dekedangle_rpfanon | #29 – Lay, Lie, or Laine?

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

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Sorry for being clueless - I was wondering why everyone hates the Hawks and Toews so much? The way they handled Kane rape accusations seems like the obvious answer at first but people hated them before that, right? Plus I got a feeling most hockey fans on reddit think he's been falsely accused.
Jealousy? Overexposure?

Overexposure certainly has had a lot to do with it. Canadian media made a big deal of Toews' "intangibles" and used that as a basis to say Toews was the best hockey player in the world (over Crosby). A lot of hockey fandom's hype backlash stems from there.

Backlash is definitely a big part of the Toews thing - Chicago's three cups were disproportionately considered to be his work, so he was praised to the skies and scored one of the biggest contracts around. Now the Hawks have had two first round exits, Toews is evidently not the Superman he was believed to be. People who loved him are mad he's not as good as they thought, and people who rolled their eyes are gleeful at his return to earth.

Some of us hate them because of natural rivalries, but beyond that it's been elevated because of just how successful they've been. And it's not all genuinely on merit too - like any Cup win, there's been a lot of luck involved, and for awhile it looked like the Hawks were just going to have every single coin flip go their way forever. For example, when they won the Cup in 2015, Patrick Kane broke his collarbone at the exact right time in the regular season so that they could put him on IR, use the extra cap space to load up at the trade deadline, and then have him back completely healthy for the playoffs. They basically got a free $6.3 million in cap space without actually losing their best player.

Hopefully you can see how that would be extremely frustrating to see over and over again for a team you already loathe, that the NHL is already shoving in your face literally all the time. I mean, how many damn outdoor games have they played in? And Toews is sort of the epitome of the player that was shoved in our faces. If you look at his counting stats, he's good but not amazing, but somehow every intangibles argument in the world gets stapled to him to excuse it, ex. "oh, he could score 100 points every year, he just doesn't because he cares too much." Give me a fucking break. That plus the extra leash he gets from being a white Canadian is pretty infuriating, even before the rape accusations.

+1 to the being shoved in our faces. Whenever my team has a nationally televised game, the announcers always find a way to mention the Blackhawks.

And when they're not mentioning the Hawks, they're wanking about the Pens. I really hate watching games on NBC sometimes.

Hah, as a Western Conference fan and Hawks hater, I figure Capitals fans have the same set of feelings about the Pens. Even with the most recent series, the analysis is never "Fleury stood on his head and Braden Holtby was kinda dogshit," it's all about how the Penguins *~*want it more*~* and *~*know how to win*~*. The same dumb shit that everyone was saying about the Hawks before they apparently stopped wanting it more and/or forgot how to win (or maybe they just have a crappy defense, a couple of top guys who are starting to decline, and major, major salary cap problems).

Is that you, my favorite meme Blues fan? Because I'm guessing we've talked once or twice about the shared miseries of being Blues/Caps fans sharing a conference with a more successful team.

AYRT

I'm a Blues fan (what a surprise), but I doubt I'm you're favorite since I'm not around all that much. I feel like we all have the same beaten-down demeanor at this point, though.

As a Caps fan, yep, pretty much. In addition to just being not very good, those fuckers can take me from totally normal irritation at an opposing team to Rage Blackout City in no time flat. And it's not just the Pens, although that's definitely the worst iteration. Last year's Pens series was pretty much the last straw for me and this year I ended up skipping most games featuring them and/or the main NBC crew, which was super weird since I'm used to watching the Caps plus any extra games I can get my hands on religiously, but it was definitely better for my blood pressure.

Yeah, I'm a Caps fan who actually tried, for a fair amount of time, and for stupid reasons, to like the Pens. I found it impossible, partly because I hated their actual play whenever I tried to watch them, and partly because there's nothing more infuriating than having to hear how great this other team is and how much better their captain is than your captain when they're not even playing in the game you're watching.

They do this when other teams than the Wild are playing, too?

SA Just realized that last sentence is ambiguous. No rape accusations against Toews that I know of, so that sentence should read "...even before the crappy way that he handled the rape accusations against Kane."

All the reasons other people have mentioned re: overexposure and media narratives are good reasons, but for it really was a combination of the rape accusations, how the team and also the NHL handled those accusations, how fandom handled them, and then a series of other really gross things that happened with the team shortly thereafter.

