I decided to take a break from writing while the NHL regular season was on hiatus. My personal life has had a fair share of upheaval recently (death in the family, house buying), so the break was necessary for my brain. The regular season gets back on track today, and we’ll enter the final push of the NHL schedule before playoffs.
I didn’t end up watching very much of the Four Nations Face Off either. By all accounts, it was a runaway success for the league, and hockey as a whole. The parts I did see looked like some incredible hockey, and the league did a great job with scheduling games at good times for the North American crowd (I can’t imagine those from Sweden or Finland were able to watch their teams in action a whole lot).
I have to admit I was wrong about the Four Nations Faceoff. What I thought would be another bumbling escapade by the NHL was actually done very well and generated way more interest than I thought it would. In fact, it was some of the most watched hockey in years. Whether the Olympics next year draws this same level of interest will remain to be seen, but kudos to the NHL for taking a mundane all-star game and turning it into something a lot of people (including players) cared about.
Unless you’ve been lucky enough to live under a rock, you’ve noticed the…uhh…insanity going on in the U.S. of late. What started as a completely stupid and nonsensical campaign talk of making an entire sovereign nation the 51st U.S. state turned into geopolitical tension between longtime allies, complete with Twitter exchanges between Canadian PM Justin Trudeau and U.S. shithead President Musk Trump. Talk of tariffs and annexation fueled a rivalry that spilled into this tournament, culminating in the Championship game between the two nations in Boston, which almost felt like it had been planned this way all along.
It might as well have been “Two Nations Face off, featuring guest stars Finland and Sweden.” No disrespect to either of those two teams…they played incredible hockey as well. Geopolitics just made their games feel less relevant.
I don’t mean anything to sound disrespectful to Finland or Sweden, because some of the best players in the world come from both nations. One of my all-time favorite players (Peter Forsberg) hails from Sweden, and Finland has also given us some truly great players, past and present.
But it’s hard to not view the round-robin games leading up to the U.S. and Canada as anything but filler in retrospect. Leading up to the game, a fair amount of trash talk had been done (mostly by the Tkachuk brothers, it seemed), and the U.S. ultimately took the game by a 3-1 score, after a litany of fights and physical play.
Fast-forward to Thursday, Feb. 20th, after the U.S. had already secured a bid for the Championship and Finland failed at playing spoiler, the two nations rematched for all the marbles.
Prior to this game, U.S. GM Bill Guerin had called shitlord Trump to invite him to the game, which was followed by a “presidential” phone call to the team later in the day. Lots of shit talking was done as well. And in the end, Connor McJesus himself would win the day for the Canadians, with a 3-2 OT win.
I have rewritten this newsletter several times, aiming to try not to be political. It has been impossible to do so, however, as this tournament boiled down to two once-friendly nations now involved in an arbitrary pissing match. Canada began booing the U.S. national anthem at hockey games, leading to Americans returning the favor at games here. By the time we made it to the Four Nations championship in Boston, it became a dick-measuring contest, where the U.S. was hellbent on being the bigger asshole.
Winning this tournament felt like it was necessary for Canada. It felt like it went well beyond simply being a hockey game for them. PM Justin Trudeau’s tweets following the game said it all:
I am from the U.S., served my country in the Marine Corps for five years, and generally held a sense of pride in my home country for a long time. This pride has slowly eroded in recent years and with this recent unprovoked nonsense, I find myself anything but proud to be an American these days.
Instead, I found myself on Thursday rooting against my home country. The same country I used to proudly fly flags for. The same country whose military I proudly enlisted into and vowed to go to war for. The same country whose President I was honored to meet more than a decade ago at the conclusion of my enlistment.
Whether you are a Republican or Democrat, left or right, or none of those, you cannot deny that the U.S.’ bullshit against a longtime ally like Canada is completely unprovoked and unnecessary (this says nothing of our hostility towards Mexico as well). The claims that are used to justify this hostility are an outright lie.
As a hockey fan, I’m glad we got an exciting tournament played by some of the best players in the world for four nations who clearly have a love of the game.
As an American, it felt like the good guys won in the end.
Thanks, as always, for reading.
-Kevin