. Don’t crush on your team mates wives 😳 also Sergei you are 40....

Sergei_81: 🤬

Blizzard: don’t make sexy eyes at your goalie when he’s stretching. 🤪

Timmyforrealz: burnnnnnn hahahahahaha

Prongstar: potential adultery, sergei’s age and Logan’s inappropriate staring aside. Dumo lost our bet. And I’ve made a decision. Drumroll please 🙈🙈🙈🙈

Kuny: drdrdrdrdrrrrrrrrrrrr

Prongstar: thanks Kuny babe 😘

Prongstar: dumo! I want the truth about Prague. In this chat. In writing. You have 1 hr.

Dumodad: no.

Sergei_81: no

Sunnysideup: YES

Sunnysideup: I’ll tell them if you don’t 😜

Dumodad: it’s all your fault. Stupid Swede.

Sunnysideup: no one made you bet me. We won, fair and square!

Sunnysideup: the year was 2006. Turin, Italy. Winter Olympics. A brash Russian and a confident Canadian decided to make a bet with a lovely, young and innocent Swede.

Bradygunzz: innocent? 😂😂😂😂

Walkietalkie: wait weren’t you in Sweden then? Or am I missing something? How’d you even know these guys?

Kaneyoudigit: I thought this story was about Prague?

DumoDad: it is. It just started 9 years earlier.

Sunnysideup: some of my national teammates played with Sergei in the khl during the nhl ‘05 lockout. Dumo was signed to do some press stuff with us at olympics. Something about cross team friendships.

Logantremblayzzz: Wow you guys are ancient

DumoDAD: we were top 3 seeded teams and they picked the Russian with good English, a Swede who’s not scary and me. It was fun. And it turned into a bit of drinking after Sergei and sunny started arguing about the quality of vodka.

Krisvolley: you shouldn’t drink at the Olympics 😂

Sunnysideup: anyways. We bet and of course all three were convinced our respective teams would win. Of course, we all know who emerged victorious 😜

Sergei_81: you had Swedish murder twins not fair. Baby sedin slash me on purpose

DumoDad: he didn’t. That was a legit hit you big baby. Also we did better than the US.

Sergei_81: was not clean.

Sunnysideup: we’re not having this discussion again. You both lost. It was a clean hit. Also, the fun part was the bet itself.

Nadotheman: just fucking tell us. The suspense is killing me.😳

Siriusly: whAt did you do??????? Dumo!!!!

Sunnysideup: well. they got kitted out in lovely blue and yellow team colors. Hank’s idea - some fans gave him loads of body paint. Hahahaha also Sergei was sporting a very impressive buzz cut then. It was a thing. So we’ve got these two idiots painted in blue and yellow including sergei’s head. Unfortunately the dye wasn’t meant for hair. So he had blue hair for two weeks after. Anya is still mad at me about that one 😜

Nadotheman: so you just painted them blue and yellow? That’s like so anti climactic.

Logantremblayzzz: oh he’s not done 😂

CarbO’Hara: Logan tell usssss

Siriusly: how come you told him and not me? I feel betrayed.

DumoDad: I didn’t. Celeste did. Traitor.

Logantremblayzzz: I was sad and homesick and she wanted to cheer me up. 😍

Ollibear: I feel like we’re getting off topic

Logantremblayzzz: wait didn’t you then make them steal the Olympic flags from the hotel you were celebrating at and exchange them with Swedish ones?

Sunnysideup: indeed, Logan, and that went smoothly. So it turned into a thing that every time we compete all three in an international thing. We make the losers swap flags. It’s cute.

Prongstar: what about Prague then? That wasn’t until 2015? Was it?

DumoDad: and we all remember who won.

RussianGod: is also where butt slap come from then? Pre game one?

Sergei_81: not our fault. U had Crosby make heart eyes at zhenya. And no Kuny, not from there...

DumoDad: you’re never letting that one go? Hahaha poor Sergei.

Dumodad: also. the butt slap is an Old tradition. We had a playoff round ages back and I slapped him. We won. We’ve done it since. Works doesn’t it?

Sergei_81: you said “let’s go get them”. Still do. It works. All magic slap. I thought you say “ let’s go eat them” Still works hehe

Ollibear: again, we’re veering off topic, dumo.

Sunnysideup: well. Prague. I know Canada won. Golden boy got golden goal. Blah blah blah. But for some reason we had another bet 😜. Dumo cooked up a revenge for me and Sergei. But it was before the final. We were just heading into the second round and somehow ended up in another vodka related discussion (we all know Swedish vodka is superior).

RussianGod: Swedish vodka is water. Russia best.

Sergei_81: was stupid idea. But vodka make us brave.

DumoDad: I never told you to start climbing that flag pole. You decided that on your own. I just told you to get me the flag.

Sunnysideup: he did climb that pole like a fireman though.

Timmyforrealz: hold up a sec. you’re telling me sergei “i never smile and my looks can literally make opponents wet themselves” Ivanov climbed a flag pole while drunk and it looked good?

Sunnysideup: he was wearing a “I love Canada” onesie and crocs. Which was about 6 sizes too little. We both were.

Newt-leo: we’re going to need pics of this.

Sunnysideup: well. The onesies were one thing. Still not sure how we got corralled into it. But anyways as I remember Sergei did successfully steal the flag from the hotel and started on the cars outside. We just didn’t know it was some group of fancy politicians also in town to watch hockey.

Dumodad: you Europeans and your weird politicians. Apparently the little politic guy didn’t like Russians. So his body guard tackled Sergei down. Sergei fought back. And somehow I ended up in the tangle of suits and Canada onesies.

Sergei_81: he blame Russia for stupid shit I might get mad. Police came and put us in little jail in hotel. Sunny no where

Sunnysideup: I went to get help. I didn’t know you were going to fight the bodyguards of the German minister of trade now did I?

Dumodad: was it German? I thought it was Spain. The flag was yellow and red.

Krisvolley: wait so. In the middle of an Olympic tournament, the three of you (all dads and husbands by 2015) gets shitfaced on vodka, go on a flag stealing rampage through Prague and get tackled by German secret services? 😫

Sergei_81: not Prague just one hotel. And car park. And house opposite.

Siriusly: how did you get out?

Sunnysideup: I bailed them out. Or. I managed to explain that they’re big hockey stars and got backstrom and oveckin to come and support me.. Ovi just giggled. Backy just stared until they agreed. He’s scary. Sergei was cursing a lot. Dumo was crying at one point... hehehehe he . I think dumo was nearly benched no after?

DumoDad: somehow the team found out and little mr captain was not happy?. Also at this point sergei was mostly naked as the onesie gave up halfway through wrestling Germans. We got a big fine, had to formally issue an apology to the German delegates and the hotel. And Sergei had to pay another fine for embarrassing Russia 😂

Sergei_81: they happy I hit German but I couldn’t say hehe. Also lost a croc never found it. Walk home in one shoe 👟

Siriusly: I can’t believe you almost caused an international incident because you were arguing about vodka.

Sunnysideup: you should see us scandies when it comes to the origins of meatballs. Pesky Danes trying to steal credit. 🤬

Blizzard: and you’re all still talking about me and the fountain. Also. We were on the lions team then? How come you’ve managed to keep this quiet? Also. Where are the pictures of this? I have so many questions.

DumoDad: Sunny has pictures. And so does the Czech police. And maybe the hotel. And it stays that way.

Blizzard: sunny. I want pictures.

Sunnysideup: lord Stanley will decide ❤️ also pretty sure both ovi and backy has some. For revenge purposes.

Siriusly: DONT jinx.

Prongstar: you broke cap.

—-

Tuesday 2.54 pm

Alice: Sirius.

Alice: Sirius pick up your phone.

Alice: Sirius Orion Black. Please tell me that a picture of you and Remus in a closet in Ikea’s kids department is fake.

Sirius: I was in hiding. Re helped me. We didn’t do anything

Alice: your shirt is on backwards.

Sirius: it’s a fashion statement.

Alice: and the shark?

Sirius: no comment

——

Part two is coming up.

——

#lumosinlove #lumosinlove ocs #sweaterweather #sweaterweatherchats #sweater weather #sweaterweatheroc’s #sweaterweatherchatsnr12 #part 1

132 notes · View notes

everygame · 4 years

Photo

Blaseball (Web)

Developed/Published by: The Game Band Released: 20/07/2020 Completed: n/a Completion: Maxed everything in the shop. Trophies / Achievements: n/a

Alright, if you’re here there are two options:

You already love Blaseball and just like reading about it.

You have no idea why people are obsessed with Blaseball.

