Sociological Reflections on the Uneven Fan/Media Reception of the NHL's New 3-on-3 OT

For this piece, published at Habs Eyes on the Prize in December, 2015, I took on the question of how hockey fans and media analysts are reacting to the new 3-on-3 overtime implemented by the NHL for the 2015-2016 season. In speaking to an avid fan of the Montreal Canadiens, a Canadiens reporter for TSN 690 radio in Montreal, and a Montreal-based arts reporter who also maintains a regular blog on the Habs, I compared their views with some sociological ideas I've had about whether the wide-open and formless style of play associated with 3-on-3 hockey may clash with our contemporary cultural obsession with order and predictability.

Points, Purity, and Predictability: Exploring Disagreements Over 3-on-3 OT

When it was announced this past June that the NHL Board of Governors approved 3-on-3 overtime for the 2015-2016 season, the official explanation was that the league and its players wanted to make game outcomes, as well as the manner in which they were decided, more pleasing to the fans. So, one decade after the shootout was added to the NHL in order to bolster game excitement, league officials decided that 3-on-3 OT was needed to make hockey even more exciting.

NHL folks responded to the announcement by either talking up the unfettered offense that would be unleashed by the significantly opened ice space of the new extra frame format or by expressing hope that more games would be decided by back-and-forth team competition than by the single-man scoring of the shootout. Coaches and players expressed varying types of hesitation.

Would team tactics and player deployments be all-offense or all-defense? Would coaches be able to come up with any workable tactics for their players to execute at all? Would goalie stats go out the window? Would skaters suffer from exhaustion?

We're now more than a couple of months in and, aside from some early mainstream media and blogger endorsements, some unsurprising player objections, as well as some numbers that tell us that 3-on-3 is infusing offense into an NHL game that many say badly needs some, what more can be said about the hockey community's response to the NHL's new experiment?

In my own experience of watching a variety of overtimes this season, I've been absolutely mesmerized. During play like this, I've been routinely annoying my wife and daughter with the constant sounds of joy that involuntarily burst from my mouth. Resulting, moreover, from the absolute pleasure I've gotten from what looks to me like an obvious amplification of skill, precision, and speed, I haven't even been overly bothered by losses suffered by the Habs during OT this year.

Well, I may be just the kind of fan the NHL had in mind when the decision was made to transition to 3-on-3, but I've also noticed that many of my fellow fans view this development rather differently.

Peering outside my own personal viewing space this season, social media routinely tells me that the response to 3-on-3 OT is actually quite mixed. While some in my network are buying in, there's also no shortage of clear and strong opposition. So, rather than enthusiastically sharing my enjoyment of the OT action with like-minded souls on Twitter, my awareness of the critics has actually led me to hold back so as to avoid a potential backlash that celebration might elicit.

Compensating for the cowardice I've shown by staying on the Twitter sidelines, I decided to explore hockey community reception of 3-on-3 OT by talking to a few people with informed views on the matter. What became clear was that one of the major points of disagreement centers around the question of whether 3-on-3 OT is accepted as a pure, or authentic, form of hockey.

  

Eric Engels, who covers the Montreal Canadiens for Sportsnet, acknowledges that 3-on-3 deviates from the form that hockey traditionally takes. Engels argues that the type of play that it actually enables mostly outweighs some of the concerns he has over its hockey authenticity.

"I think 3-on-3 is highly entertaining, but don't believe it's any less gimmicky than the shootout is," Engels wrote in an e-mail. "Search the video archives and watch Tampa and Philadelphia in early October or go back to Los Angeles and Chicago [from a recent] Saturday night. [It's an] absolutely unbelievable display of skill, saves and beautiful goals. People say they'd rather see a tie. But, you'll never convince me that's more exciting."

While Engels accepts a 'gimmick' that he believes (despite its occasional sloppiness) is bringing a clear reward in terms of its on-ice results, the perceived novelty aspect of 3-on-3 is the exact point that drives others to reject it completely.

Rosalyn Roy is a Newfoundland-based blogger, author, and diehard Habs fan who can be found tweeting about her team on most nights they play. Contrary to welcoming the offense of the new 3-on-3 OT, Roy simply can't accept what she sees as the less-than-true hockey form that it takes.

"I hate it. It feels less like a fix for the skills competition that is the shootout and more like just another gimmick," Roy said. "The best strategy, if you can even call it that, seems to be to lose the initial draw, wait for a turnover or failed scoring attempt, and hope for an odd-man rush going the other way. Even at only five minutes, it's bound to tire out your skaters because of all the open ice. As far as gimmicks go, it's hardly a good sales pitch for newbie hockey fans and this old timer hates it just as much."

While not all critics of the new OT format reject the shootout as Roy does, the sense that traditional hockey is being eroded via this innovation can run pretty deep.

