Hawks continue this month of heavy interconference play with a trip to Raleigh for a game with the erstwhile Whalers, or ErstWhale, if you will. WUNNA DOSE GREAT SIX-A-CLAHHCK STARTS with it being out east.
Kirkwood teased me about it, but no joke: I fucking hate the Carolina Hurricanes so much. Their whole existence and manner of operation just tweaks me in such a bad way. First of all, the Whalers had awesome sweaters,
a kitschy theme song, one of the cleverest sports logos ever, and that lovable-loser spirit that as a Cubs fan I have to find endearing. Meanwhile, the Hurricanes look like skating blood clots, represent themselves with some abstraction of a toilet flushing, and have no real personality or identity other than amassing Staal brothers. The average Hurricanes fan is either a petulant internet contrarian who, given the choice between UNC, Duke, and State, roots for None Of The Above, or a second-rate laxbro who roots for the Penguins like his parents do when Crosby comes to town.
And that's the other thing. The whole Raleigh-Durham-Cary (said to stand for “Containing All Relocated Yankees”) agglomeration is just so emblematic to me of everything that's sending our country, or at least a good part of it, straight into Fuckedtown. North Carolina, never having had to contend with labor unions or real urban problems like the parts of the country that
weren't built on enslaving black people to chop up leaves that give you cancer, has the legislation and wherewithal to attract companies away from the North and down to their unholy sprawl of boring office parks, and with them their employees. Now every Joe Split-Level from dying rust belt towns like Buffalo and Pittsburgh and Detroit can flit off to some subdivision called, like, “Leighboroughwoode Farms Estates,” buy one of thousands of shoddily built faux-Georgian McMansions, and magically transform into some fucking low-cost-of-living JohnKirk, living large, looking down, and driving through a veritable spiderweb of roads to nowhere. Raleigh from the air is such a clusterfuck of disordered sprawl that it makes Schaumburg look like Manhattan. I'll admit it's probably a pretty good life if you don't think about what ill-gotten bullshit it all is, how entire swaths of our country, especially the swath that we live in, are rotting from the inside out while nominal Republicans live off corporate welfare and redundant defense spending.
Some people would argue that it's a joke for the NHL to be in places like Dallas or Tampa. I'd retort that while those are indeed incongruous locations, the population is large enough that you might as well plant a flag and see how many people you can get to care. Others will say that it's a joke for the NHL to be in small Canadian backwaters like Edmonton or Winnipeg, and while yeah, those are much smaller than our traditional pro-sports towns, they're also in Canada where people live and breathe hockey – in the case of the Jets, the owner is one of the richest men on the planet and could buy the other 29 teams if he felt like it, so it doesn't really matter if Winnipeg has 800,000 people or 8 people if that's where he wants to have his toy. But Raleigh? It's not big; even with the boom it's only similar to Milwaukee or, ironically, Hartford. It's not hockey-crazed; they have ACC hoops.
What's the fucking point? It's just that some guy from Michigan bought the Whalers, couldn't get enough free money from Connecticut because they were planning on giving it to the Patriots (oops), and had to put the damn thing somewhere, and the Palace of Auburn Hills wasn't an option. He and his general manager Jim Rutherford have owned the Whalers/Hurricanes for about 20 years now, during which time they've mostly missed the playoffs, sucked at drafting, twice hired and fired useless idiot Paul Maurice, and won the Stanley Cup in the first year after the lockout with what's often regarded as the worst championship team of all time in any sport. The whole thing is just a giant dead spot on the league. They could be in Hartford as a second New England team without as many of the asshole fans their other teams have. They could be in Milwaukee. They could be anywhere else but some whitebread, shitty New South “great place to raise a family.” What a fucking drag.
As for the Hurricanes as constructed for 2014, they're with the NYC/Pennsylvania teams because they have to be put somewhere, and it is here that they are expected to finish near or at the bottom (though the Flyers look like they're staking out that cellar for themselves). They're a trainwreck on the blue line with Joni Pitkanen's season-ending and likely career-ending broken foot: their best defenseman is Ron Hainsey, who went unsigned through most of the summer because he was blackballed for leading labor negotiations and also because he's not very good. Rutherford generally abhors developing his own defensemen because it takes too long, which is funny because again, he's been their general manager for twenty years and holds an ownership stake, so what would his fucking hurry even
be, anyway? This gives the Hurricanes a logjam of decent scorers but no one who can stop scoring, other than Cam Ward, in theory, who is talked about as An Elite Goaltender but this seems to be more by fiat than by anything he's done since 2006, which has mostly consisted of “be injured” or “be bad.” Nevertheless, the Hawks barely see Ward, so he's prone to stumping them. I remember a Hawks-Canes game from 2011-12 where there was no one at the game, the Hawks got shut out, and there was just this heavy fog of No One Cares looming over the whole thing. So yeah, there's that.
Up front, they have two Staals, Semin, and Skinner, who are all capable of scoring but are never coached terribly well. Jiri Tlusty is coming off a career year, yet still no one sees fit to correctly pronounce his first name (ř adds a zh sound, so it's yeer-zhee, not yeery). Abandoned Hawks prospect Tuomo Ruutu is still down there long after Andrew Ladd left us. With our penalty kill being questionable, you probably don't want to let these guys go on power plays, but at the same time, they're such a bunch of half-hearted limpdicks that it's tempting to knock them around early and demoralize them a bit. No one retaliates.
Carolina has a 2-2-2 record, but that's inflated by an overtime loss, so 2-3-1 is more like it. 13 for, 17 against, which doesn't really indicate a high-scoring team. 3-1-1 both ways for the Hawks, and 15GF 12GA isn't exactly indicative of what we ought to be, either.
The Hurricanes have new uniforms for this year, having abandoned their storm flag pattern for looking like the Canadian national team and the Red Wings. More of that great southern hockey tradition.
Screw this team and their city. Go Hawks.
_________________
Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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Interesting thoughts on the Raleigh Durham area. I have been told that if the team chose to use colors of the pride flag , female attendance might improve.
that TMMOTI penalty was hilarious. Nice job 