#24 – Not Sure If Serious or Playing Dumba

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This is the twenty-fourth post of Deke Dangle RPF Anon, a community for all your ice hockey anon meme needs.

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Comments

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

I'm sick of people talking about Phil Kessel like a reclamation project or abused dog (which some fans have literally been calling him). It's condescending and gross, and also just wrong. The Penguins didn't trade for him because they felt sorry for him and wanted to ~give him a better home~, they did it because they wanted and needed a player of his caliber to help them win. The rewriting of this narrative post-Cup win like "we were the only ones who believed in you! we made you great!!" is such self-aggrandizing bullshit. Sure, he was underappreciated by a lot of people and got a hard time from the media, but he was already one of the best players in the world in his position when he was in Toronto. The Penguins knew it, and so did most people with common sense tbh, which is why the reaction to the trade at the time was "oh shit, Kessel playing with Crosby and Malkin...". Like, I enjoy seeing Kessel showing up his haters! but for god's sake no need to dehumanize him to do that.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

I haven't seen the "we made you great" narrative. The "we made you a Stanley Cup champion", yes, because that's not about being great, that's about being on the right team at the right time.

Kessel got a lot of shit in Toronto and elsewhere. It was implied he was locker room poison, that he dragged down teams he was on, that he didn't care about winning. Hell, he didn't even make the World Cup roster despite being top US scorer at Sochi. It's really nice that the year after he gets out of Toronto, he's a champion, and it makes me happy to see him being appreciated by team, fans and Pitt media. (I'll allow that the Toronto team never seemed to not appreciate Phil, professionally and personally.)

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

na

I do kinda side-eye the Pittsburgh media for their self-congratulatory tone now considering they also bashed Kessel quite a bit during the season when he was snakebitten. (Looking at you, Super Genius.)

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

God - totally off topic but I'm tempted to start an entire venting thread about ye Olde Super Genius because I have ~opinions that I am not comfortable sharing in namespace because his herd of toxic defenders will ride in and be just as gross as is humanly possible.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

He's so transparent in playing favorites (aka the guys that are willing to go on his show) and sooooo petty.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

I thought I knew all the major Pens opinionators, but I have no idea who this is. Help a nonnie out?

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

I enjoy seeing him appreciated, too. That's different from calling him a reclamation project or comparing him to a dog. Kessel having gotten a lot of undeserved shit doesn't mean that no one knew he was a good player, and it doesn't justify being condescending about him. If you haven't seen people making those remarks, that's fine. It's obviously not you or your point of view I'm venting about, although it is even a little diminishing to say "we made you a cup champion" when the whole reason the Pens traded for him was because they thought he would help make them cup champions, not to benevolently give an opportunity to a guy they felt bad for.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

I guess that's fair enough. He was never a reclamation project like, say, Daley (And I love Daley, but his Chi numbers were terrible - he went from an afterthought to a top pairing guy.) And I agree the abused dog stuff is nonsense.

Well, we made him a Cup champion, he made us a Cup team. Definitely it wasn't an act of charity!

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

I think it's tied into this weird underdog narrative the team and its fandom have. I've been pretty amused by the salt coming out of the camp, because we don't see nearly enough attitude in hockey, but congrats on getting it together and finally not underachieving? Kessel is what, the second best American right winger (maybe the league? I'm drawing blanks)? He was exactly this good in Toronto.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

I have been really enjoying the team ostentatiously singing Phil's praises as a player and an in-the-room guy, and for that matter praising Sid's leadership endlessly. Maybe I'm just projecting, but it feels like a rebuke to certain media narratives.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

Cool.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

I have too! I don't really care about Crosby's leadership, but the whole HBK thing during the parade was great. For someone who doesn't much like the Pens, I've actually been really enjoying this Cup win. There's just a lot of great elements.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

Pen weren't underdog in regards to their forwards. They have a meh defense though. Also, Kessel is below Kane for best American winger.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

What does "second best" mean?