Brendan Kelly reports on arts and culture for the Montreal Gazette and CBC Radio's Daybreak in Montreal, and maintains his own Canadiens blog. Never pulling punches in his critique of his favourite team, or of the NHL as a whole, Kelly's opposition to 3-on-3 OT's dilution of the game of hockey is no less militant than Roy's.

"I do not like the 3-on-3 at all," Kelly said. "It's funny because I am a fan of the shootout. I think everyone enjoys that. But the 3-on-3 just looks goofy. I love playing 3-on-3 on a 3-on-3 sized rink. On a NHL-sized rink, it just becomes silly. It's really a typical Bettman innovation. Ideas coming from a guy who knows nothing about hockey culture."

Kelly's perception of threats to traditional hockey culture clearly provide powerful justification for his rejection of the inauthentic style of play that's resulting from what he calls a cold and corporate imposition of 3-on-3 OT. Yet, not all hockey observers I spoke to agree on the specific features of that cultural tradition.

Amanda Stein is a reporter for TSN 690 radio in Montreal who covers the visitors' dressing room at every Habs home game. In offering her appreciation for the style of play created by 3-on-3, Stein also presents a dissenting take on its place in relation to hockey's tradition.

"While the Canadiens haven't participated in too many 3-on-3 occasions this year, I've certainly enjoyed what I've seen from other teams playing in the new overtime format," Stein said. "I'm enjoying the quick pace of back-and-forth with so much free ice. I like the entertainment value of odd-man rushes, big saves, and one man's mistake is another man's goal. I think it showcases hockey talent better than an individual shootout move does. Ending 3-on-3 is much more in the spirit of the game of hockey - a team effort - whereas that dreaded shootout is much more individual."

So while the offensive production of 3-on-3 is definitely winning some observers over, mutations to the very game conditions that are enabling the offense violate others' conceptions of authentic hockey to such a high degree that endorsing the innovation is normatively impermissible.

Now, I don't know about you, but I find the claim that 3-on-3 defies hockey tradition to be dubious. Like Amanda Stein said, aren't pretty passes, risk-taking, and breath-taking collectively produced goals not part of hockey's tradition? And, like Eric Engels stated, if 3-on-3 OT provides these things more starkly than regulation play, and definitely more often than the shootout, isn't that a good thing? Or, if it really reminds us of the shinny that Brendan Kelly loves to play on the outdoor rink, aren't we actually tapping into a central part of hockey's great tradition by integrating 3-on-3 into the NHL game?

There must be additional explanations for the mixed reviews, and when I thought about all of this a little sociologically for a few moments, I really thought I'd figured it out.

When it comes to the world in which we live, and also our mundane daily lives, what do people crave more than predictability? We want to know what the interest rates will be for years, we read polls to tell us who will win elections in months, and we expect forecasts to allow us to plan for weather we'll face in weeks. Our tech devices are for communication, but we gleefully use their multiple functions to guide us through each part of each of our days in highly routinized ways. (Just think about how your routine gets thrown off if you leave your mobile phone at home one day.) So, comfort in predictability characterizes the workings of our wider social world. It's the same in sports and hockey as well.

As the public representatives of major businesses that put a premium on maintaining positive reputations, what have most athletes' public comportment and communication styles become if not predictably limited and dull? Engaged in minute-by-minute consumption of information about games, trades, and fantasy transactions, what are sports fans routinely doing if not trying to predict the accomplishments of their favorite players and teams? And, as the numbers are gathered, analyzed, reported, and debated, what's the new generation of fancy stats bloggers and writers doing if not working according to the belief that the seeming chaos of player deployments and plays can be converted to understandings that might lead to more predictable team tactics and outcomes?

It's within this broad social context that the NHL dropped 3-on-3 OT into hockey. With its significant and intentional heightening of uncertainty, randomness, and un-predictabilty, I wonder if 3-on-3 OT isn't just a a little too displeasing for today's players and fans who've been trained to embrace sports and life routines that depend nearly entirely on order and the expected.

Well, as good as that theory might sound at a sociology conference or in a classroom, according to the hockey observers with whom I spoke, player and fan rejection has little to do with a lack of fit between 3-on-3 OT's inherent unpredictability and the predict-all logic of the wider world in which we live. For them, the wider opposition comes down to much more basic negative emotional and psychological reactions people are having to an unfamiliar change made to a game whose features they've known intimately for quite some time.

Leaving aside her own view that it deviates from authentic hockey tradition, Roy suggests that many other fans aren't warming up to 3-on-3 OT because, despite the hype, they're actually underwhelmed by the on-ice product they're seeing from the change thus far.

