Sports notes

First, F1. Just last week, world champion Sir Stirling Moss said that Michael Schumacher's championships cheapen the F1 world championship, because he unsportingly won them instead of some more worthy British driver. Does anyone know whether Jackie Stewart is seriously ill, or does he just have the flu or something? Usually, when we're due for another staggeringly stupid statement from the British isles, it's Jackie Stewart saying someting moronic. The only explanation I can think of for Stirling Moss's lunacy is that Jackie Stewart is ill and they had to call someone else.

Delightfully, we'll have two Lotuses in F1 next year. Renault is selling their remaining stake in what used to be Benetton, and Genii Capital is selling a 25% share to Lotus Cars, a subsidiary of Proton who make the Lotus-branded road cars. The new team is going to be called Lotus Renault GP. Meanwhile, Tony Fernandez's Team Lotus will be running on Renault engines next year, so they'll be called Team Lotus Renault. To top it all off, both teams have announced they'll be going back to the classic black-and-gold Lotus colors.

It all makes perfect sense: four Lotus cars on the grid. With Toro Rosso, we already have four Red Bulls, and there are four silver cars with Mercedes engines. Maybe Ferrari could buy a share in Sauber so we'd get four red cars with Ferrari engines too?

On a happier note: the team orders ban is finally history (autosport.com). It's about time. The team order ban is a textbook example of a bad rule: it can't be enforced, and the only reason to have it is to maintain kayfabe. Good riddance.

**

Then, hockey. Seriously, ESPN America. Last week's games: New Jersey-Pittsburgh and Toronto-Pittsburgh. Over the last month or so, roughly every second game has been a Penguins game on FSN Pittsburgh. If there was another channel showing the NHL that I could get without buying a whole shebang of movie, golf and football channels, I would.

On the topic of the Pens, I could do a huge and potentially controversial post on a post-lockout staple: which is better, Ovechkin or Crosby? To be honest, I can't be bothered to. But there is one aspect of that I will address. Ever since the two guys made their league debuts, the received wisdom has been that Crosby is a more complete player and Ovechkin is a one-dimensional sniper.

If I did any hockey journalism in any capacity any more, I'd have to mince words about this, but as I don't, I can be honest. This idea isn't based on anything at all except the Canadian racist stereotype of European players. You can hear some variation of it pretty much every Saturday on CBC, but it's not like that guy's its only proponent. In the stereotype, Canadians are "team guys" who play a solid two-way game, and Europeans are selfish "skill guys" who are only in it for the money. Because Crosby is the current incarnation of Canadian hockey and the anointed "Next One", he must be a responsible, all-around player, and his Euro arch-rival Ovechkin must be a selfish sniper.

This is the only reason anyone can maintain that Crosby plays a two-way game and Ovechkin doesn't. Sure, Ovechkin regularly makes defensive plays that can perhaps be politely described as phlegmatic. The thing is, every time he does that, they show the clip as proof. Crosby does exactly the same thing, only you don't see those clips being shown over and over again. I've seen innumerable instances of Pittsburgh being scored on because Crosby turned the puck over in the offensive zone and sluggishly skated to the bench, giving up an odd-man rush to the other team simply because he couldn't be bothered to skate.

Don't believe me? Despite the fact that Crosby has a higher points per game average, Ovechkin has a higher career plus-minus and is in a totally different league in career takeaways. So if you look at the stats, Ovechkin is a better two-way player than Crosby. I'm sure that if someone went on TSN or CBC and said this, heads would explode all over Canada, because it can't be true. But those are the numbers.

Another way this manifests itself is this season, as Ovechkin has seemingly given up goal-scoring completely. He's still scoring a respectable number of points, and barely a week goes by without some hockey program discussing his "new-found" playmaking ability. Even Don Cherry ran an Ovechkin highlight where he passed to a teammate on an empty net rush, and claimed he's "learning to play the Canadian way".

It must really make doing those shows and writing those columns easier when you don't have to look at anyone's stats, or have any idea how they actually play. Ovechkin has never had less than 40 assists in a season, and usually finishes with well over 50. Some particularly observant people might even remember that Ovechkin not only had 50 goals as a rookie, but 50 assists as well, which is a rarer thing than you might think. And remember that this was on a team where he was single-handedly responsible for something like half of their goals. Sure, Ovechkin has matured over the years and plays a better all-around game; that doesn't mean he never played one before.