Now, in the grand tradition of my article on Cinco Paus, because it turns out this tumblr shouldn’t just be about me finishing games and then complaining about how they failed me, I present:

Blaseball or: How You Learn To Stop Hating The Fact The Canadian Team Is Called The “Moist Talkers” And Love A Game That’s Usually Sold As A Communal Storytelling Experience (As Wank As That Sounds)

There’s a challenge here. Blaseball, once you’re in, makes you want to immediately gush about the cool things that are happening in the game, to tell the story of it, but unless you’re definitely tuned in to it, I think it can be somewhat alienating. Like here’s what I want to say, right?

That after the Raptors went out of the NBA playoffs I stopped caring (this is not entirely true; I stopped after the Nuggets put the Clippers out because spite/the lols) and was kind of looking for something else to obsess over in a not-too-active fashion. You see, what kind of got me into sports, as much as learning to enjoy the actual games, is the… theorycrafting? I might be using the term wrong. But it’s looking at the schedules and thinking, “ok, if they beat them, then they’re here, but if they get beat, then they might struggle there” or “trading X player for Y would be the best move… will we do it? Can we do it?”

It’s part of the reason why this year’s NBA bubble was such a success--they created a play-in situation for a group of teams on the edge of the playoffs, and then even though I don’t really care about any of the teams involved, there was so much drama, and so many ways for things to go, that you could spend ages just thinking about how X thing had to happen for Y thing to occur and then get excited if it happened or have to recalculate.

So: Blaseball. It is, ostensibly, a game in which you gamble on baseball blaseball games. I mean for the most part, I will be clear with you, that is it. It’s a game where you make bets and use your winnings to increase your ability to make bigger bets. It’s not even a particularly effortful example of this. There’s no clicker mechanics outside of one involving peanuts that turned out not to do anything, and all games are pretty clearly given odds so you can mostly fire and forget.

However. The thing you have to do with blaseball is actually the thing I have to do with a sport: pick a team and care. It’s not a baseball blaseball betting sim. It’s a sport fan experience. I say experience, not sim, because you will not be pretending to be a fan. You will be a fan, and if it’s for a made up team, who cares?

I think for a lot of people (the kind of nerds who play this kind of game) that’s a novel experience and I think that for people like me (who like sports) there’s an immediate sense that people are being ironic. You know; “blaseball” doesn’t feel that far from saying “sportsball” and I can’t guarantee that a lot of folk aren’t enjoying it… wrong. But then I also feel like people enjoy actual sports wrong so fuck it (I’d just warn you that if you go hard and join the discord--which is kind of necessary--you might find some people… annoying).

So you might think I’ve just described a few things at cross purposes there: I said you’ve got to be a fan for this to work, but then I also said that the NBA bubble succeeded because it made me care about teams I didn’t care about because of theorycrafting. Well, not exactly: what I’m saying is that in this game you’re going to need one (the ability to be a fan) to make the other pop.

I’m lucky here, because I’m Canadian (among other things) immediately and violently defending the one Canadian team in the thing is instant. I don’t need to put any effort in. I’ve never been the kind of guy who could just pick any team because I like the look of them, maybe you are or maybe you’re actually going to have to live in Charleston to want to support the Shoe Thieves, but let me say: if you are not American, the only correct decision is to support the Moist Talkers despite their terrible name (that I have come to terms with.)

Anyway, now I’ve given you the background, let me explain what happened last season to my team.

During a game, an legendary undead pitcher swapped places with our worst pitcher before, in another game, swapping places with a dog who used to be owned by one of our previous players. Then our fans started a campaign to make sure our best pitcher, who was trapped inside a peanut, would be idolised enough that they’d meet the “Monitor” a huge squid god, which most people assumed would kill them. At the end of the season, the squid cracked open our pitcher’s peanut shell, chose not to eat them and as a result saved them from the end of the post-season, where a vengeful peanut god turned all the players trapped in peanut shells (or, uh, who had Peanut in their name) into an evil team who then played the season champions in a RPG battle-style blaseball game (with hit points and everything) and cursed them. Then, at the end of the season blessings were handed out and thanks to having our best pitcher and receiving and absurd four blessings (including one which increased the size of one of our batters and one that gave a player a fishing net) we were suddenly one of the best teams in the league… with the danger that we might actually win the next season and be forced to fight the peanut god.

Now, as I said above, there’s a fair chance that seemed like absolute drivel to you. And even if it is exciting, I think the most important thing to do is to scroll back up and look at the screenshots and remember that the game doesn’t really have any graphics. Blaseball games occur in a tiny window with a diamond graphic, and so it’s a bit like watching just the corner of the screen in a baseball game. It is not particularly entertaining to watch games (although you can learn how to be captivated by it anyway). The game also, despite not being anything, can take up a massive amount of mental real-estate because you’re going to be checking in on it every hour of almost every day even though all you’re doing each time is clicking ten things and checking scores. It’s probably much too much, and it gets worse when you start to engage with the discord, because as a fan you really have to co-ordinate how to vote for blessings to make sure your team is always improving and you’re raising money for a good reason.

Alright, by this point it’s almost sounding like I’m trying to talk you out of getting into it, and I *do* recommend you don’t sicken yourself of it too quickly by checking it all the time. But most importantly I sort of glossed over what the genius aspect of Blaseball is: that being a fan has a weird, roundabout effect on how well your team does, and that reflects the fact that being a sports fan is not passive. When you watch a game you’re somehow putting everything into it even though you can’t affect anything. It’s why you spend all that time theorycrafting. Here, you, as a group, pool the votes you’ve spent all week raising money for and try and make your team what you want it to be. You don’t get to change what’s going on in a game like it’s Twitch Plays Baseball, or something. That wouldn’t be a fan. In Blaseball, instead, what you do is you try and make your dreams real via collective wishing. It’s only the slightest step up from just being a fan of a real team, and it gets to the heart of the communal experience of being a fan.

If I was the NBA, the NFL or very specifically the MLB I would 100% be looking at Blaseball and how to learn from it. I think there’s a crass version of it--imagine fans of teams in the NBA bubble could have voted to like… make sure their team got the nicest hotel rooms, or nicer meals or something--but giving fans a way to boost their team (outside of the brute force of their psychic power in a home game) by, I don’t know, checking into an app or otherwise engaging is a truly interesting (and honestly kind of disturbing, for people who hate the implications for tracking) concept.

Anyway. Try Blaseball! Pick a team, bet based on the odds, invest in snake oil, idol the best pitcher every game you check, but don’t check too much (and invest in the pitcher pendants, once you’re maxed buy votes and join the discord to find out what your team is voting for/get involved in the conversation. That’s it. But it’s pretty cool.

Will I ever play it again? I mean, it still feels a bit rich to say I’m playing this but I’m invested at least until the Moist Talkers win a season. Which could be this season. I’m really interested to see how much The Game Band expand this, too--I can think of a lot of ways that fans/players can be ever more empowered, but I’m interested in how carefully they could destroy the balance, and so many ways this could simply be more entertaining to look at and engage with (I mean the fact that you have to go to external sites for things like future schedules is kind of wack imho.)

Final Thought: There’s a ton of other stuff people like about this game--making up stories about the players, who they are, drawing them--and the nice thing is I don’t give a flying fuck about any of that and I don’t really have to. You can completely ignore the wiki’s fanfiction if you like and just deal with the reality of the game and how you personally react to it. Or you can really get into it and care about it way more than what’s actually happening on the field. I don’t care, I’m not your dad.

Even if I did just spend a long time shouting at you about sports.

#video games #web #webgames #blaseball #the game band #review #games #gaming #text #txt

15 notes · View notes

imaginingsoftly · 4 years

Text

It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time Pt. 10 - Morgan Rielly

Type: roommates to lovers, Y/N insert shorts

Requested: No

Warnings: arguing, minor meltdown, swearing, angst

(Y/N = Your name, time jumps marked with a line)

A/N: Fair warning, this gets angsty for a hot second. Also, there’s a little bit of Greek in here, but nothing that you’ll need to translate. It’s a couple of food things, a phrase, and some names, all of which are explained in-text. I have some Greek in my family, so thankfully I was able to draw off of personal experience for this.

Another win, another party. The boys were on a win streak, and had decided to celebrate every win like it could be their last. Kat and Andrei were drunkenly dancing on each other, and Y/N smiled at the way Andrei stared down at Kat. They really did make for a cute couple. Dougie was dancing next to them, some random brunette shimmying awkwardly in front of him. Morgan was standing at the bar joking with Tom, the bartender. Tom was probably talking about the game, she knew he watched all of them in between pouring drinks. “So is everything still good with you and Mo, Y/N?” She looked back at the boys sitting across from her, and smiled.

“Never better. It just works, you know?” Marty and Brock rolled their eyes, and Marty reached out to punch Y/N’s shoulder. “Stop being so corny and tell us if he does anything embarrassing,” Brock yelled over the music, “You’re our inside source for all things Mo, Y/N, so talk!” Y/N laughed, and Morgan grinned as he slid in next to her, sliding a beer over to both of the boys sitting across from him. “Go away, Mo, we were interrogating Y/N.” Marty saluted Y/N with his bottle as he spoke, and she lifted hers back at him.