"Fans don't like 3-on-3 because, like the shootout, it favors the faster teams," Roy said. "Workhorse teams are not going to benefit from it. Like the shootout, it reduces team effort to a lucky snipe, only with two more players on the ice, and at a faster pace. Big whoop de do."

Eric Engels believes that some players and fans struggle with 3-on-3 OT because it leads them to feel intensified disappointments in response to those parts to the games that, due to their respective ways of being competitive, they never really want to confront.

"Seeing as how I view 3-on-3 as the same type of gimmick as the shootout, I believe what fans don't like about it is the anticlimax of seeing their team lose in that situation," Engels said in his e-mail. "I've been to several hundred hockey games at this point, and I've never seen fans all sitting and quiet during the shootout. But, when their team loses, it goes dead silence. It's the same thing for the players. The Canadiens were ornery after 3-on-3 losses against Ottawa and New Jersey. They don't like losing, and they especially don't like losing in a format where mistakes are magnified."

While Brendan Kelly insists that most fans agree that 3-on-3 is a "travesty" that has little to do with the game of hockey, similar to Engels, he also points to a specific and negative psycho-emotional context when giving his view of why not all the players are embracing the change. For Kelly, 3-on-3 OT can bruise players' egos.

"The players don't like it because it's very hard for them to play this game," Kelly said. "The teams, notably the Canadiens, don't know how to play 3-on-3. It's almost impossible [for them] to set up to play 3-on-3 on a rink this size, and thus they often end up looking downright amateurish out there."

For Amanda Stein, player and fan hesitation is not so much about intensified emotional discomfort they experience in response to key moments of a 3-on-3 situation. Rather, the resistance is mostly evidence of a near universal human tendency that most of us have to be slow to embrace change in the worlds around us.

"I chalk it up to learning to adapt to something new, to accept new additions to the game we hold so dear to our hearts," Stein said. "It can be a scary thing to watch things change. Consider Erik Karlsson, who first called 3-on-3 'boring,' then backtracked a couple of days later saying, 'I really liked the 4-on-4, so maybe I'm going to give 3-on-3 some time.' It boils down to learning to accept the changes that are coming to the game of hockey, and requiring the time to accept that it does."

So, let's summarize. While some fans and players enjoy a 3-on-3 OT that's facilitating goal scoring and the liberated collection of points for their teams, others reject it as an unholy deviation from traditionally pure hockey. Though the hockey observers made a convincing case that the opposition is better understood as the psychology of hurt feelings than as illustrating the sociological effects of the force of the culture of our times on hockey fans' tastes, at this early stage in the 3-on-3 experiment, there's clearly a paradox.

The NHL brought in 3-on-3 OT with the hopes that it would allow its players to make the game of hockey more fan friendly, but a sizable number of hockey fans, and maybe even players, hold mostly unfriendly feelings towards the place of 3-on-3 OT in their favourite sport.

Regardless of your own view, and like one of the hockey observers said, I don't expect that our overall love for the game will be eclipsed by the reality that two solitudes appear to have formed around 3-on-3 OT in the NHL.

"As the years go on, questions about the change will become less frequent, we'll talk less about it, and it will just be part of the game," said Amanda Stein. "You can't make everyone happy in this situation, unless I guess you score the overtime winner. But, remember, there's no 3-on-3 OT in the playoffs. And, that's when the games really matter."

What Happend to Hockey Fans After the NHL Lockout?

In this All Habs piece, I used some sociology to assess why the fans, after they expressed so much anger, were so quick to return to hockey after the NHL lockout came to an end. To help me sort this out, I interviewed sociologist Matt Loveland (LeMoyne College) and two mega hockey fans, Roy MacGregor (Globe and Mail) and Bruce Dinsmore (Montreal actor and organizer of a fan boycott against the NHL). This piece helps to show why that mainstream reports of fan disillusionment with the NHL were highly exaggerated.

Reconcilable Differences! The Return of the Fans to the NHL

 
By Avi Goldberg 

As we roll to the trade deadline of this shortened hockey season, it’s hard to believe that only months ago many of us were cursing the NHL and the players for depriving us of our game. We can easily recall the anger we felt during the lockout, but we may blush as we admit just how easily we let it evaporate when the action returned. Following-up on the effects of the lockout on the fans, I have gone to two known lovers of hockey and to one expert in human behaviour. At the risk of opening old wounds, I use their views to help make sense of how fan bitterness appears to have been forgotten so soon after the lockout came to an end.

You can continue to read the piece in its entirety here.

The Healing Power of Sports

My current All Habs piece looks at how sports help communities grieve human loss following a tragedy. It also considers some of the serious shortcomings of using sports to promote mourning during times of crisis. The piece is based on a discussion I had with Ted Bird and Elliott Price on The Morning Show on TSN 690 and is especially relevant in light of last month's shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.

