Derick*
Guest
Maybe I'm giving too much of a voice to the kiddies at HF who take everything Bettman says or does and runs with it in the opposite direction, but there was a lot of talk about "Well, I won't be watching the Winter Classic this year since it will just be a Sid/Ovie lovefest", same with two years ago with people going out of their way to not watch the Pens/Caps series.
Again, I may be silly for assuming that the opinions of some of these clowns actually carries over to the three dimensional world, but it still seems like, somewhere along the way, it stopped being okay to like a good player or team, lest you be labelled a bandwagonner.
Or are you equivocating? Do the "kiddies"/"clowns" complain about the commercials/conversation about them, or complain that the games themselves are uninteresting? I enjoyed the Pens/Caps series and I plan on enjoying the Winter Classic but that doesn't mean I want to see Crosby or Ovechkin's face on every magazine cover, or news articles and threads that have nothing to do with them unnecessarily somehow become about them (like this one). It's not that them or their rivalry isn't interesting, it's that other things are interesting too and it's grating to have things you've seen/heard about them five hundred times before get in the way of reading about other hockey subjects. It's not annoying because I'm offended other people care too much, but because it gets in the way.
The rivalry is both real and imagined. It's real but it's not big or elaborate enough to talk about it as much as the media wants to, so the media imagines parts of it that don't exist. The real rivalry, the actual anger and competition between them, is interesting. What's said about it is rarely anything new about their actual play or personal rivalry, it's just the same things being said repeatedly, and the rivalry (at least the one thats talked about) seems to be between their fans more than them.
Something actually related to their rivalry (their game in the Olympics, their playoff series, their scuffle in the regular season that year) happens once ever 6-12 months and if one of those things happens that's interesting because it's shows how they're rivals, not just that their media personas are rivals. But every single time any of them does anything independently it's arbitrarily compared to the other. Things they do independently that we decide to compare isn't a rivalry. It's a comparison. I just noticed that my laptop weighs a lot more than my computer mouse; that's doesn't make them rivals. John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi are rivals. That doesn't make comparing how much sugar they each put in their coffee, or how much of a stupid biased gay wad either of their supporters tend to be, important or interesting.
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