Morgan slid an arm around her shoulders. “He snores,” Y/N said quickly, “and he’s a shit cook. I taught him how to flip a pancake.” Marty snorted as Morgan leaned back to look at her, betrayed, but Brock’s face made everyone laugh seconds later. “You don’t know how to flip a pancake either, Ginner, do you?” Brock’s ears turned red at her teasing, and Y/N and Marty high-fived.

The four settled into an easy conversation, most of it surrounding the various basic living skills the boys had never bothered to learn, and somehow Y/N found herself promising to teach Ginner and Marty some of her cooking secrets. The drinks flowed as much as the conversation, and Y/N found herself leaning more and more heavily into Morgan as the night wore on. She was blessed with a naturally high alcohol tolerance, but she still didn’t drink often and the guys had a foot and hundred pounds on her. Andrei and Kat finally made their way over to everyone, and Kat pulled Y/N away for a “bathroom visit.”

“So, Y/N spill!” Kat reapplied her lipstick in the semi-darkness of the bar’s bathroom while Y/N leaned on the edge of the sink. Actually, leaning on the sink was probably a bad idea. God knows what had been in it. “It’s been almost two months and you’ve given me nothing about your dating life.” Not that it was Y/N’s fault they hadn’t gotten together. Kat was the busy one, and Andrei took up almost all of her free time.

Now Y/N would ever say that out loud, but still. “It’s good. I mean honestly not that much has changed, except we swap spit sometimes.” Kat snorted out a laugh and mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like “and other bodily fluids.” Which, really, she wasn’t wrong. About half of the apartment had been christened thanks to Morgan’s sex drive, and Y/N found herself in much better shape than she had been before they started dating. “He’s been good for me, Kat. And for my anxiety. I’ve been falling asleep a lot easier, and I haven’t felt like chest pains were killing me in almost a month.” That was probably the most remarkable part of the entire thing; the anxiety and insomnia had been a normal part of Y/N’s life since she was in college, and suddenly a stable relationship and someone to really talk to was lessening her episodes. It had happened before, in the one other real relationship she’d had, but not to this extent.

Kat put her lipstick away, finally satisfied that it looked okay. “I’m happy for you, Y/N,” she said, touching Y/N’s hand. “He’s a good guy. You deserve someone like him.” The two smiled at each other, and Kat slung an arm over her friend’s shoulders. “Let’s go give those boys hell before they have to go back to taking life seriously, yeah?”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The week leading up to the playoffs was a lot. Morgan was filled with a sort of manic energy that was hard to be around sometimes, and Y/N could tell it was because of years of first-round disappointments. He was readying himself to be disappointed again. She kept him busy as much as possible, coming up with reasons to send him to the store or to clean things around the house, but even that was becoming a little tiresome. There was only so many times he could run the vacuum cleaner through the apartment before Mrs. Dagny downstairs complained.

They were eating dinner together three days before game one when Morgan stood suddenly. “I have something for you,” he announced, and Y/N was left to sit confusedly at the eating bar. He returned from his room holding something behind his back. “So I know you know about all the traditions in hockey, down to the smallest ones, and this year you’re a piece of one that means a lot to NHL families.” Morgan pulled a jacket from behind his back, and Y/N dropped her fork in surprise. WAG jackets were a big deal, and she hadn’t planned on getting one unless Morgan or one of the girls brought it up. No one had, and she’d just brushed it off. The jacket was beautiful, black and slightly worn, like someone had roughed it up a little bit to soften the denim. The alternate logo sat front and center, the hurricane warning flags spanning most of the back. Morgan’s number spread across the shoulders, and his name sat on the popped collar. She laughed at the Red Sox logo on one shoulder, and smiled softly at the Canadian leaf sitting on the other. Their two homes, combined. The only question was how he had arranged all of this.

Y/N met Morgan’s eyes to silently ask, and he grinned. “I asked Kat to set it up for you. I figured it’d be a fun surprise.” He held it out to her. “Try it on.” She stood hurriedly, and Morgan helped her slide the jacket over her shoulders. It fit perfectly, and Y/N silently thanked Kat for accommodating the wideness of her shoulders. “Perfect,” Morgan said, spinning her around. “My number looks good on you, sweetheart.” Y/N laughed. “Thank you,” she whispered. Morgan pulled Y/N into a hug and pressed a kiss to her forehead. “Thanks for sticking with me this whole season, Red Sox. I know it must’ve been hard sometimes.”

“Only sometimes,” she joked. They settled back into dinner, though Y/N left the jacket on. Everything felt too surreal to take it off. “So are you ready for game one? Boston was looking scary as the season ended.” It was like Morgan could never escape the Bruins; they had been the top team in the East for yet another year, and the Hurricanes were meeting them as the wildcard. Y/N could see the strain that was setting in, and the pressure Morgan was surely putting on himself.

Morgan sighed, looking at the wall in front of him. “In a way, I’m glad it’s Boston. It might be nice to exorcise those demons, you know?” Y/N nodded. “At the same time, it’s like really? Boston again?” He rubbed his face tiredly, and Y/N reached over to grab his plate. “C’mon,” she said, “we’re going to get a couple of small bowls of ice cream and watch some baseball. I’ll even turn on the Blue Jays game for you.” Morgan nodded. Y/N headed into the kitchen to take care of their bowls, and he dragged his feet over to the couch. Y/N stopped to watch him as he walked, noticing the exhaustion behind his steps. The last couple of weeks of the season had been tough on him, and it was showing. Their win streak in early March had been the only thing keeping them in the playoffs, and they’d exited the regular season barely limping into the wildcard. Losing Tuevo at the end of that win streak had shown exactly how flawed their forwards were. If there was any consolation, Boston was the same way.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To say the season ended badly would be an understatement. Game seven, and they didn’t have a chance from the start. Boston came out swinging, literally, scoring two goals and inciting a near-brawl in the first ten minutes of the game. The boys recovered, briefly, when Kase was ejected from the game for a bad hit on Sebastian, but Boston came back with a vengeance in the second. A final score of 7-3, and the boys were done and Boston was headed to Toronto. Morgan was red in the face when he came out of the locker room, having shouldered most of the blame for the way the back end played. The press was hard on him, especially since Toronto was moving on to the second round in the first year since he’d been traded, and Y/N could tell their questions had gotten to him.

He stormed past her in the hallway, and Y/N had trouble meeting Ky’s sympathetic face with a smile and a nod. “I’ll see you soon.” She handed Emmy back to Jaccob, and took off after Morgan. “Morgan,” she called, hurrying towards the parking lot, “Mo, hang on!” He didn’t even slow down, and she was almost surprised he waited for her to climb into the passenger's seat before he sped out of the lot. His face was harder than stone, and she watched his jaw muscles ripple as he ground his teeth. Morgan was driving faster than usual, slamming on the brakes a little harder than necessary. Y/N didn’t know what to say, so she sat in silence. He was never like this. A frown sure, being a little too hard on himself definitely, but never this angry. She only spoke when they turned onto the street their apartment was on. ��I know you don’t want to hear it right now, but I’m proud of you. It wasn’t the outcome I know you wanted, but you were good. The bounces didn’t go your way tonight.”

Morgan choked out a laugh as he pulled into the parking space next to her Jeep. “I sucked, Y/N. Don’t try to make excuses for me. It’s never good enough.” He barely put the car in park before he was jumping out, slamming the driver’s side door in the process. Y/N jumped out as well, knowing he would leave her behind if she didn’t. Morgan wasn’t waiting for her tonight, and his height advantage was all-too evident as he took off up the stairs faster than she could keep up. She knew he was exhausted, so this was anger fueling him.

Y/N caught up with him at the door to the apartment, where he was angrily shoving his keys into the lock. It wasn’t turning, and he punched the door in frustration. This was a side of him she didn’t even know existed. “Morgan, stop!” She shoved past him, grabbing the keys out of his hand. “I’ve got it. Just stop, please.” Y/N barely made it out of the way before Morgan was barreling inside the apartment, and she hurriedly followed behind him, stopping when they were in the living room. “Morgan.” She said his name quietly, but he paused. “I understand your anger, and I think it’s justified. Just please,” she begged, “don’t take it out on me. I love you, Mo, and I wanted to see you succeed.” A few tears she hadn’t realized were building up dropped down her cheeks. “I’m sorry that you didn’t get the series win tonight, and I’m sorry it was Boston again. I wish it had gone differently this time.” She wiped the tears off her cheeks with the back of her hand, and Morgan’s face hardened as he looked at her.