Sports & Tragedy: Good Grief?

By Avi Goldberg

Last month, following the NFL’s acknowledgments of the Jovan Belcher murder-suicide in Kansas City and the horrific school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, media commentators took time to assess the place of sports in relation to real life human tragedies. Is it helpful, it was asked, to play on and to use sports as an activity to help citizens cope with the horrors they’ve witnessed, or is it better to push sports to the sidelines and to encourage participation in true practices of grieving loss? Both history and responses to recent events show how sports create meaningful, if imperfect, forums for community healing during periods of societal crisis.

You can continue to read this piece here.

The Culture of Hockey Fandom

In this piece, published on the All Habs web magazine, I take exception to the notion that the fans of hockey would be foolish or pathetic if they were to return to support the NHL at the end of the current lockout.  While hockey, and sports in general, can be rightly criticized for its various excesses, it also provides numerous avenues of meaningful social, intellectual, and leisure activity for its fans.

Influenced by sociological theory addressing the role of culture in bringing members of society together, I defend the fans against charges that there is something obscene about the dependence they have developed on their sports and on their participation within hockey fandom communities.

You can find the web version of the piece here.  

Cheering For the Fans

By Avi Goldberg

In the early days of the NHL lockout, much attention has been directed towards hockey fans.  Talking points have ranged from accusations that Gary Bettman takes the fans for fools to suggestions that the lockout is an opportunity for them to wean themselves off their obsessive involvement with a sports business whose economics are too unseemly to deserve their time and money.  A shared theme is that hockey fans are irrational, both for loving their sport so much and for returning so quickly when it is temporarily taken away from them.  Accompanying these views is the insinuation that fans should stay away when the lockout ends.  There are compelling reasons why this outcome will not, and arguably should not, happen.

Sport in general, and hockey in Canada in particular, must be viewed as part of a society’s way of life, or culture.  While culture exists to guide members of a group, we give the elements of culture multiple meanings in addition to their intended functions.  Just as religious practice can mean more than worshipping a higher power and mobile phones provide experiences that surpass the convenience afforded by carrying a tool to makes calls, fan involvement with hockey creates significant routines that transcend tracking wins and losses of favourite teams.

Above all, hockey is a social experience in which fans join with friends, family, and sometimes with strangers in bars or via the internet, to participate in the action.  There is no doubt that the plays, points, and outcomes matter, but there is much more to it than that.

Given the comfort that comes from being with others, joking and laughing with them during the games, and from sharing food or drink at the same time, it can be credibly argued that fans willingly pay the price of admission just to be able to experience group connection that all humans need.  Hockey, as experienced through its multiple platforms of activity, is a significant source and locus of everyday social belonging for its fans.

Second, many fans are routinely involved in hockey because it enables them to exercise their minds in creative ways.  When fans debate the greatness of the players, argue over issues like fighting or blindside hits, or when they dissect the strategies of coaches or GMs, they engage in cognitive stimulation that has positive social effects.

Fans may not always get to express their passions at the workplace or even at home, but when they do it over hockey, they contribute their unique perspectives to the discussions that are ongoing within their communities.  Telling and sharing of stories help communities to imagine their togetherness.  Fans connect with hockey because it allows them to weave their own ideas into the narratives that circulate and shape the identities of their social groups.

Finally, while some dismiss the leisure experienced by hockey fans as something that distracts them from activities that are of true importance in life, the legitimacy of fan emotion should not be denied.  Creating everyday fun through hockey fandom is but one of many ways that networks of individuals carve out spaces of autonomy for themselves within the confines of modern society.  Far from being a crass distraction from the pursuit of an authentic quality of life, the pleasure of everyday fan experience is both intrinsically valuable as well as a meaningful by-product of choices that society members make to author the terms of their own social realities.

Because it is an outdated notion to only see the pleasures of the so-called higher forms of culture as being uplifting to members of society, it is unfair to reject the emotional roller coaster ride of fan life as a mere waste of time. 

With hockey providing so much richness to the everyday lives of its fans, is there any logical reason to think that the current lockout could, or should, encourage fans to stay away once it is finally resolved?  

One recent interpretation suggests that the lockout represents a clash over ideologies in which the owners are fighting to apply the economic philosophies they promote in the wider society to the NHL.  From this reading, it could be argued that should fans be drawn into an ideological battle, the potential exists for a mass exodus from the game in response to the imposition of an economic system in hockey that violates their own values.

Of course, for this to actually occur, hockey fans would have to be as engaged in the affairs of economic philosophy as the owners are.  Given, however, the sense that fans and pundits are united in their disdain and indifference towards the intricacies of the positions advanced by both sides in the dispute, the implications of the fight over competing ideologies appear not to be grabbing fan attention this time around.

