The Hart conundrum

When Alexander Ovechkin won the Hart Memorial Trophy as the NHL's most valuable player, several Canadians were upset. It literally took minutes for the Globe to post Ross Duhatschek's column, titled "Ovechkin’s Hart win proves it’s time to redefine meaning of the award". Duhatschek's reasoning is that the Hart trophy rightfully belongs to Sidney Crosby, and if the criteria are such that Crosby doesn't win it, the criteria need to be changed.

According to Duhatschek, defining the Hart as the MVP trophy "trips up voters, and it did again this year, when Alex Ovechkin of the Washington Capitals won his second MVP award over Sidney Crosby of the Pittsburgh Penguins". This is a fantastic notion: he's actually saying that the people who voted for the Hart in accordance with the official criteria made a mistake. The only way this can possibly make any sense is if you think the actual definition of the Hart trophy is "the trophy Sidney Crosby wins".

I've written plenty about the cult of Crosby, that is, how the Canadian-dominated hockey media has defined him as the best player since Mario Lemieux, if not Wayne Gretzky. As evidenced by his Penguins being completely dominated and swept by the Bruins, the reality of Crosby has never lived up to his anointed status. When the Penguins first made the playoff, Canadian broadcaster TSN took a fan poll on whether the Penguins would win three, four or five Stanley Cups in the next ten years. They won one, with the Conn Smythe trophy for playoff MVP going to Evgeni Malkin. None of this stops us from being deluged with a constant vomit of praise for Crosby, so it's hardly surprising that someone like Duhatschek can argue in earnest that not giving the Hart trophy to Crosby is not an opinion different from his but an objective mistake. In fact, Duhatschek seems to think his fellow voters are in on a conspiracy he calls "the push to rehabilitate Ovechkin’s image". This is quite startling.

The argument that the Hart needs to be redefined so that Crosby wins it more was enthusiastically supported on Twitter by the Hockey News' Adam Proteau, who has previously argued that the NHL needs to be more political, but only in ways that he likes, and that pronouncing foreign names correctly is racism. He, too, feels that the Hart trophy needs to go to Crosby more, and has developed the argument in a column titled "Why the Hart Trophy should go to most outstanding player".

Proteau first argues, like Duhatschek, that giving the Hart trophy to the most valuable player punishes players on good teams:

In essence, by sticking with the literal interpretation of most valuable, you are ruling out great players who play on talent-rich teams and will almost always be giving the Hart to a player on a playoff bubble team. That’s punishment for something beyond any player’s control.

Again, this only makes sense if you think that those players are somehow a priori entitled to the Hart. It's no surprise that this argument is made about Crosby. It's also senseless. By the same criterion, the Art Ross trophy punishes players playing on more defensively responsible teams. The Vezina punishes goalies playing on more wide-open offensive teams. Certainly the way the Conn Smythe trophy is awarded punishes really good playoff players whose teams lose. And so on. Why is this only a problem when Crosby doesn't get a trophy Canadian pundits think belongs to him? Why is it a problem at all, ever?

Proteau's concluding argument is that "most valuable" is a vague category, while "best" is somehow obvious.

Unfortunately, the manner by which the NHL determines its regular season MVP is far different. In making their biggest individual honor about a nebulous concept and not a more inclusive term like excellence, the NHL has allowed semantics to drag down the voting and dilute its results.“Value” is in the beholder’s eye, but everybody knows what “outstanding” entails. And the sooner the NHL recognizes that adjusting and clarifying the language behind the awards will lead to more accurate results, the better off the voting process, and the Hart itself, will be.

Of course, if you drink the Crosby Kool-Aid, certainly this is true. But for anyone else this is complete nonsense. The only NHL awards that aren't value judgements, "in the beholder's eye", if you will, are the Art Ross, Rocket Richard, Crozier and Jennings. Oh, and whatever they're calling the Plus/Minus these days, if it still exists. There's no way "best player" is somehow less arbitrary than MVP, unless of course you've decided before the fact who the best player is.

As it happens, Proteau undermines his argument himself by identifying the most valuable players:

If you took Crosby away from the Penguins – as the injury bug did again on March 30 – would they plummet from the top spot in the Eastern Conference? The proof is right in front of you. By contrast, if you took John Tavares away from the New York Islanders or removed Sergei Bobrovsky from the Columbus Blue Jackets, would those two teams be in playoff position? Most hockey people would say no.

So even though Proteau disagrees with the definition of most valuable player, he still correctly identifies the two prime candidates for the Hart based on those criteria. So how is that more nebulous than his suggestion of "best player"?