“Stop pretending to be upset!” Morgan was red in the face, and Y/N could barely recognize the person she loved behind the anger. “You don’t know how this feels, and you don’t even care about the team!” He threw his arms out wildly, and she saw Bogey run for her bedroom when Morgan’s hand came dangerously close to his perch on the couch. “You’re a Boston fan, for fucks sake! Go out and celebrate, just stop fucking pretending you give a shit about if we win or not!” Morgan’s chest was heaving with how heavily he was breathing, and Y/N was frozen from where she stood by the window. He really thought she didn’t care about him? Didn’t care if the team won or lost?

Y/N felt another tear slip down her cheek, though she wiped it away as quickly as it fell. Morgan’s face shifted slightly, like he was just realizing what he’d said. Y/N ducked her head before any more tears fell. “Y/N, I,” she shook her head, pushing past Morgan and towards the door again. “Y/N! Red Sox, come on, I didn’t mean it.” Sure he didn’t.

“Angry words are usually pretty truthful, Morgan, so I think you did.” His face was helpless as he reached out to her, and Y/N put her hand on the doorknob. “I need to cool off for a while. I think you do too.” She left before Morgan could respond, and especially before he could convince her to come back.

She was halfway down the stairwell before footsteps sounded above her. How in the hell could he possibly think she was happy he’d lost? She knew those boys; they mattered to her now, it wasn’t like they were some faceless team. She cared about him, for fucks sake. Morgan caught up with her as she reached the street. He breathlessly called for her to stop, and Y/N’s feet slowed for a step before she steeled herself and kept walking. “I need to cool off Morgan, I’ll be back.” His footsteps continued behind her, and his hand caught her arm under the elbow.

“Y/N please. I shouldn’t have said that.” She finally slowed, turning to face Morgan. His eyes scanned her face desperately. “I know you care. I know you wanted us to win.” She wasn’t ready to forgive him yet, and the eyebrow she cocked told him enough. Morgan let go of her arm to rub his face, and she could see exactly how exhausted he was. “Go, Morgan,” she said a little more gently. “I’ll be back. I promise.” Y/N reached out to squeeze his arm reassuringly before beginning to walk again. Morgan paused for a second and then followed.

He walked silently alongside Y/N until they were past the apartment complex. “I just want to know that you’re okay. I know you take these walks when I’m not around, but I’d prefer you not walk the city alone this late.” Y/N could feel him staring at her as she looked forward, and it took everything she had not to meet his eyes. “I won’t talk if that’s what you want, and I’ll even walk separate from you if necessary, but I just want to make sure you stay safe.” Well damn. When he put it that way she couldn’t refuse. She nodded shortly, and Morgan let out a breath that she hadn’t noticed he was holding.

They walked in silence through the city, and Y/N finally felt herself cool off. Morgan had a temper, she knew that, though she didn’t know it went that deeply. It didn’t excuse what he’d said, not by a long shot, but his apology was sincere. They finally reached the spot she was seeking out, a small nighttime Greek restaurant ten blocks from their building, and Y/N felt Morgan look at her questioningly as she stepped through the door. The smell of oregano and garlic hit Y/N almost as quickly as the sound of the traditional music, and she shouted out a greeting as she pulled Morgan along with her. “Ti kanete, yiayia!” The older woman behind the counter looked up as Y/N spoke, and she began to hurry out from behind the counter when she recognized her. “Ah, koúkla,” she called out excitedly, “you finally came for another visit?” Y/N melted into the older woman’s hug. Her hug was more comforting than even Morgan’s, the kind of hug only a grandmother-type could give.

Y/N pulled back, and the older woman drew her hands back to Y/N’s shoulders. “You too skinny, koúkla, too skinny.” She let go of Y/N’s shoulders to pat her cheeks gently, and Y/N gavet the first smile she’d had since the game started. “Eat. I’ll bring keftedes and loukoumades.” Y/N nodded, and looked back at Morgan as the woman hurried away, shouting at her husband to get the food going. He was standing there slightly shell-shocked, and the last of Y/N’s immediate anger dissipated with the look on his face. She took pity on him, grabbing his hand to pull him towards a table. Morgan reacted instantly, adjusting his hand to hold hers properly. As they sat, Y/N took a moment to drink in the atmosphere.

It felt homey, and smelled familiar. She had grown up on Greek foods, her mother half Greek, and the Greek thrown between Erriéta and Matthaíos was as familiar as Saturday breakfasts at her grandparent’s house. Even the furniture was familiar, plastic on the brown booth chairs and all. Morgan was still looking around confusedly, and Y/N took pity on him. “They’re Greek. Harriet and Matthew are insomniacs, like me, so they opened this place when they immigrated here. It’s the only restaurant not attached to a bar or fast food that you can find after 1am.” She smiled over at the kitchen, where Matthaíos was throwing dough balls into the air and catching them as Erriéta scolded him. “In Greek, their names are Erriéta and Matthaíos, but they mostly go by the English translations now. It’s a little easier.” Morgan smiled gently at her, and she continued before she let him suck her back in too quickly. “I came in here one night after a particularly bad day last year. I called out a hello in Greek, though it was the wrong one.” Y/N laughed at the memory. “‘Ti kanete’ is the informal way to say hello, not what you say to strangers.”

“Harriet kind of adopted me after that. It’s why I call her yiayia. It’s the Greek word for grandmother. She has a habit of adopting strays.” Erriéta appeared then as if she had been called, sliding large plates of keftedes and loukoumades between Y/N and Morgan. “Eat,” she said emphatically, “too skinny. You too, boy,” she directed at Morgan, “you too skinny too.” Morgan stared up at the woman mildly alarmed, and Y/N smothered a chuckle. “Thank you, yiayia,” she said sincerely. Erriéta patted her hand gently and swept off again, yelling at Matthaíos in their native language again.

Morgan looked mildly shell-shocked, even as Y/N pulled a plate from the stack at the end of the table and piled it high with food. “The food is good,” Y/N told him. “Eat.” Morgan still looked at the food skeptically, and she rolled her eyes. “It’s turkey meatballs and doughnuts in a nutty syrup. I promise it’s all delicious.” She dug into her own plate as she spoke, shoving an entire doughnut in her mouth. It had been a while since the last time she’d eaten the loukoumades, and it took every bit of self control Y/N had not to take the entire plate just for herself. She smiled when Morgan took a bite of meatball, immediately making a face of surprise and shoving the entire thing in his mouth. “Good, yeah?” Morgan nodded emphatically, and Y/N laughed at the way his cheeks bulged.

They ate together in semi-silence, only talking for more napkins or to argue over who would pay the bill when Erriéta brought it by. They did meet gazes every so often, and Morgan’s gentle but exhausted smile melted the last of her anger away. “I love you too.” Morgan’s words startled Y/N out of thoughts of more loukoumades, and she cocked her head in confusion. “You said it earlier,” he clarified, “and I yelled at you. You didn’t deserve to have my frustration taken out of you.” Morgan sighed, leaning back in his chair. “They wouldn’t stop asking me about Toronto. I can’t help but feel like I was the reason they kept losing all those years, and it sucks.” Oh. Oh.

“Morgan, no. It’s not your fault. They finally went out and got those pieces you guys needed to succeed all those other years. You can’t blame yourself for the front office screwing up.” Y/N reached out and gripped one of Morgan’s hands. “A few overpaid forwards and two good defensemen aren’t going to win you a cup. If the front office had smartened up when you were there, maybe you guys would have made it further. But sweetheart, it’s not your fault.”

Morgan nodded slowly, and Y/N could actually see him realize she was right. He squeezed her hand back, leaning forward again with a sigh. “What would I do without you?” Y/N smiled and shook her head in response. “Let’s go home.” Morgan stood as he spoke, pulling Y/N with him. Erriéta and Matthaíos came over to hug Y/N, and then Erriéta even hugged Morgan.

“Take care of her, boy, yes?” Morgan nodded solemnly at Erriéta’s request, and Y/N hugged the older woman again. She pressed a box of what Y/N could only assume was more loukoumades into her hands, and winked. “For later. You too skinny.” Y/N laughed and nodded.

The walk back to their apartment was much more lighthearted than when they’d left, and Morgan tucked Y/N into his side with a sigh. “Can we cuddle when we get back?” Y/N took a breath to respond, but Morgan hurriedly spoke again. “I understand if you’re still mad, but I wanted you to know that the option is there.” Y/N let out a breathy laugh, though she didn’t respond immediately. Was she still mad at him? She had been hurt at the time, and maybe still was, but honestly it didn’t seem like Morgan meant what he said. It was more like he’d wanted someone else to be as upset as he was. They both needed a hug and a good night's sleep.

“Yeah, Morgan, I think we both need that tonight.” Morgan squeezed Y/N’s shoulder as they came upon their building, and he held onto her as they climbed all seven flights of stairs. Bogey was sleeping on the couch again as they entered the apartment, and Morgan scooped him up gently. Bogey protested with a tiny meow, and Y/N pressed a kiss to the cat’s head. “He doesn’t like it when you pick him up while he's trying to sleep, you know.”