Fan mobilization away from the NHL, to either advocate for or against the implementation of particular economic principles in hockey and/or society, is a highly remote possibility.

With ideological matters far from their hearts and minds, hockey fans are anxious for the players, the teams, the games, and the meaningful cultures of their fandom to return once the lockout does come to an end.  Given the legitimate ways that engaging with hockey gives meaning to their lives, there is nothing irrational or foolish about it.

Dissecting the Yunel Escobar Shakedown Press Conference

The Following post is contributed by my colleague and friend, Randy Schnoor.  Randy is a sociologist who specializes in issues in the study of sexuality.  He is also a huge baseball fan and, like many of us, was glued to his set during the press conference that followed Blue Jays shortstop Yunel Escobar being caught having placed an anti-gay expression on his eyeblack during a game last week.

Responding to what he views as a communication event in which the meanings of communication were highly unstable and incomplete, Randy gives his interpretation of what was said and needed to be said about Escobar's actions and intentions, the Blue Jays organization and manager, and current efforts to address and remove homophobia in sports.

You can contact Randy directly with your comments or feedback:  randal.schnoor@primus.ca 

Homophobia in Baseball: the meaning of words with “no meaning”

By Randal F. Schnoor

The press conference with Yunel Escobar regarding the homophobic slur on his eye-black was fascinating. There seemed to be a gap between the questions and answers. Escobar was not able to articulate what he meant by his actions. His words had no meaning. The reporters did not seem to understand how this is.  Let me try to fill in the gaps.

Latin American society is at a different stage of acceptance/abhorrence of such homophobic slurs. It is a clash of cultures. Escobar said the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong historical period. As a result, he was forced to endure a fierce scolding in public by his GM and others.

Why did Escobar not seem to understand what the fuss is about? It is because homophobia is part of the underlying structure of much of Latin American society. Especially among males. From Escobar’s perspective  it would be roughly equivalent to saying “you are a spaz” or “you are a bum”. A light rip against others. That is how lightly the word “maricon” (faggot or pussy) is taken in some parts of latin American society. It is like teenagers saying today that movie was so “gay”. In other words it was a crappy, cheesy movie. The word is accepted by some as a legitimate descriptor.

Escobar got caught in the cross-hairs of time and place.

This is not to argue that Escobar should be excused. Quite the contrary. Homophobia in sports is a real issue. Words matter. They do have a meaning. They reflect underlying inequities and power relations. They shame others into staying in the closet. Escobar deserves what he got.

When Blue Jays Manager John Farrell was asked whether there is homophobia in the baseball locker-room. He quickly denied it. This is not a helpful response. It is inaccurate. There is an underlying sexism in male sports locker-rooms which favours tough heterosexual males. Males desperately want to pass the hyper-masculine test. Their success with women help validate their manliness. If one does not fulfill this ideal then one must be the opposite: a fag or a pussy. This is the ultimate insult. These values are so much part of the culture of the male locker room that it is possible that Farrell does not “see” it. We don’t notice the air that we breathe.

Things are improving in sports. The “you can play” campaign is a great first step. Much more is needed. We will reach the next stage when an active major league ball player finally becomes comfortable enough to be openly gay. I predict this will come in the next five years.

Let’s see.

Professor Randal F. Schnoor, Ph.D.

Sociologist specializing in the study of sexuality

York University

Toronto

My Memories of Jeff Cormier

Jeff Cormier was a sociologist and a very close friend.  We met while the two of us were grad students in sociology at McGill.  In our time together there, we shared many serious and many more not-so-serious professional and friendship experiences.  While he was efficient and productive as a scholar, and was on his way to having a successful academic career, Jeff had a range of esoteric interests and befriended people from all walks of life.  His unique combination of intelligence, curiosity, generosity, and humour drew many folks to become friends with Jeff.  

On September 7, 2007, Jeff Cormier passed away.  To commemorate five years since Jeff's death, I have decided to post the eulogy I wrote and delivered at a memorial service that was held at McGill.  In the eulogy, I did my best to honour Jeff's memory by telling typical stories of my friendship with him.  My hope is that those who knew Jeff, and maybe a few who never did, will read this and be reminded of the kind of warm, wacky, and compelling human being he was. 

‘Cormier’

Since many of us simply called him ‘Cormier,’ that is how I will refer to Jeff today.

I was a PhD student here at McGill with Cormier.  He and I were interested in many of the same topics in sociology.  We were never in a class together because Cormier started his studies a few years before I did, but this did not prevent the two of us from becoming friends.  In the next few minutes, I am going to tell you a few memories of my friendship with Cormier during the McGill years.  I already know that most of you, who were also friends with Cormier, will recognize aspects of your friendship with him in the stories that I recount.