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

Eh, I think the saltiness is understandable. Most hockey media is really terrible, and the players have obviously heard the undeserved shitty things that were said about them when they weren't doing well. They remember that stuff, and so do fans. Winning the cup is a big accomplishment and really hard to do, no matter how long they've been "underachieving," and of course it feels good to be able to rub it in the faces of people who said you couldn't do it. But imo that's totally different from this weird attitude people have towards Kessel. It's... fetishization isn't the right word, but idk, it feels like the other side of the same coin of how his haters treated him, in a kind of dehumanizing way. But yeah, people saying that Kessel was playing the best hockey of his life in the playoffs or the Pens gave him the opportunity to be a "complete" player... no.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

people saying that Kessel was playing the best hockey of his life in the playoffs

People have also been saying that about Crosby and Letang. I don't think that's condescending. The Conn Smythe vote totals had Kessel just behind Sid. If it wasn't the best hockey of his life, it was certainly close to it.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

DA
I mean, he was playing incredible hockey because he had linemates who weren't, you know, marginal NHLers. I think the Olympics might have been the best hockey of his life, but the fact that HBK became a second line in terms of minutes is because it highlighted all the good things about his skillset. So, it was more of a joy to watch than say, him trying to drag his teammates along on the Leafs. (He did have some good linemates too, but none as good in terms of how fast he is.) So, I don't think it's because the Pens ~redeemed~ him or whatever, but he was playing better than he was on the Leafs because of the team around him.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

NA
I particularly hate this in how certain fans go really over the top with embracing the hot dog story to the point where it still feels like they're making fun of him. It's not like he gave an interview where he talked about how much he loves hot dogs, that was a probably made up story by an asshole in Toronto that imo was basically fat shaming him after he left. I know when pens fans talk about him "filling the cup with hot dogs" it's a joke, but there's also a level of "look how much we love him and his hot dogs when Toronto hated him!" but like if you really loved him why are you basically perpetuating a stupid story that was designed to make him look like a fat idiot who eats too much and therefore is lazy, or whatever.

This is only tangentially related to what you're talking about but I've been thinking about it for a while. I'm over the hot dogs and don't want to hear about them anymore, basically.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

Having listened to a fair amount of Toronto-centric media in the past few weeks I can tell you that there is absolutely the belief in that market that he was NOT one of the best players in the world and that his game had significantly changed while playing for Pittsburgh.

True or not everything I've listened to goes to this being a narrative beyond just fandom. But I'm of the mind that Toronto media might win awards for toxicity as well.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

Yeah, obviously there were people in Toronto who thought that about him (although I think they were just a really loud and nasty minority), and now they just can't admit that they were wrong/are experiencing confirmation bias. But that definitely wasn't the prevailing view of him. It's not like he had a handful of lone defenders sticking up for him, just about everyone thought he was a great player and thought that his detractors in Toronto were undervaluing him. Most fans thought the trade was a steal for the Pens.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

The other thing that's been really prevalent in the Toronto media that I've encountered is the idea that Kessel can't play with "great" players, he was supposed to play with Crosby or Malkin but instead he ended up with Bonino and Hagelin on the "third" line. And obviously only performed well there because they could cherry pick against a lesser defensive pairing.

Which I think in addition to everything else sells Hagelin and Bonino really short - they obviously aren't "generational" but it's not like he's dragging boat anchor Tanner Glass around the ice either. And as far as narrative is concerned I'm not sure the Pens win the Cup if they don't have the luxury of spreading their talent across 3 lines the way they did.

Sometimes I think the media in Toronto has just bought so hard into the fat, lazy, locker room cancer angle that they can't pull their heads out of it to see what's actually happening.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

DA

Also, Leafs fans will deny this and say it was all about rebuilding, but his fucking management and Shanahan in particular bought into the idea that Kessel was lazy, locker room cancer, and bad for the team culture. That's why he was traded for garbage. They turned him into an effigy of everything that was wrong with the former Leafs regime and lit it on fire. That wasn't just the media, people seem to forget that. The current braintrust of the Maple Leafs that everyone keeps lauding for being geniuses believed this stuff.

No player should be stuck in an environment like that so yeah, I'm glad the Penguins "rescued him" from that. I'm glad that JR was smarter than the master of the ~Shanaplan~ and took advantage of his stupidity and toxicity.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

yada
I mean, retaining salary was Pittsburgh fleecing them, but Kapanen and a first isn't total garbage. Not his worth, but not garbage either.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

da
I don't follow the Toronto media that closely, but honestly sometimes I get confused about how much the fans actually believed the Kessel narrative or how much of that was after the fact scrambling to cover up that he was basically too good and they needed to get rid of him to successfully tank for Matthews. Either way the media/ team seems to have pretty much managed to convince the fans that he was the problem and that this was all worth it before Matthews has even gotten there, which is why I hope it goes about as well as tanking for Hall/RNH/Yakupov/McDavid has gone for the Oilers.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

Toronto v. Pittsburgh- a war of views between the most rational of fanbases.