Morgan followed Y/N into her bedroom, depositing Bogey on the gray comforter. “I just wanted to cuddle with both of you. Plus, he loves my hugs.” Y/N let out a laugh, and she was still laughing as they settled into the bed. Morgan pulled her close, sliding an arm under her head and another across her lower ribcage. “I love you, Y/N. And I am so grateful that you let me hold you every night.” Y/N settled deeper into his chest, and Morgan pressed a kiss to her neck. “Goodnight, sweetheart.”

#nhl imagines #nhl imagine #morgan rielly imagine #good idea ML

30 notes · View notes

himbeaux-on-ice · 3 years

Text

anyway I’m increasingly feeling a bubble for the 2021 playoffs may be the best course of action. multiple players have said that while they wouldn’t have wanted to be away from their families for a whole season in a bubble, it was in some ways psychologically preferable to (for example) the current rules around conduct during down time/on the road, mainly because they could actually socialize with their teammates, spend time together off the ice, leave their hotel rooms to at least do things around the bubble. it was more of a “okay, I’m committing to this one situation and can operate in that mindset” thing instead of the current “I am now living some half-complete version of my normal life, where I don’t have the benefits of the bubble OR most of the social benefits that would normally be available in a non-COVID year”.

also, I’m sure a return to a bubble would be contingent from the players’ end on fixing certain flaws of last year’s setup (such as repetitive meals, limited recreation options, things that were promised and not delivered on), and there were most certainly a LOT of lessons learned on the operational side of things in conducting the 2020 Cup Bubble, given that it was something that had NEVER been done before, and was put together pretty quickly. this year they would have a blueprint to start from, and potentially a longer preparation runway if they start now.

additionally, arguing against a return to a bubble because you see that as somehow a money-motivated choice just shows a profound lack of understanding of the league’s current operational and financial situation. if there is a selfish financial choice to be made by the NHL, it would be holding the playoffs in individual arenas, because in an increasing amount of US markets, fans are being allowed into the buildings, which allows teams to make playoff ticket revenue instead of hemorrhaging money into a bubble.

at the very least, I think they should consider having the all-Canadian rounds in a bubble, before the team that fights its way out of Canada goes up against US teams. it doesn’t look like Canadian cities are going to allow crowds in arenas by the time the playoffs roll around anyway, so you might as well save the travel and the exposure risks, and stick the four Canadian teams in a nice safe bubble (Toronto again, anyone?) or two while they duke out their first two rounds in an empty arena. then you can still make money off of more-vaccinated Americans going to US playoff games (played by increasingly vaccinated players) in limited numbers, while making sure the playoff teams situated in the midst of Canada’s current COVID catastrophe don’t go through what Vancouver is currently experiencing. Then ship the team that makes it out of Canada down south for the third round, or stick everyone in a bubble for rounds 3 and 4, or whatever!

anyway, that’s my ramble. some people on here just love pessimism beyond the point of pragmatism I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

#long post #maybe don’t reblog

8 notes · View notes

gabrieloi-blog1 · 4 years

Text

It not a big city like Atlanta

Like True, i've never worn a players jersey. I only wear one with my name on it. But i had mentioned to my wife, that with the aproaching retirement of the Greatest Raven of All Time, Ray Lewis would be the one guy whose jersey i would like to have.

wholesale jerseys I know our citizens deserve better. Much better. On the governor cheap jerseys. Cardiff City Craig Bellamy celebrates gaining promotion to Premier League after the npower Football League Championship match at the Cardiff City Stadium, Cardiff. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Tuesday April 16, 2013. wholesale jerseys

nfl jerseys Virtua is a comprehensive multi hospital healthcare system headquartered in Marlton, NJ. Its mission is to deliver a world class patient experience through its programs of excellence in cancer treatment, cardiology, orthopaedics, women's health, pediatrics, surgery and neuroscience. A non profit organization, Virtua employs 8,400 clinical and administrative personnel, and approximately 1,800 physicians serve as medical staff members. nfl jerseys

wholesale nfl jerseys from china Klinsmann wholesale jerseys, a German who has lived in California since retiring as one of the best players ever, has instated a more demanding training regimen coupled with an emphasis on nutrition, even yoga classes. Soccer. He's been vocal in his suggestions to MLS for how to improve player development at the pro level. wholesale nfl jerseys from china

cheap nfl jerseys But when I got here I was surprised how nice a city it is. It not a big city like Atlanta, but it a nice city. A good, Canadian city, which is what I like.. The object is to keep you connected and aware of changing weather no matter where you are. It weighs just less than 2 lbs. And is very durable.. cheap nfl jerseys

wholesale jerseys from china It is inside this massive arena that you will find four small classrooms Cheap Jerseys free shipping. Meat freezer cold and thick with the smell of wet equipment, they are steps away from the ice and a Zamboni painted in the school colours. Because students wear skates as often as shoes, the floors are made of soft rubber.. wholesale jerseys from china

cheap nfl jerseys One of the major trends that t shirts have been experiencing is witty or puny sayings that make others laugh. Many printing companies even carry organic cotton now so you can wear an eco friendly, self designed shirt. This is just the tip of the iceberg. cheap nfl jerseys

wholesale nfl jerseys from china Eventually was found on the other side of a 20/20 five foot www.cheapjerseyschinatrade.com. Divider wall between our night. Five troopers tell Eyewitness News they found the child awake and alert be talking act an act of god at this point. Reality Show: The Reality Show would be a contest that focused on reality TV editors. Five teams of editors would all be given the same pile of raw footage of, say, a bunch of people living together in a house (or, in season 2, a zoo!). There is no immediately clear narrative in the footage it's just a bunch of people hanging out and talking, and it's up to each team of editors to edit together the most exciting and dramatic story by manipulating the footage using all of the tricks they've accumulated over their years of distorting footage.". wholesale nfl jerseys from china

wholesale jerseys "This is not over," Kelly's lawyer Michael Critchley said outside the courthouse, with his arm around his weeping client. He said the judge had erred during jury instructions www.cheapjerseyschina8.com. District Judge Susan Wigenton told jurors in response to a question they could convict Kelly and Baroni on conspiracy even if the act itself was not "intentionally punitive toward Mayor Sokolich.". wholesale jerseys

Cheap Jerseys from china 21, 2015.News of the trade broke less than one hour before Ladd and the Jets were to take the ice here Thursday evening at American Airlines Center for a game against the Dallas Stars.It had become clear something was brewing even before the trade was announced word had leaked out Ladd was a late scratch from the Jets lineup about 90 minutes before game time.The Jets captain was a full participant at practice here Thursday morning and from all indications was going to play Thursday evening.Head coach Paul Maurice told reporters following the Jets morning skate that he had not been asked to keep Ladd out of the lineup as a precaution against injury while the team shopped him.There had been reports all day Thursday that the Jets had been shopping Ladd around the league.Cheveldayoff refused to say how many teams inquired about Ladd services, but did say there were multiple potential suitors www.cheapjerseysfromchinasale.com.The news Ladd had been traded broke the same day as the Jets announced that centre Bryan Little is done for the season with a compression fracture to his T 6 vertebrae, sustained last week in Tampa in a high hit by the Lightning Anton Stralman.The loss of both men on the same day removed the team two leading goal scorers 17 goals apiece and a total of 76 points from the Jets offence in one day.Cheveldayoff was asked if the departure of both men on the same day sends a message to Jets fans that the team has now shifted its focus from making the playoffs this year to the club future."The message to the fans is we going to compete each and every night to continue to push this organization forward, both on the ice and off the ice," said Cheveldayoff, adding he might not be done in the trade market yet."I think a deal like this one here might do some things for the market place as far as setting some other things in motion maybe.The Jets play Chicago twice this season on Mar. 18 and on Apr. 1 Cheap Jerseys from china.

1 note · View note

fanforthefics · 6 years

Note

Sid/Geno #22 💋

a kiss … in a rush of adrenaline

Geno thinks about it for the first time after their first Cup win.

It’s the wrong place to think about it, maybe–they’re all high on everything, haven’t been sober in days, and Geno’s happier than maybe he’s ever been. This is what he came here to do, why he hid in that Finland bathroom, why he ran to a country without knowing the language or anything more than hockey–this. To hold the Cup.

And then he looks at Sid, incandescent with his happiness as Flower tilts beer from the Cup into his mouth, boyish and handsome and Sid licks some beer from his mouth, tongue pink, and–something shifts in Geno, something irrevocable. A knowledge that can’t be changed or moved, as he looks at Sid.

Oh, Geno thinks then, for the first but not the last time. What will it be like, to have Sid next to him, but only in some of the ways Geno wants?

It doesn’t matter then. It’s just a thing Geno thinks about, usually when Sid’s either being particularly annoying or particularly cute. When either he chafes, passed over again and again for Sid’s brighter flame, or when Sid does something that makes him ache for wanting, drawn in always to that flame.