One of the funniest things about my friendship with Cormier is that, if I reflect back on the first couple of encounters I had with him, I never really thought that it would have been possible.

The first time I met Cormier, I got a very bad impression.  I stumbled into the TA room early in my first semester in the program, I think 822A in the Leacock Building, and saw this guy holding court with what I assumed to be a group of other graduate students whom I had not yet met.  Maybe they were even undergrads.  There was a brief introduction, but I really did not like Cormier.  Why did I not like Cormier?  I didn’t like Cormier because he was this big guy with really long hair who seemed to be very charismatic and animated in his conversation with the others.  Durkheim, an early sociologist, suggested that the bond between like and like cannot be as strong as that between unlikes, and since I also had long hair at the time and since I was also known to be somewhat charismatic with my peers, when I saw this guy looking like that and making the others laugh, I just didn’t like it.  Who would want to be friends with a charismatic guy with long hair?

Cormier was a very good hockey player, and I think my second encounter with him came after a weekly game at the McConnel Arena that the sociology and geography graduate students used to play back then.  I did not really know the guy that much and, after the game, I found myself standing around with him in the lobby of the arena as we waited for the others to emerge from the dressing room.  We had a short conversation then and, if memory serves, one of the topics that came up was teaching.  I told Cormier that I was pursuing a PhD because I wanted to teach one day.  Cormier, so much taller than I am, looked down at me, shaking his head, and said something like, “Avi, you think that as a teacher you have something interesting and enlightening to bring to your students.  Your students will want to get good grades.  The two things are not compatible.”  “Who was this guy and why did he say these terrible things?” I asked myself.  That Cormier was so smooth on the ice, but who would want to be friends with a guy who dispenses such disheartening advice?

We didn’t start out as friends.

Strangely, though, as the years of grad school progressed, things really changed for me and Cormier.  The more encounters I had with him, the more I found Cormier’s advice to make some sense or to be kind of funny.  There was a certain charming irony in the fact that he was into political sociology and loved Trudeau, Gellner, and Charles Taylor, but that I found him to be so apolitical.  I experienced hilarity in the way that he would come into my apartment, head straight to my book shelves, and be genuinely tickled to examine some of my new selections, and I was intrigued by the fact that he was a roadie for a local band.  There were engaging conversations at meals—a few at his apartment with Julie and many at Amelio’s or at the Vietnamese place at Les Cours Mont Royal—and there was banter, uproarious but always witty banter, in the locker room at the weekly hockey game.  We loved to make up nicknames for the profs.  Steve Rytina was ‘Stevie Awry,’ Roger Krohn, ‘the Artful Roger,’ and John Hall, well, John was simply John.  Cormier admired John Hall as much as a grad student can admire his or her favourite professor.

Cormier and I had become friends after all. 

Cormier worked hard while he was at McGill.  He worked hard with Axel.  He worked hard to complete his degree under the guidance of Suzanne.  He always seemed to be working.  He often had an article he wanted to share.  He always had something intellectual cooking with Philippe.  He was serious about sociology.  He seemed to know where he wanted to go with this academic thing.  I noticed how hard he worked and, in seeing this and reflecting on myself, I thought that I would never make it because I don’t, I can’t, work as hard as this guy does.  One day Cormier said, “Avrum” (by this time he would sweetly call me by my full first name) “I treat it like a 9 to 5 job.  I work all day and when I leave the library I leave the work behind.  The next day at 9 I start over again.”  Thinking that I was so clever, I responded to Cormier, “Cormier, I will never succeed at this, I will never be able to work hard enough, I don’t have the Protestant work ethic like you do!”  Cormier looked at me and laughed like crazy.  He laughed that laugh where you think you must be the funniest person alive.  I thought he laughed because he knew it was true, he had the Protestant work ethic.  After he laughed, Cormier looked me deep in the eyes and said, “Avrum, I’m Catholic.”  I never knew if he laughed then because I thought he was Protestant or because he thought the joke was truly funny.

I am going to wrap up my storytelling now by sharing two quick, but my most favourite, memories of Cormier from those days.

The second last memory occurred when Cormier, Jimmy Kennedy (another grad student), and I were hanging out in a different TA room, it was near Suzanne’s office but I don’t actually remember the room number.  Jimmy and I had been talking recently about Cormier and we both mentioned that we could not get over this guy’s laugh.  He was out of control when he laughed.  Everyone knows it.  Everyone!  Jimmy and I were so into Cormier’s laugh, that when we sat chatting in that TA room, without really planning to do it, Jimmy and I found ourselves laughing intentionally just to draw Cormier into laughing too.  It started and it went on and on and on.  Jimmy and I just kept laughing and Cormier laughed even louder.  We were like school children.  I was sure we were disturbing Suzanne.  We put it on so we could derive enjoyment from hearing him laugh and Cormier was totally unaware of what we were up to.  That just made the whole thing funnier.  Cormier, hearing this story now, would probably say that Jimmy and I were taking the piss to him.  We were.  We did it out of affection.