So like, everything with the rape accusation was a complete zoo, and I hate the way the team handled it, but I also hate how little consequence there was for Kane from other quarters. He maybe lost a sponsorship or two? And he got kicked off the cover of NHL '16. That was it. And then he came back and won the scoring title and the NHL was just so excited to have their marketable superstar back, and they praised his accomplishments to high heavens without so much as an asterisk, while certain members of the media talked about how great it was that Kane "overcame adversity" (ie, getting accused of rape).

About RPF fandom's response, the less said the better, but it certainly soured me hard on anyone who still expresses any interest in Kane/Toews at this point.

In addition, that same year there was a Hawks prospect who was accused of revenge porn; AFTER this became public the Hawks suspended him, but only until the charges were dismissed on a technicality, at which point they happily reinstated him. And then right after that Andrew Shaw used his homophobic slur on camera. (And there might have been something else in a similar vein at this time, too? Someone tell me if I'm forgetting something.)

And none of it mattered! Not only were the Hawks shitty in multiple ways, but the NHL and the mainstream media just kept right on blowing smoke up their asses.

+100

All of this, plus, before the rape accusations large sections of fandom (not just Hawks fans, Kane and K/T were very broadly popular) were hostile to fans who disliked Kane, and really deaf/unreceptive to any criticism of him (for the cabbie thing, choking thing, etc.). Meanwhile Hawks fans (and by extension a lot of the rest of fandom) acted like the fact of being a Kings fan was a moral crime because of how the team handled Doughty and Voynov; this vitriol was quite obviously driven by on-ice rivalry (Voynov was arrested shortly after the Kings beat the Hawks in the WCF and went on to win the cup). And then for these same fans to turn around and act the way they did when it was Kane was accused... the hypocrisy of it was really the icing on the cake of insufferability.

na

A bit of an aside, but sports rpf fandom does offer a nice lesson in "literally everyone's opinions are motivated by rooting interest, even their opinions about important things like sexual assault and domestic abuse. Don't fully trust anyone's moral outrage until it's tested."

ayrt

Yup. Inclusive of the outrage re: Kane and the Hawks. All of it is warranted, but that doesn't exclude other motivations from factoring into it. I'll own up to it myself, I try to separate my team-related hatred of the Hawks from how I objectively talk about Kane and the organization, but the feelings themselves bleed into one another in a way that I personally find difficult to separate.

The main reason I hate Toews is basically he doubled down on the rape apologism and "support your team" shit during the summer of investigation. (And then tried being all cute on social media by posting shit like taking his gf's purse dog fishing and supporting community gardening and saying he's not a Trump supporter).

I hate the Hawks as an org for everything else mentioned (Bobby Hull, their logo, the revenge porn incident, Shaw, #isupport88, shitty RPF-side stanning, hockey media/NHL stanning, etc). NOBODY handles DV/sex crimes right imo but the RL Hawks definitely have a laundry list of fuck-ups and the fact that K/T is still a major pairing makes it worse for a lot of people, me included.

(Toronto doing the White Ribbon thing and Carolina responding to a Change.org petition with "we don't have anybody in the org with a DV/sex crime history" get minor points for at least addressing the issues, though).

+1 to all of the above, plus that fucking racist logo. I realize it's a complicated issue -- it's not as blatantly racist in name or imagery as Washington's football team or Cleveland's baseball team, and even Jordin Tootoo has said he's proud to wear that jersey in his Instagram posts -- but it still doesn't endear the team to me, especially with how much press they get, accompanied by their logo.

NA

Yep. I really can't understand why they won't just change their names to "Hawks" and have an actual hawk as the logo... It's so easy and everyone already calls them that anyway.

Honestly the organization's disingenuousness in basically manipulating the American Indian Center into doing a u-turn of their previous stance to "approve" the racist logo is its own brand of disgusting that's also perfectly emblematic of Hawks fan hypocrisy and grossness on other issues as well

DA

The freaking logo! IDK how I forgot that part, but yes, that was the first reason I hated them, before any of the other offensive stuff came out.

Since the NHL just put him in a brand new promo, I also have to point out Bobby Hull, who has a freaking statue outside their arena, as well as a long history of beating women and making pro-Nazi statements.

I might have some sympathy for how they cling to Patrick Kane given that American stars aren't thick on the ground, if they would at least cut loose the old assholes they don't need anymore, but they keep dragging Hull out and using him as an "ambassador" and I really don't think his marketing profile is that high over other retired players that it would break them to let him fade into obscurity.

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#29 – Lay, Lie, or Laine?

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