It’s easier, in some guilty parts of Geno, during the concussion. When it’s–not Geno’s team, because the Penguins are Sid’s team to their bones, and Geno will fight tooth and nail to make sure that stays true, but Geno’s the one holding them in trust. Geno’s the one leading them for now, the one the camera’s on. The one people are talking about. It’s–Geno hadn’t thought he wanted that, not really. But it makes him think.

And–and Sid’s not there all the time, on the ice and in the locker room and on the bus, yakking on and smiling so fondly and dragging Geno into watching game tape and listening to every single call up who sets foot in the lockerr room, to every fan, and just being so Sidney that Geno’s fists sometimes clench to keep from just–being reckless. Geno still goes to see SId, of course, but it’s not all the time. Not the constant reminder of what he can’t have.

And then–then Geno gets back from Russia, where he learned what it meant to be Captain, to have a team that was his, and Sid’s there, in the locker room Geno’s first day back, and he yanks Geno into a hug, and Geno can feel his smile on his neck. Geno leans into Sid’s embrace, holding him tight so he can have this much, and he thinks it again, for real.

So that summer, when his agent comes to him, asking about the contract extension–Geno thinks about what it felt like, to have his own team. Thinks about standing on his own. Thinks about eight years in a locker room with a man he’s in love with and can’t have. Thinks about what might happen, if that love turns to resentment.

And he says no.

Sid doesn’t talk to him for two months, once the Pens trade him.

Geno’s not surprised, exactly. Geno hadn’t told him for exactly this reason–because he’d wanted as long as he could have with Sid unsullied, Sid’s offseason texts about everything from the fish he’d caught to pictures of his dog to thoughts about the penalty kill. Sid’s ridiculously awkward selfies, and the way he sucked at emoji responses to Geno’s pictures. But Geno does not have any illusions about Sidney Crosby. He knew what to expect.

Still, Geno had expected a few weeks, maybe. Everyone knows Sid sulks. Geno’s been sulked at, more than once. Oh, Sid says all the right things to the media– “For sure, I’m sad to see Geno go, but he’s going to make a huge splash in Dallas. I can’t wait to see what he does–as long as it’s not beat us,” and shit like that. But the chatty texts cut off on a dime a few days before Geno heard about the trade, and Geno knows what that meant.

He gives Sid a few weeks, but then he starts to get annoyed. What, did Sid expect him to stay in his shadow for the rest of his career? To always be in second place? Sid wasn’t usually selfish, but that was.

But he texts Sid a few times, angrily, and gets nothing back; and then he goes to Dallas.

It’s–he’s been to Dallas before, he’s played there, but it’s still different. There’s so much more space here, and it’s warm, and there’s none of the steel that seems to run through Pittsburgh’s bones. Instead there’s oil and cows and it all feels newer, somehow.

The guys are good, though–training camp is what it is, as usual, and if none of them are the Pens–none of them are Sid–it’s still good. They’re a good group, and clearly ready to make something of themselves. And Gonch is there, which, as always, makes it easier. Still, it’s…weird. Different locker room, different traditions. The way some of the guys look at him, like he knows the answers–he’s used to being a vet on the team now, to wearing a letter, but it’s different, here. Where’s he’s expected to change things.

“You’ll get us there,” Benn–Jamie, not Jordie tells him, a little drunk and big-eyed. Geno had been worried about him; rumor was he was going to be captain before Geno came, but he’s been nothing but solid. A good kid, Geno thinks, though he isn’t that much older, solid and dependable and the sort to care more about his team than scoring–the kind of person, Geno thinks despite himself, who Sid would like.

He stops thinking that. He’s been trying not to think about Sid as much. It hasn’t worked–he still looks to him on the power play, still looks at his phone and wonders how the Pens camp is doing, who’s wearing the A in his stead, if Sid is spending long evenings with whoever that is–but he’s trying. He came to Dallas for a fresh start. He’s going to get it.

“Right, Geno?” Jamie asks, and Geno blinks.

“Hm?”

“The playoffs,” Jamie tells him, eyes big and bright and yearning. “Right? This year’s our year.”

“Yes, our year,” Geno agrees, though he’s maybe not sure, and toasts Jamie.

They play the Pens early in the season. Geno doesn’t have time to nod to some of the guys before they get on the ice, but then–then he’s across a faceoff dot from Sid, and in some ways it’s like practice almost every day for years, the two of them. And in some ways–Sid would always be smiling then. Now he’s set, his game face on, the one that means nothing’s going to throw him out.

“Guess we finally see who better,” Geno throws at him, right before the puck drops–just to break him. To see him feel something, god.

It’s a miscalculation. Geno knows it the moment he sees Sid set his jaw at that, the way it lights a fire in his eyes. Sid wins the faceoff, and then he’s down the ice.

Dallas loses. No one’s surprised, really–the Stars are still rebuilding, and the bones are there, but they aren’t quite there yet. Sid’s on fire the way he always is after someone challenged him, but Geno gets a goal and an assist too, sneaking it around Flower in a way that gets him sworn at in French. In the end it’s not that weird–Geno’s played long enough that he’s played against people he considers friends. A whole team of them is a little different, but. It is what it is.

They get off the ice clearly bummed but not distraught, and head to the locker room, where Geno has infinite media about what it feels like to play against his old team, against Sid. “Is always fun to play Sid,” Geno tells them. “He win this time, but maybe not next.” He doesn’t think it’s fitting, here and now, to say what he’s always said–that Sid’s the best player in the world, and there’s nothing Geno’s loved more than keeping up.

“Yeah, sure,” Demers puts in, when the media’s done. “You say it’s fun. Tell me that when you can check him.”

“What that mean?” Geno asks, raising an eyebrow.

Demers looks at Jamie, who shrugs. “Um, you just. Don’t check him very hard,” he says. Geno’s been getting shit about this for years, he knows how the handle it–it’s not like, maybe, in his heart of hearts, it might not be true.

Anyway, “Think I have enough checking,” he says, because he was definitely not imagining how hard Tanger was gunning for him. He’s more than a little pissed about that, actually; they’re supposed to be friends.

He gets changed quickly, then goes to the visitor’s locker room, to say hi to the people who are still his friends.

What he’s not expecting, when he opens the door, is to be met with a glaring Sidney surrounded by a cadre of French Canadians–one smiling (Flower), one glaring (Tanger) and one looking vaguely exasperated (Duper). “Yes, hi Geno, good game,” Flower says in a rush. “Now, take him. Fix him.” He shoves Sid out of the door.

Sid must not have been expecting it, because he stumbles, and Flower’s slammed the door shut before he can catch it.

“Asshole!” Sid mutters. Geno raises his eyebrows.

“Is so bad, talk to me?” he asks.

Sid lifts his head, and–god, it’s still…He’s still so Sid, even with his media face on, all eyes and lips and cheekbones and a ridiculous sort of beard. “You want to talk?” he asks, coolly.

They aren’t going to do this here. “Come,” Geno says, and ushers them to a nearby office. Sid goes like a cat might–making it clear he’s only going because it’s his idea. Then Geno closes the door and leans against it.

Sid stands in the middle of the room, his media face still on. Geno thinks he’s going to have to talk first–Geno tends to be more impatient than Sid, and he has plenty to say–but then Sid tilts his chin up just a little.

“If you weren’t happy with the way the team was going, you could have talked to me,” he starts, stiff, formal. “Or to Kuni. I know we haven’t won in a few years, but–”

“Not about winning,” Geno snaps at him. Does Sid think so little of him? And if he really cared this much about winning, would he really have gone to Dallas?

Sid swallows. “Well. If you were having problems with anyone on the team–”

“Sid, you know I’m not.”

“Then if you were dissatisfied with my leadership, we could have discussed–”

“Of course not!” Geno interrupts. God, he wants to just–shake Sid. For being so Sid.

“Or with your minutes, we could have–”

“Not about how long I play–”

“Then what the fuck?” Sid snaps back, his cheeks flushed, and Geno can breathe again. This is Sid, his Sid–not the media version, the Sid who was easygoing until he wasn’t and who would fight with Geno for hours about stupid shit and who, Geno was beginning to realize, he would never not love. “If it wasn’t any of that, why did you want to leave?”

“You really think I’m want to play behind you forever?” Geno demands, incredulous. Does Sid not get it? “Always be–Sidney Crosby, and also Evgeni Malkin. All fame on you.”

“That’s all–media bullshit!” Sid retorts. “You’re the best player out there and you know it, why does it matter what they say?”

“Easy for you to say!” Geno yells, and pushes away the part of him that always thrills to have Sid praise him like that, like it’s obvious. “Maybe I’m want someone, sometime, to say, oh yes, Geno Malkin, he great too!”