My final memory is of when, even though Cormier was a political sociologist who seemed to me to be apolitical, I saw him unexpectedly one day at a very political event.  It was not long after I came back from my fieldwork in Israel and I was still all fired up.  There was a major downtown rally in support of Israel and there was a small counter-rally organized by those who wanted to stick up for the Palestinians.  I went to check this out because this was what I was studying.  I was most surprised, part way through the action, to hear my name being called, and to look beyond a fence separating the two sides to see Cormier.  “Why was he here?,” I asked myself.  That question quickly became irrelevant.  What is really important here is that, after I made my way to him and after we exchanged a few thoughts on what we were in the midst of, Cormier told me something that was so great.  No one ever knew what Cormier was doing, what projects he was involved with, even though he did a lot.  I could not have predicted what he was about to say, but he told me, right in the middle of Israel versus Palestine in downtown Montreal, that he got a tenure-track job at King’s University College at Western.  The racket of the demo faded to me.  He looked so proud.  He looked so pleased.  I was so happy for him.  I was so happy that he looked so clearly happy with what he had accomplished.  The demonstration was just the same old same old.  Cormier’s news made it a really wonderful day.

I told you at the beginning that I would present to you my memories about Cormier, the guy with whom I originally never expected to be friends.  As with many memories, I cannot be certain that I got the timelines, or even all the details, 100% right.  What I am certain of is that the final two memories I shared with you—about Cormier’s beautiful propensity to laugh and about the quiet pride and pure joy he expressed when he told me he landed the job—revealed the qualities that Cormier displayed in abundance.  Those are the qualities that enticed me, and so many others, to spend time with him.  Those are the qualities that will always come to mind when I think about my dear departed friend.

Popular Sociology On The Air!

Twitter, NBC, & London 2012

Sadly, I hold the belief that sociology and the social sciences more generally are not held in high regard in the wider society.  Thanks, however, to my childhood friend, Duke Gent, who always said things like "the world needs people who study things in detail and share the products of their labour," I want to try to show people that sociological insights can be used to help think about our everyday lives in new, provocative, and helpful ways.  I was most fortunate to have the chance to do this on Monday, July 30 when I was invited by Dave Kaufman to join him and Jay Farrar on their kickass TSN990 radio show, The Kaufman Show.

In the segment, we spoke about the temporary suspension of Guy Adams' Twitter account.  The LA based correspondent for The Independent had his Twitter account shut down after he encouraged his followers to complain to NBC about the quality of their coverage of the London Olympics.  Twitter cited Adams' publication of an NBC executive's e-mail address as a violation of the social media site's User Policy in its decision to shut down his account.

Dave, Jay, and I discussed the significance of these events and I suggested that they reflected tensions between two differing logics of communication and community in the new media world.

Thanks so much to Dave and Jay for having me on the show.  Listen to the entire episode (and tune in each Monday night) or zoom ahead to my segment (starts around 1:45).  You can find the link here.           

As The Habs World Turns

This piece, co-written with Mort Weinfeld (McGill University), was published today on the Gazette's Hockey Inside Out blog.  You can find a link to it here.  As of this moment, there are more than 625 comments in response to this posting on the site.  Habs fans are using the comments section to slam sociology, the simplicity of the method and findings, as well as to count down the days until training camp.

The piece was accompanied by a Mike Boone feature on Weinfeld and me that looks at why we decided to put this together.  You can find a link to Boone's piece here. 

A great honour to also get listed on Puck Headlines on the Puck Daddy blog here.

 

Don't take the academic stuff in this one too serious.

Pondering the Permutations of Therrien 2.0.

With As The Habs World Turns set to break for the offseason, fans and pundits have expressed polarized responses to rookie GM/Director Marc Bergevin’s cliffhanger decision to hire Michel Therrien to coach the Canadiens.  While some are willing to give Therrien a chance, others expect his second stint to be no better than his first.  To provide a dispassionate perspective as the free agent frenzy continues on the slow fade to summer, we used a “moneypuck” inspired approach to assess the coach’s potential.

This past season, over-achieving coaches like Dave Tippett (Phoenix), Barry Trotz (Nashville), and Kevin Dineen (Florida) got the most out of their players and brought teams not considered to be outstanding on paper to the playoffs.  By contrast, an under-achieving coach like Terry Murray (LA) presided over a team that failed to live up to its potential, and was replaced by Darryl Sutter whose success requires no chronicling for championship-starved followers of the bleu, blanc, et rouge.  Like all fans, we wonder where Therrien will fall in relation to these trends.