I agree with Proteau that the Hart process would be better, and give more accurate results, if you will, if the voters agreed on what they were voting for. In my mind, the easiest way to accomplish this would be if everyone could just agree to vote on the actual criteria of the Hart Trophy, instead of something they've made up. As near as I can tell, the only real case for redefining the Hart Trophy is so that Crosby would win it more often. If that's what you want, why not just make the Hart the trophy for the player who wears #87 on the Pittsburgh Penguins? Problem solved.

In other words, the real problem Proteau and Duhatschek have with the Hart is that reality is not living up to the demand that Crosby be the best hockey player of his generation in such a dominant way that everyone is forced to acknowledge his Canadian superiority. That isn't a problem with the Hart trophy, it's a problem with Crosby, or more specifically with the hockey-based chauvinist cult of Canadian supremacy that both Duhatschek and Proteau subscribe to. The fact that Proteau often criticizes the racist excesses of this same cult while producing garbage like the ridiculously racist tweet on player names is just testament to the deep level of confusion he seems to be laboring under.

Obviously rhe criteria for the NHL's major awards aren't set in stone. If there's a reasonable case to be made that the Hart trophy should be redefined, then by all means make it. I'd be happy to listen. It's just that "Crosby should win it more" isn't one.

A convict's paranoia

A convict's paranoia is as thick as the prison wall - and just as necessary. Why should we have faith in anyone? Even our wives and lovers whose beds we have shared, with whom we have shared the tenderest moments and the most delicate relations, leave us after a while, put us down, cut us clean aloose and treat us like they hate us, won't even write us a letter, send us a Christmas card every other year, or a quarter for a pack of cigarettes or a tube of toothpaste now and then. All society shows the convict its ass and expects him to kiss it: the convict feels like kicking it or putting a bullet in it. A convict sees a man's fangs and claws and learns quickly to bare and unsheath his own, for real and final. To maintain a hold on the ideals and sentiments of civilization in such circumstances is probably impossible. How much more incredible is it, then, while rooted in this pit, to fall in love, and with a lawyer! Use a lawyer, yes: use anybody. Even tell the lawyer that you're in love. But you will always know when you are lying and even if you could fool the lawyer you could never manage to fool yourself.

And why does it make you sad to see how everything hangs by such thin and whimsical threads? Because you're a dreamer, an incredible dreamer, with a tiny spark hidden somewhere inside you which cannot die, which even you cannot kill or quench and which tortures you horribly because all the odds are against its continual burning. In the midst of the foulest decay and putrid savagery, this spark speaks to you of beauty, of human warmth and kindness, of goodness, of greatness, of heroism, of martyrdom, and it speaks to you of love.
- Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, p. 32

I don't agree with much of his ideology, and am more than a little disturbed by the fact that he was an unrepentant serial rapist, but the man did write some good lines on occasion.

Krista Siegrieds: Patriarchy

Yes, it's a good thing that Finland's representative at the Eurovision Song Contest has campaigned in favor of marriage equality. And yes, it's a good thing that her stage show included a lady kissing another lady, which allegedly made Turkish TV drop the whole contest. But have you noticed that the lyrics to her song are actually kinda terrible?

Spying on you undercover, drinking coffee with your mother
Am I getting closer?
Baby, I feel like a sinner, skipping dinner to get thinner

If you weigh too much, no-one will want to marry you! DIET

Where is my proposal?

Because obviously the female narrator can't be active. That would be subversive!

I’m your slave and you’re my master

...

Oh baby, come on, take your shot
So marry me, I’ll be your queen bee
I’ll love you endlessly
I do it for you, for you, for you
Yeah, I do it for you, marry me, baby
I’ll play your game, I’ll change my last name
I’ll walk the walk of shame
I do it for you, for you, for you
Yeah, I do it for you, marry me baby

Marry me and I will submit to you completely, like a woman should

Oh oh, oh oh oh, ding dong
Oh oh, oh oh oh, ding dong

I know where the future’s heading, I can see my perfect wedding
Isn’t that just bracing?
I don’t think there are no ladies who will give you cuter babies

MARRY ME FOR MY REPRODUCTIVE CAPACITY

Isn’t that amazing?

I’m your slave and you’re my master

I think it's fair to say she isn't exaggerating.

Oh baby, come on, take your shot
So marry me, I’ll be your queen bee
I’ll love you endlessly
I do it for you, for you, for you
Yeah, I do it for you, marry me, baby
I’ll play your game, I’ll change my last name
I’ll walk the walk of shame
I do it for you, for you, for you
Yeah, I do it for you, marry me baby
Oh oh, oh oh oh, ding dong
Oh oh, oh oh oh, ding dong
Oh oh, oh oh oh oh oh, ding dong
Oh oh, oh oh oh, ding dong

This is the day, I don’t wanna wait much longer now
If you run away, I’m gonna find you anyhow
Oh, yeah, yeah, oh yeah
Whatchu waiting, whatchu waiting
Whatchu waiting, whatchu waiting for?