“You never cared before!” Sid’s hands are clenched into fists. “You–you always said you didn’t care about that, you just wanted to play, for us to play together.” He takes a breath, and Geno can see it, beneath the anger–the hurt. The confusion. Fuck, he hates that. Wants, instinctively, to do whatever he has to to fix it. “Was that a lie?” Sid asks, half accusing, half–something else. “Were you always going to leave m–us?”

“Not a lie! I’m think I stay, but my contract up, and–” What’s Geno supposed to say? But I realized I couldn’t stay forever and be in love with you and watch you never know? “And I’m think things over, and decide,” he finishes.

“You could have talked to me about it,” Sid informs him snippily, but he’s winding down. Sid can keep a grudge forever, but he doesn’t seem to want to keep this one. “I–Mario told me, and I told him he was lying, because you’d have told me if you were thinking about going somewhere else.”

Geno winces. “I’m…I can’t say, not to you.”

“Why not?” Sid asks, honestly confused, and Geno–it’s another thing Geno can’t say, that Sid would have talked him into staying, because Sid could probably talk him into anything short of throwing a game if he smiled at him, if he asked. “I thought–I mean, weren’t we–aren’t we–friends?”

“Yes, of course,” Geno says, too fast. They’re friends before anything. “Yes, but. Have to make choice on my own.”

“But why?” Sid demands again, because he’s like a dog with a bone, and then there’s a knock on the door and it pulls open to reveal Tanger and Kuni there, looking, if Geno knows them right, like Tanger was going to burst in and Kuni was holding him back a little.

“Bus is leaving, Sid,” Kuni says. Tanger’s mostly growling at Geno. “You ready?”

“Yeah, for sure. I’ll just–” Sid waves a hand, like that means anything. “It was–good seeing you, Geno.” He pauses, then something like a smile cracks over his face, bright and like a knife into Geno’s heart. “Better beating you.”

“Not next time!” Geno throws back, as Sid leaves. Kuni nods to Geno and heads out, but Geno grabs Tanger’s arm before he can go.

“What wrong with you?” He demands. “You mad I’m trade too?”

Tanger throws off Geno’s arm with the sort of look in his eyes he gets before a fight on the ice. “I get not wanting to be in Sid’s shadow,” he shoots back, his accent thick enough that it takes all of Geno’s concentration to understand the English. “But you didn’t have to be cruel about it. Not to Sid.”

“What? I’m not–”

Tanger shoves him out of his way–hard enough that Geno might have pushed back, if he’d been expecting it. “He’d just gotten back, and now he’s been fucking miserable and it’s your fault,” he snaps, and then he’s stalking out of the room before Geno can follow him, if Geno even had an idea of what to say.

They don’t talk again for two weeks, and even then, it’s because Geno’s been complaining to Gonch about the lingering weirdness in the room–he knows what it feels like when a team is 100% behind their captain, and it’s not Dallas, not right now. He just can’t get it there–there’s no real problem in the room, it’s not that, it’s just not what he knows it can be. What it should be.

“I’ve worn a letter for years,” he tells Gonch on a groan. “I should know how to do this.”

Gonch just raises his eyebrows at him. “You wore an A,” he says. “It’s different.”

“Are you saying I don’t know how to lead?” Geno demands. He knows how to fucking lead, that’s not the problem.

“I’m saying,” Gonch says, in the tone that means his patience is wearing thin, “That you’ve always had Sid’s authority as a crutch, and you’ve never had to do it on your own. And that I’m not the person I should be asking about this.”

Geno glares, but–he has a point. And, guiltily, maybe Geno’s been waiting for this–for a good reason to talk to Sid. To hear his voice again.

So he calls, that night, when he knows Sid will be eating dinner. “Hello?” Sid answers, sounding wary.

“Hi, Sid.” he says. “Good time?”

“Yeah.” He hears movement, like Sid’s getting up. “How are things?”

Geno is not equipped to do small talk in English over the phone. “Sid,” He whines, and Sid snorts. Geno grins to himself, smug.

“You called me,” Sid points out. More noise–is he sitting down? Geno can picture him, sitting in his living room, probably in his old sweats and one of his t-shirts that are far too small on him now in ways that made it hard for Geno to look at him, sometimes. “What’s up?”

Sid’s being aggressively normal, so Geno is too. “I’m…want advice,” he admits. He can almost hear Sid’s smugness down the line. “Shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Yes, you think, very loud.”

“What do you need advice on?” Sid asks, instead of replying to that. “If it’s your defense, I can’t–”

Geno doesn’t like asking for help, but it’s Sid. If there’s anyone other than his mom he can ask…He takes a breath. “I’m–how you make sure you win room?” he asks. “I’m…it’s not there. Don’t know how to get it, to where we–where Pens are. With you.”

“You’ll get there. it’s only been a few months.”

Geno rolls his eyes at the floor. “Is not the same. You know–everyone on Pens ready to kill for you, if you say.”

“That’s not–”

“We all ready,” Geno interrupts him. He doesn’t want to deal with Sid’s humility, not right now. “How you get there?”

Sid sucks in a breath, then pauses for long enough that Geno prompts him, “Sid?”

“Yeah, sorry. I’m thinking.” There’s a weird note to his voice. “Some of it really is time. It wasn’t like this, in the beginning.”

“Sid.”

Sid chuckles, probably at Geno’s tone. “Yeah, fine. So I think what works best is to make sure you make it personal with everyone–they need to know you, trust you even if they don’t like you–”

Once he gets started, of course, Geno’s stuck there forever, because Sid on a role can’t be stopped. but it’s–maybe this was a bad idea, because Geno had known Sid was a good leader but he hadn’t really conceived of how much thought Sid put into it, and it’s just a lot, and it’s not helping Geno’s plan of moving on.

It also–and this part is a little annoying, in a general ‘Sid shouldn’t be good at everything’ sort of way–works. Geno can sense it, can see the room coming together. Can see the thing they could build.

And it breaks the seal, too. Sid starts texting him again, little things that Geno encourages by sending pictures back. It’s not helping him move on, but it’s not like he could ever not want to have Sid in his life, not really. And he thinks he could survive like this, with his team and Sid on his phone, far enough away that the yearning isn’t omnipresent.

Then–there’s Sochi.

The less said about Sochi, the better.

Jamie comes back covered in glory, grinning and showing his medal around. Geno comes back glowering, and unable to put a fucking puck in the net.

Geno’s storming around his house one day after practice, unable to sit still and unable to work out either. What’s the point? He’s just–he couldn’t win for Russia, couldn’t do his job, how is he supposed to here?

The doorbell rings. He strongly considers just letting it ring–who could be here? Who could want to see him? –but then it rings again, and he goes to the door, to yell at whoever’s there if nothing else.

He’s not expecting Sid. But Sid is what he gets, standing on his doorstep in a baseball cap, looking like he’d just wandered over for a beer like he’d do in Pittsburgh. “Sid?” Geno asks, his throat dry.

“Hey, can I come in?”

Geno steps aside. Sid comes in, looking around the house curiously as Geno leads the way to the living room.

“You still have those? I thought you’d ditch them,” he says, nodding to his statues.

“Why I get rid?” Geno asks, sitting down on the couch. “Are best statues.”

“They’re awful.”

“You awful,” Geno retorts, then. “Sid, what are you doing here?”

Sid just looks at him, long and hard. He’s taken a seat on the couch next to Geno, and he’s so–solid and handsome and Geno remembers seeing him with the gold medal in his hand, alight like he was the sun. “We’re playing tomorrow,” he says, slowly. Like Geno should have remembered. Which maybe he should have, but what would it matter. He wasn’t going to be of use anyway. “Jamie asked me to come by.” Geno snorts. “He’s worried,” Sid adds.

“Why? He finally get team, like he want first.”

“Geno,” Sid tells him, scolding. Geno scowls. maybe it’s unfair, but he thinks he gets to be. “He’s worried. So is Gonch. So am I.”

“Why? I play like shit, you win.”

“I don’t want to win if you’re like this,” Sid retorts. “I want to beat you at your best.” Geno almost smiles, despite himself.

But then– “I fuck up, Sid,” he mutters, looking down at his hands. “In Sochi. It—”

“Yeah, you didn’t win,” Sid agrees, matter of fact. “You didn’t win a lot of times. What’s different about this time?”

“I don’t know!” Geno’s getting louder, he can’t help it. Does Sid think he’s doing this on purpose? “I just–it not working. We losing again, and I’m not help, and–”

“You wanted a team,” Sid interrupts. He’s leaning over, elbows braced on his knees; he’s looking at Geno like what he’s saying is obvious, like Geno should know it. Should be able to do it. Can do it. “This is what it means to be captain. It doesn’t matter how you’re feeling. You’re a leader.” His chin lifts up, and Geno thinks of–of Sid at the worst of the concussion, when he’d drag himself to the rink to watch. When he clearly wanted to play more than anything, and still fist bumped everyone on their way out. Every time they lost and Sid stood in front of the media, the team, Geno, and told them what they had to hear, before he went home and dealt with it himself. “So lead.”