Successful over-achieving coaches must motivate their players, as individuals and as a team, prepare strategies for the season (systems and lines), and develop tactics suited to the specific challenges offered by each opponent.  Fighting off the visceral temptation to join the doubters, we pondered over how we could use our sociological expertise to make a fair and systematic prediction about how Therrien will stack up the second time around.

Effective strategic and tactical preparation is premised upon making realistic assessments of a team’s talent.  When Therrien used his opening press conference to evaluate his new players, we decided to use some statistical data to test his claims.  Among other possibilities, overly generous or naïve remarks by the coach could be seen as indicating poor talent assessment skills.  They would also provide credibility to the fear that a pathway had been cleared towards a redux of Therrien 1.0.

Therrien identified the first line (Desharnais, Cole, Pacioretty), the goalie (Carey Price), the young defenseman (PK Subban), and the second line centre (Tomas Plekanec) as highly talented core players with whom he was ready to work to ensure that the 15th place finish would be an aberration.  We compared statistics of these players with equivalent players from the 16 teams that qualified for the playoffs this past season, focusing specifically on the final four.  To our surprise, the results yield promise for Therrien 2.0.

All statistics in our analysis were taken from Nhl.com.  To put together data on first and second lines, we located records of game-day team lineups from this year’s playoffs and compared them with records of team lineups from the second half of the regular season.  Considering factors like injuries during the season and line rotation adjustments for match-ups, we assembled first and second line combinations for each team in our sample that we considered to be representative of what the teams used, or intended to use, for the 2011-2012 NHL season.

Compared to the playoff teams, only five team’s first lines (Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, San Jose, Boston, and LA) scored more points than the Habs first trio during the regular season.  Twelve of the sixteen playoff teams did NOT rely on placing their top three point getters on their first line as the Habs did this past season.  Though Therrien got this one right, the numbers also confirm the widely held view that the relative strength of the Habs first line masked an overall lack of offensive depth.

Carey Price tied for 12th out of all goalies in regular season wins.  Among the highest winning goalies, Price tied for 13th in save percentage.  Goalies from three final four playoff teams (Jonathan Quick, Mike Smith, and Henrik Lundqvist) finished in the top five in both regular season wins and save percentage.  As Therrien suggested recently, there is room for improvement.  The numbers also suggest that many pundits and fans are right to believe that Price has the potential to be an elite goalie.

Compared to the top regular season scoring defensemen on playoff teams, Subban tied for 14th.  This solid if less than spectacular result is put into perspective by noting that six out of the playoff teams (including LA and New Jersey) had their top scoring defensemen finish out of the top10 in regular season points for defensemen.  In comparison with the top scoring defensemen on playoff teams, Subban’s +/- rating of 9 during the regular season put him in 8th place.  This is the highest result for a non-playoff team’s defenseman in this category.  The numbers suggest that Subban clearly has the potential to be an anchor on the Habs back end.

Finally, compared to second line centres on playoff teams, Plekanec finished 6th in points during the regular season.  Of the final four playoff teams, only New Jersey’s second line centre (Patrick Elias) scored more points. On the other hand, Plekanec ranked last in +/- compared to playoff team second line centres.  While the numbers show that Therrien has work to do to help Plekanec realize his offensive AND defensive potential, this depends both on the player having an effective supporting cast and on improved team defense.

The numbers show Therrien’s talent assessment skills to be quite sound.  But, and interpreting the meaning of the numbers differently, in systematically confirming that Therrien demonstrated good judgment in his decision to parrot the conventional wisdom on the team’s strengths, we have still left a tough question about last year’s Habs unanswered:  Did a 15th place team with a solid core of players reveal a coaching regime that had no clue or did it reek of other deficiencies that not even a Toe Bake, Scotty Bowman, or Jacques Lemaire could overcome on his own?

Regardless of how one interprets the numbers, what can anyone fairly predict at this time about whether Therrien can take this core, develop it and the other players, and get them to over-achieve?

A sociologist would argue that there are many variables that determine coaching success, but no scholarly training is needed to safely predict that Therrien cannot act alone.  All loyal fans of a team with a painful recent history of poor trades and ineptitude in retaining or developing its homegrown talent know that Bergevin and his impressive-on-paper team have a key role to play.  So, as barbecue season heats up, we hope that this exercise reminds all fans, and especially the coach’s doubters, that it is at least as important to pray that Bergevin can channel an inner Kenny Holland (or Dean Lombardi!) as it is to agonize over whether it’s within the realm of possibility that Therrien’s hiatus has given him what he needs to channel an inner Darryl Sutter.