Hockey Enforcer + Twitter = More Than Just A Rant

In this piece, published on the All Habs online hockey magazine, I go beyond most mainstream sports media and blog accounts in unpacking the Krys Barch Twitter outburst against the NHL owners.

While most media coverage either questioned the significance of Barch's comments or challenged the player's judgment for suggesting that fans feel sorry for him during the hockey lockout, I explore how Barch's position of marginality in the NHL may allow for additional interpretations of the meaning of his words.  In addition to providing insights into the status of solidarity among the players, I suggest that the Barch Tweets give insight into the particular anxieties of the NHL fighter as well as supply an opportunity to assess the role of new media in fan involvement and mobilization vis-a-vis the ongoing NHL lockout.

You can read the online version here.  

Krys Barch, Messages From The Margins

By Avi Goldberg

There has been a fair amount of debate surrounding the Krys Barch Twitter rant from last Saturday night and whether there was any big picture significance to the thoughts of a marginal NHL player.  Judging from the media coverage of the incident, in which the analysis has mostly alternated between slim and scathing, skepticism reigns.  Taking Barch’s marginal status a little more seriously, however, provides an opening for deeper interpretation.  Since people on the margins of social contexts have vantage points of their surroundings that are not as available to everyone else, I would say that the Barch comments do contain some important observations that are worthy of further discussion.

The most obvious significance of Barch’s Twitter talk pertains to the NHL labour negotiation. 

Collective negotiations between two sides in a dispute require that both parties demonstrate solidarity to the public and to each other.  The recent Jimmy Devellano diatribe against the players not only showed the challenge of keeping members of a group in line but also that the owners appear to be steadfastly united in their resolve to resist the players’ claims.

While the fine levied against Devellano provides evidence that Gary Bettman wields a heavy hand in keeping the owners quiet, Donald Fehr’s efforts to forge a new culture of unity among the players has also been noted.  We know that many of the owners have the means to wait things out, but in going rogue, Barch alerts us to the potential that exists for more economically marginal groups of players to speak out against the defined interests of the NHLPA should the cost of lost income become too hard for them to bear.

Beyond lockout politics, a second insight arises from asking what the Barch comments might reveal about the particular anxieties of players like him in today’s NHL.

In referring to the pain his body has endured, his consumption of alcohol, his concern for his ability to provide for his growing family, and in his insinuation that the owners are taking away his ability to do the job he loves, Barch’s pleas put health, safety, and existential threats to hockey’s enforcers on uncomfortable public display.  Not withstanding the influence of alcohol, what would lead him to want to do that?

To establish his credibility, Barch made explicit linkages between the work experiences of hockey fighters and those of other blue collar workers.  While this comparison aims to draw empathy by highlighting the especially wide gaps in privilege that separate the fourth line hockey players from the owners, it may also have been delivered as way to publicly rationalize the on and off-ice stresses and coping strategies that distinguish hockey enforcers from their more widely serviceable teammates and union brethren.

Interpreting Barch’s remarks as expressing a pre-emptive effort to normalize his hockey job does not require logic to be stretched too far.  With acceptance of the fighter’s role as valuable in today’s NHL not nearly as secure as it used to be, in addition to losing their income, enforcers are hovering in a perceived position of weakness. 

A final insight relates to the role of new media in the current version of the lockout.

Is digital media allowing fans to exert leverage on the hockey negotiators in the same manner as protesters are believed to have used online networking to gain new opportunities to shape domestic politics during the Arab Spring?  Or, can the potentials for rapid and wide dissemination of player sentiment on the internet be harnessed to push the league into compromises that it otherwise would not have felt pressure to make?  Does Barch’s Twitter commentary, and its immediate repercussions, yield any tentative answers? 

Getting ordinary people to leave their routines to act in support of a cause requires more than just anger.  Without leadership, strategy, incentives, peer pressure, prominent allies, and meaningful bonds between would be foot soldiers, the translation of anger into effective action usually does not occur.  Had the tweets been written by Sidney Crosby or Claude Giroux, and had they been accompanied by a call for fans to take coordinated action against the NHL, perhaps a new media mobilization potential could have been initiated.  Because they were authored by a relatively marginal hockey figure, with limited public prestige and influence, they have had little traction.  They can be classified as nothing more than one digital narrative of complaint among many others.      

Digital media are currently providing opportunities for fans to communicate with each other about their frustrations and to independently express their individual opinions about the lockout.  Conditions can change, but despite recent claims to the contrary, the deepening of this digital interaction is currently containing the anger to the blogosphere and the twitterverse rather than channelling it in opposition to its perceived source.

Krys Barch was understandably taken to task for tweeting that fans should empathize with athletes who risk losing the potential to continue to earn millions of dollars a year, but our inability to relate to his claims of economic vulnerability is not the only message here.  Seeing him as a player whose specific hockey job may be on the line, and who publicly vented his fears through a communications medium whose independent power to wield influence can easily be exaggerated, Barch’s tweets may signal the anxiety he feels about his ability to control his own life as much as they reveal his anger over the owners’ refusal to agree to the players’ terms for concluding a new CBA.

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.