Hopefully not for you to do anything. Women are passive, men are active.

So marry me, I’ll be your queen bee
I’ll love you endlessly
I do it for you, for you, for you
Yeah, I do it for you, marry me, baby
I’ll play your game, I’ll change my last name
I’ll walk the walk of shame
I do it for you, for you, for you
Yeah, I do it for you, marry me baby
Oh oh, oh oh oh, ding dong
Oh oh, oh oh oh, ding dong
Oh oh, oh oh oh oh oh, ding dong
Oh oh, oh oh oh, ding dong

So to put it bluntly, the song is sexist tripe. Pure patriarchy at work: if you, woman, conform to our society's beauty standards by torturing your body and remaining passive, a man will one day select you to be his personal slave. Of course, this kind of rampant sexism is the norm for love songs, but the problem is that because of the singer's association with the equal marriage campaign, her song is being promoted as progressive. Which it quite clearly isn't. I don't care how much of an ally she is, she shouldn't get a free pass for this sexist bullshit.

The uneven surface, 2013 edition

A lot of people have written and talked about how awful the officiating in this year's NHL playoffs has been, and I agree with them. Pretty much the only time the refereeing made any sense in the first round was in the seventh games where the refs called nothing. So then the second round starts, and we're wondering what the refs are going to do now. Sure enough, in the first period of the Ottawa-Pittsburgh game, it's totally different again. Several penalties are called that would never have been penalties in the conference quarterfinals. Until the second period, which Ottawa dominated, when the refs put their whistles in their pockets and call nothing. Brooks Orpik crosschecks a guy in the face right in front of the ref? Nothing. Until 37:57, when Cory Conacher gets a ridiculous penalty. Yeah, he had his free hand out and impeded the Pittsburgh player, so it's a good call - if you ignore the entire period that preceded it.

I've believed since the 2009 playoffs that the NHL's referees favor the Penguins. Certainly not to the extent that the games are fixed; then the Penguins would have won more than one Cup in that time. I'm not even saying this is anything the league has brought about. Back when I followed the Finnish league, there was actual data showing that the referees did, in fact, favor one team clearly over the others. There was never any indication that the league was behind it, or even any credible theory as to why they would be. I'm not suggesting there's one here either. But I've written about this countless times: game after game, the Penguins are almost guaranteed to get a late power play in the second and third periods on an incredibly soft call. No other team gets that.

Certainly the Sens lost last night's game themselves; they couldn't capitalize on their second period chances and gave up two goals on bad plays by defensemen. So to suggest the referees decided the game would be completely wrong. But the Pittsburgh penalty, the inexplicable soft call on the opposing team at the end of the period, is still very much with us in 2013.

The perverse depravity of air power

I'm reading Colonel Walter J. Boyne's The Influence of Air Power upon History, and got no further than the second page before reading this:

This is fortunate, for questions about both the influence and the decisiveness of air power were never more important than today, when the world is faced with an entirely new kind of terrorist-driven war-making, with new kinds of enemies, shadowy groups of warped individuals who murder in the guise of religion. These new enemies have converted their weakness in numbers and arms into the terror of an especially depraved concept of "asymmetric warfare" in which the killing of innocents of any nation is substituted for meeting the warriors of an enemy state in battle. Neither air power advocates nor naysayers ever anticipated the sheer perversity of the terrorists' attacks, from bombing kindergartens to crashing highjacked airliners into buildings to the threat of using weapons of mass destruction in cities around the world.

That is an astounding paragraph. Never mind the ludicrous idea that terrorism is somehow new; this is a notion our more blinkered American friends have proven themselves fully capable of holding. I have once witnessed an irate American declaring to some Brits and continental Europeans born in the seventies that they can't possibly understand what it's like to live with the threat of terrorism. What's more striking is Boyne's appeal to "air power advocates", especially in a book dedicated to the history of air power.

After the Great War, European military thinkers were determined to avoid a repeat of the senseless mass slaughter of attrition warfare, and most of them turned to depraved concepts of asymmetric warfare that substituted the killing of innocents for meeting the warriors of the enemy state in battle. The great advocate of strategic bombing, Italian general Giulio Douhet specifically advocated killing and terrorizing enemy civilians in order to defeat their nation, and thinkers and planners all over Europe followed his lead. British advocates of strategic bombing like the socialist geneticist J.B.S. Haldane and ex-officer turned military correspondant B.H. Liddell Hart enthusiastically added chemical weapons to the mix, calling for not only threatening but actually using weapons of mass destruction in cities around the world. Even in the sixties, armored warfare pioneer and fascist occultist J.F.C. Fuller railed against popular sentimentality, in his view the only obstacle to victory through chemical warfare.