They win. A part of Geno feels a little bad about it, because Sid helped more than a little, but more of him is just–he got a goal, and more than that, he played well. It was good.

He’s still riding on that when he goes to the guest locker room. Tanger glares at him less this time, when he comes in; or only the grumpy post-loss glare. Geno takes it as a good sign.

Sid’s still getting changed, buttoning up his shirt as he talks to Duper, and he’s got his face on like he’s talking over the game and Geno thinks of how he’d lookeed over the faceoff dot today when Geno had won the faceoff, and how he looks now, and how he looked last night telling Geno exactly what he needed to hear, and he won, finally, again, and–

“I’m steal,” he announces to Duper, and tugs Sid away.

“Fuck off, what?” Sid demands, clearly pissy from the loss. “G, I–”

Geno opens the nearest door he can find, herds Sid in, closes the door, and kisses him.

It clearly takes Sid entirely by surprise. It takes Geno a little by surprise, the recklessness joy of it. Sid goes still beneath Geno, and Geno probably should be worried but he can’t be, right now. Instead, he pulls back, beaming. He won, and now he knows what Sid’s lips felt like, and Sid hasn’t punched him. He’s doing well.

“What?” Sid asks. His hand come up to touch his lips.

“I’m win,” Geno tells him, feeling smug.

“Yeah, I know.” Sid’s cute when he’s sulky, Geno’s always thought. “But, G–what was that?”

Geno is happy, and he’s been holding this in so long, and–Sid’s looking at him with his big eyes and touching his lips and looks confused, not mad. “I’m not tell you about contract because you talk me out of it,” he says. “I’m know that if you ask me to stay, I stay, and I can’t stay, not with how much I want you.”

“G–”

“Because I’m want you, so much, for so long, and I know if I stay, I say something, or I start to–or it turns bad, because I’m jealous, or because I’m think I only stay for you, and so I’m go, and–”

“G–”

“And I’m happy here,” Geno keeps going. He should have known he wasn’t going to stop once he started. “But, if I’m think I move to get over you, it not working, and you–”

“Geno,” Sid interrupts, just enough of the captain in his voice that, instinctively, Geno shuts up. Sid blinks at him again, still tracing his lips with his fingers. Lips Geno has kissed. Geno has to resist the urge to touch his own lips, to remember. “I didn’t–I didn’t know. I didn’t think.”

“I know.” Geno does. “I–”

“Shut up,” Sid cuts him off again. “I didn’t think, but–I never thought I was going to play without you. And then you weren’t there, and I had to learn…” He shakes his head, but there’s a light in his eyes Geno knows. That’s Sid making a play, that’s Sid before he does something insane and wonderful and scores. “Maybe I couldn’t have let myself think about that,” Sid goes on, thoughtful, “Not when–I was your captain, it wouldn’t have been okay.”

Like Sid would have ever tried to pull rank on him. But Geno has spent years knowing Sid’s play, and going with it, and now is not the time to scoff at that. “You not my captain now,” he points out.

“No,” Sid agrees, and he still doesn’t look happy to say it, but he doesn’t just look sulky either, as he takes a step forward. Closer to Geno. “I’m not.”

Geno looks at him, smiling up at Geno, and it’s–it’s like that first time, that Cup win sparkling through their veins. That first time he fell in love with Sid.

It’s probably stupid. They live halfway across a country from each other; their schedules will never match up; they’re going to have to play against each other. But–maybe Geno doesn’t need Sid. But he wants him. And they might not be on the same team anymore, but together they’ll always be unstoppable.

“Going to kiss you again,” Geno warns, and Sid rolls his eyes, and kisses him first.

#pens fic #my fic #like a month later!#and not entirely to the prompt #sorry life ate me #but i was thinking about the white shirt interview #and needed to go the alternate route #also i am coming off of a very busy week so i have no idea if this makes sense #but enjoy!#Anonymous #pens tumblr fic

94 notes · View notes

rachael19860213-blog · 5 years

Text

0 in World Cup qualifier

0 in world cup qualifier "Don't get us wrong. Been a week since we played, so I thought there was some rust early and then coach factory outlet online we settled in. Taking the step into contention is a big one, but it one the Panthers are confident in making. Orgeron still probably needs to win at least three of the Tigers four games left to have a good shot at getting the job permanently, and that's still anuphillclimb with Alabama, Texas A Florida and Arkansas remaining. Carroll had been a longtime NFL assistant before becoming the head coach of the Jets for a season in 1994 and the Patriots for three more from 1997 99 before being fired each time. Beyond Billy's accomplishments as a hockey coach, some say an even greater accomplishment was the impact he had as a junior high school teacher for 16 years, during which time he played a prominent role in the development of the innovative Donnan and Vimy Ridge sport schools. 11 McNeese. Bishop then converted from the penalty spot in the final 10 minutes, but coach Darrell Pascoe admitted his side didn get it all their own way. Taking the MLS by storm in his debut season, the former Arsenal striker has bagged three goals in his last two appearances and also now sits four goals clear in the race for the Golden Boot.. "Obviously, when you see the ball go in, it helps you feel good and helps your confidence go up, but you can't just rely on scoring," said Chartouny, a third team All Atlantic 10 pick last season. The Raiders were unable to win their first playoff game since 2002, falling to the Houston 27 14.. "I've always tried to be a good role model for our wrestlers and our community. If you taking them outside for a run, Jabra Through technology can pipe in the sounds of cars and traffic to keep you aware of your surroundings.. There are different types of relationship coaches. "I pinned the guy and jumped into Coach Emmert's arms and was immediately overwhelmed by an unbelievable sense of accomplishment. They might only recruit about 10. And, the team performance wasn't the greatest effort put forth by a Kansas football team, there is still plenty of time until their season opener Aug. RF Chas McCormick then kept his bat red hot with a two run single, giving the E Train a quick 2 0 edge. On the other side, Hadspen captain coach Liam Reynolds has been well led his side cartel alongside Sameera Vishwaranga and Nick Price, while Thanuka Dabare, Reynolds and Damien Woods have been the batting staples. In the AFC East alone, which the Patriots have won 12 of 14 seasons, 17 coaches have come and gone, according to STATS.. SPONSORED During the 2018 Seahawks season, CenturyLink and the Seattle Seahawks will honor WIAA recognized student athletes that display leadership, passion and dedication both on and off the field. The University Ringette team won its fourth consecutive Canadian National University Ringette Championship in January 2015.. Port City: 1. We played much better. Injuries to established players, such as Adam Campbell, Josh Meulendyks and Kane Uebergang hurt. But the Wildcats didn't get another basket until Jemarl Baker sank a 3 pointer with 51 seconds remaining in the half.. Lynchburg defense was stout in the first half as they held the Warriors scoreless and settled for a 0 0 halftime score.. Having started brightly, the London team wilted and had to settle for a 1 1 draw.. Dianne is now in her 20th season as head coach of the Edmonton Eskimos Cheer Team, widely considered the best cheer team in the CFL. More than 20 pro scouts were in attendance. Michigan State's Xavier Tillman scored 17 points and blocked five shots. From our camp, practice matches and general training. MONTRAL The Montreal Impact suffered a 3 2 loss, Saturday night at Stade Saputo, at the hands of Minnesota United FC. Our other two seniors, Bekah Workman and Shaylynn Hartmann, also share with Lauren the experience in running in three consecutive sectionals. "We probably got sucked in a little bit but they will learn from that. KEY ADDITIONS Emilie Stephenson (attack) Georgie Bunworth (mid court) Lilly Francis (mid court) Emily McNamara (attack) Amelia Ford (mid court) Ginger Wollermann (defense) Lauren Benington (defense) After multiple years of building chemistry and falling short in the finals, Sebastopol is looking to push into the upper echelon on the competition in 2019. Wright. In his playing days, he was known as "The Gainesville Gunner." At Gainesville High School, he averaged 30.8 points a game, the highest scoring average in the state at that time, as a hard driving shooting guard who often fired shots from 25 feet. Q: What do you see as your key on field strength? A mix of new jordan shoes strong and determined experienced players, combined with some depth at the younger end of the list. As 'primal beings' we are in need of several vital elements and forms of energy. In effect, doing little things to make other people happy can greatly improve your happiness.. [ 14 ] The fireworks scene has lost none of its one of my favorite scenes in the movie, Guiry says. I have blogged on the topic before but it bears repeating. Sometimes that means risking their lives to lace up running shoes, and sometimes that means running 26.2 miles through a desert.. Defensively, he would guard the other team's best player no matter what position they played. He has a ton of physical upside and has shown an above average fastball and slider. Avoid rush orders. He motivates everybody to be the best ballplayer they can be. Bowden Jr. Running provided opportunities to build deep friendships even when alongside teammates according to running pace rather than common interests.

1 note · View note