by Matt Barr

Tiptoe around your readers' sensibilities

When we wrote for LCS Hockey and then the late, not lamented Trolleytracks Hockey in the late 90s and early aughts, sanctimonious little girls rarely complained if you said things like Darius Kasparaitis "seems as if he likes to hurt people" and is "pure, concentrated evil." Usually, the boys reading at least would write in to say that for someone so uptight you sure have nice things to say about Dale Hunter and Chris Chelios, who are the real maniacs but oh, wait, they're Anglo-Canadian and/or Greek-American, you stupid xenophobic pussy; or that you were jealous of the Penguins' success (this is how long ago this was).

If there'd been someone called Jarkko Ruutu back then, chances are you'd have seen quite a bit of online writing and discussion centering around his "almost killing" Jaromir Jagr, though admittedly, much of it would have been in favor of Jagr being killed. How can you tell Jagr's almost been killed, you might read, when he acts like it every time he's so much as nudged?

Times have evidently changed, which isn't surprising, I suppose, given how standing up for a victim of irrational, spittle-flecked hatred, even if you have to invent one, is the surest path to self-esteem in so many other areas of discourse today. When you can't run a Most Hated NHL Player poll without someone succumbing to the vapors, it's time to stop talking about hockey altogether. Maybe we can admire the color schemes of third jerseys, and that would be ok.

UPDATE: It's worse than I thought out there.

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