The Second World War saw no use of chemical weapons, but the doctrine of strategic bombing was put into full effect, killing well over a million civilians, mostly German and Japanese. How Colonel Boyne manages to see this as meeting enemy warriors in battle is beyond me. He refers to the strategic bombing campaign against Germany in the paragraph immediately following the one I quoted. I'm pretty sure there were kindergartens in Dresden and Hiroshima; a logic that sees a terrorist bombing of one as an unimaginable atrocity and the aerial bombing of one as an event that apparently never even happened is beyond me.

The colonel's own career adds a twist of pure absurdity to his denounciation. In the 1950's, he himself flew strategic bombers for the US Air Force. At that time, the US Air Force's mission could very well be described as threatening to use weapons of mass destruction in cities around the world. Their specific wartime role was the mass slaughter of enemy civilians with nuclear weapons. Certainly the strategic role and the practice of a nuclear deterent is vastly different from the reality of a terrorist attack, but membership in the only organization to ever use nuclear weapons to murder tens of thousands of civilians should not lend itself particularly well to Boyne's brand of moralizing.

The victims of terrorism are just as dead as the victims of strategic bombing and other aerial warfare operations are. They all died because someone somewhere decided that these particular innocents were worth murdering to further his or her - almost invariably his - political goals. As long as we condemn the killing of innocents, indeed killing, selectively, we empower the exact attitudes that lead to more of it.

The NHL and foreign names

As anyone who watches the NHL knows, North American hockey broadcasters don't have the faintest idea how to pronounce European names. At first I thought it was simple ignorance, but I was wrong: in fact, the travesty of language we European NHL fans are used to cringing at comes courtesy of the NHL Pronounciation Guide. You can find the 2002 copy here. We'll do an exercise: I'll give you the NHL "pronounciation", you try to figure out who the hell it is. Answers in the hyperlinks!

suh LAH nee (answer)
nih tee MAK ee (answer)
NEE nuh muh (answer)
huh LEHN ee uhz (answer)

These are 2002 examples, but I assure you, the quality of the product hasn't changed one bit. My Russian isn't nearly good enough to comment, except to say that my guesses have been better than the NHL's, but here's a Swedish example:

SHOH struhm (answer)

Yeah, you probably guessed that one, but seriously, even surly Finnish teenagers flunking compulsory Swedish class know better than that.

For any readers who don't speak Finnish or Swedish, take my word for it: the people behind that "pronounciation guide" don't have the faintest idea what they're doing. But it's not just that the league and the broadcasters don't know how to pronounce European names, it's that they're deliberately disseminating, almost mandating, the incorrect pronounciation of those names. In the information age, frankly, it's offensive. It cannot be beyond the league and the broadcasters to find out how players' names are actually pronounced. That they refuse to do so is, quite simply, racist.

There is, of course, a political side to this. The most notable exponent of mispronounciation is, unsurprisingly, Don Cherry, whose renditions of European names are, well, wrong. He's admitted to doing it on purpose, because he's a racist. That isn't surprising, but it was a little surprising to read this tweet from Adam Proteau of the Hockey News, one of the more liberal voices in hockey:

So remember this: according to Proteau, pronouncing foreign names correctly is racist. I have to admit, I don't even know what to say to that. On reflection, I suppose it shows how deeply internalized the racism is. Even to a liberal commentator who regularly calls out Cherry and his ilk for their racist and misogynistic nonsense, the notion of finding out how to pronounce a foreign name is so repulsive that he creates a convoluted, MRA-esque pseudo-logic that makes respecting a foreign language racist. I don't think I'm going to be able to read his columns the same way again.

We, at least, can try to be constructive about this. To avoid being racist against our North American friends, I suggest that if Finnish readers want to refer to the creator of the NHL "pronounciation" guide, broadcaster Mike Emrich, they pronounce his name miik umrääk. Be sure to respect hockey journalism and avoid racism by carefully enunciating Adam Proteau as älän prötöö, and Don Cherry's robustly Canadian name is correctly pronounced reimond luksuri jätst. Remember: they would want you to say it like that. Because the "correct" way would be racist.

My 2013 IIHF World Championship picks

Subtitled If I Hurry, I Can Get This In Before the Game. Don't worry, it'll be short. I've never seen a Finnish team this lousy. I only recognize five or six names on the roster. It'll be a literal miracle if we're not knocked out in the quarterfinals. We may even struggle to get that far. The game against Austria in a week's time is probably going to be big, and that tells you all you need to know. As we say in Finnish, we've lost this game.