So in other words, what new-found ability? The idea that "Ovechkin doesn't pass", also propounded by the Finnish government TV channel's sainted play-by-play legend, is based purely on the imaginary stereotype of the Russian player as a sniper who only cares about scoring goals. Not even Kovalchuk actually plays like that, and he used to be a far purer sniper than Ovechkin.

Said anointed play-by-play guy thought it was amazing and a huge risk to have Ovechkin playing the point on the national team, as he's never played that position before. I'll leave any evaluation of his hockey savvy at that.

So in many ways, the Ovechkin-Crosby comparison tells you more about how we pick and choose information to fit our preconceived stereotypes than about the way the respective young men actually play hockey.

If you've watched Coach's Corner recently, you may have noticed how fond he is of quoting himself to prove how prescient he is, even if I hesitate to use such a big word in this context. On the subject of national stereotypes, how about somebody plays back all those times he screamed about how Brian Burke is going to fix Toronto by getting rid of all those villainous Euros and hiring good Canadian boys? Well, you got your North Americans: your Clarke MacArthurs and Phil Kessels, Komisareks, Beauchemins and Schenns. How's that working out again? It turns out that maybe Toronto's problems weren't caused by the nationality of their players. Of course, these days I believe he blames the nationality of the coach.

The trouble is that in general, we want sports to be a morality play. In general, we want sports to reward righteousness and punish wrongdoers. To the nationalist sport is even more important: sport is the crucible in which the nationalist's prejudices are put to the test and proved. The thing is, sport doesn't actually work like that, so the nationalist has to resort to selective perception. Otherwise it might turn out that his preconceived notions aren't supported by facts. As nationalists generally have quite a bit invested into their prejudices, and questioning them would mean questioning their very identity, what we end up with is a large number of people who are completely unwilling to actually see what's happening on the ice.

As much as I like watching sports, the one thing I deeply dislike, especially about team sports, is that they encourage groupthink. Watch any NESN broadcast and Andy Brickley and Mike Milbury will be happy to explain to you that when a Boston player runs an opposing forward head first into the boards from behind, it isn't a penalty and shouldn't be called. If the opposite happens, though, it just proves how villainous the other team really is. On other forums, one will hear that running up the score is a criminal, uncanadian thing to do, unless of course it's done by the Next One. A couple of weeks back, Milbury was kind enough to explain to us (on Versus) that a slewfoot by a Canadian player shouldn't be a penalty at all, while a slewfoot by a Russian player should result in a major penalty and suspension.

Of course, it gets even worse with national teams. Sports and nationalism go hand in hand, because nationalism requires groupthink; the proposal "my nation right or wrong" is, after all, fundamentally absurd. Only groupthink can make it palatable, and team sports are a very important way of teaching groupthink to children. If there ever was an argument against sports, that's it.

**

To finish on a different note, I'd like to propose a tentative quantitative definition for a dynasty in the NHL. The word gets thrown around a lot, especially about the Penguins, which is what brought it to my mind. I still remember a viewer poll on TSN some three or four years back. The talking heads had decided amongst themselves that the Penguins were a dynasty, and asked the viewers how many Cups the Pens would win in the next five or so years. The answers they got were 2-4. Remember that this is before they had won a single playoff series.

So I got to thinking: how would you go about defining a dynasty in the NHL? My proposal is this: four or more Cups in five years. That gives us as many as six dynasties:

Toronto Maple Leafs, 1945-51: five Cups in seven years ('45, 47-49, 51)
Montréal Canadiens, 1956-60: five Cups in five years
Montréal Canadiens, 1965-69: four Cups in five years
Montréal Canadiens, 1976-79: four Cups in four years
New York Islanders, 1980-83: four Cups in four years
Edmonton Oilers, 1984-88: four Cups in five years

Few other teams come close; certainly none since the Oilers qualify.

In my mind, to be a proper dynasty a team has to really dominate the league, like the Oilers, Isles and late 70's Habs did. If we try to quantify that, this is what I ended up with, and I think it works.

As an aside, we're currently in the longest stretch ever without the Cup being won by a Canadian team. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the previous longest streak of US winners was in 1936-41, with the Wings, Hawks, Bruins and Rangers winning six in a row until the Leafs brought the Cup to Canada.

It has now been seventeen years since a Canadian team won the Cup. As I find the racist stereotypes propounded by so many Canadian hockey pundits so relentlessly offensive, I have to admit that that does make me a bit happy.