Let's Not Forget Boogaard, Rypien, & Belak

This piece, published in the Montreal Gazette's hockey blog, Hockey Inside Out (HIO), asks whether we have forgotten last summer's hockey tragedy when three former NHL enforcers lost their lives within a ridiculously short period of time.  After reviewing the events of last summer, and the responses to it in the national media, I suggest that there are three unanswered questions about the deaths that need to be addressed if the hockey community wants to ensure that this type of tragedy never happens again.  

Thanks to Mike Boone of the Gazette for including this piece on HIO.  You can find the link to the HIO version here.  

We Can’t Find a Solution If We Forget About the Problem

By Avi Goldberg

In the aftermath of tragedy, members of a community join together, reflect on their priorities, consider alternative ways of living, and then slowly return to the routines that marked their lives prior to the upheaval they experienced. As painful memories and feelings fade over time, it is common that important questions or lessons that arise from difficult circumstances are lost.  One year after the summer sports columnist Bruce Arthur described as “wretched” for the hockey community, have we settled into the forgetting stage of the post-tragedy sequence?

With the Olympics on and the NHL staring at a potential work stoppage once again, it is easy to overlook that we have passed the anniversary of the deaths of Derek Boogaard and Rick Rypien and are nearing one year since Wade Belak took his life.  Last summer, however, as the cumulative news of each individual loss looked ominously like a trend, mourning players, league officials, and fans had to digest the fact that three former players, all enforcers, lost their lives within a freakishly short period of time.  As the deaths coincided with a period during which heightened attention was being directed at the effects of head shots and concussions, the game of hockey itself came under scrutiny.

A tough question was asked:  Was NHL hockey in general, and the enforcer’s role in particular, responsible for the tragedy?

Journalists, hockey insiders, and a range of experts and regular folks used Canada’s national newspapers to weigh in.  While some assigned near-total responsibility to the NHL and called for the elimination of fighting, others endorsed the enforcer’s rightful place in the game and challenged the notion that the three deaths be viewed as anything more than coincidence.  The commentators’ words demonstrated unity in the experience of grief, but they betrayed a lack of consensus on whether the facts surrounding the deaths pointed to a common cause.

As a tragic summer turned into autumn, the new NHL season began.  And following a nasty exchange of recriminations between Don Cherry and former enforcers over the significance of the deaths – plus a New York Times investigation into the life and death of Derek Boogaard – fighters kept doing what they do to keep roster spots in the NHL.

In response to heated public debate that threatened to boil over last summer, the NHL and the Players Association announced they would collaborate to investigate the circumstances of the deaths.  Also, league programs designed to assist players in trouble would be evaluated to ensure they deliver appropriate care.  Almost one full year later, we await news of even preliminary ideas that may be emerging from this NHL/NHLPA commitment.

For hockey observers who want to know what the league is thinking, and possibly preparing to do, it seems as though the tragedy has been forgotten not long after it was on near constant display.

Supportive of fighting in hockey or not, those who see only coincidence in last summer’s deaths can tolerate the silence.  After all, how can a remedy be found for unwanted outcomes that lack a shared cause?  But even acknowledging that there are limits to explanations of human behaviour, provocative questions emerging from last summer’s media exchange remain unanswered and untouched in public conversations today.

The most obvious question pertains to the growing body of research that demonstrates clear connections between blows to the head and serious physiological and psychological harm.  In light of this knowledge, the NHL has moved to reduce negative consequences of hits to the head by regulating open ice hitting more stringently.  But how can the league avoid considering ways to address similar harm resulting from players exchanging bare-knuckle punches to the face and head?

Hockey enforcers are not the only workers that face pressures on the job site.  But more questions are raised by non-physical challenges that may be dangerous to a hockey enforcer's health.  These include:

• daily battles to manage emotions in order to be always ready to fight

• amplified forecasting of economic and career vulnerability during life after hockey

• working in a culture of winning and toughness that discourages those whose role it is to patrol and protect the safety of others from venting their emotions. 

As each of these experiences can strip away at the perception of control over one's fate, it may be necessary to explore whether these specific job requirements put the hockey enforcer through psychological duress not experienced by fellow players.

A final question relates to the positive outcomes that can emerge when influential bystanders join the process of turning a private problem into a public issue.  During the economic conflict in the NHL in 2004-2005, for example, Brendan Shanahan was praised for bringing hockey minds together to discuss and repair parts of the game that had broken down.  Aside from the players, former and current GMs, scientists, eminent members of the media, and empathetic citizens offered poignant and provocative thoughts on last summer’s tragedy.  People with varying types of expertise and experience are concerned about this issue. Can respected individuals among them be tasked with coordinating an official effort to ensure that answers to all remaining questions be pursued?

Even following a thoroughgoing public investigation, it is likely that people will continue to disagree over whether a need exists to treat symptoms or whether there is a cause to be rooted out.  Whereas good folks hesitated to seek informed answers last summer due to fears that emotions would get in the way or due to the sense that the timing was not right, now is the moment for members of the hockey community to act.  Failure to do so suggests the deaths of Derek Boogaard, Rick Rypien and Wade Belak have been forgotten.

And that would mean we are OK – indeed, complicit – in allowing the fighters' tragedy to happen again.

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.