Play For

Who are you playing or coaching for?

Your ‘Teammates’ is a common reply. But do the manners that players play with reflect this belief?

My game plateaued in my first season at the NTDP without being afforded the opportunity to iterate in a reciprocal manner across time. The process of how I entered games, explored playing and played games was corrupted by a poor time sensitivity or said another way lacking a context that invoked a traditionally valuable development fugue. I wanted play with my teammates.

This post is inspired by the following Jordan Peterson video where he also mentions the character woven into the fabric of two way hockey.. eenjoy

https://youtu.be/MRUqcIE_wHk

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Understand

To understand two way hockey, you must understand two way hockey.

Balancing Conflict

“Marx was fundamentally right in seeing conflict and not consensus at the heart of modern social structure. It is not just that we live too much by variety and multiplicity of fragmented concepts; it is that these are used at one and the same time to express rival and incompatible social ideals and policies and to furnish us with a pluralist political rhetoric whose function is to conceal the depth of our conflicts.” MacIntyre After Virtue p.235

Creative Spirit

General Carl Von Clausewitz examined the nature of war and highlighted three distinct characteristics two of which I will focus on.

One- war is comprised of the same “blind natural forces” of “primordial violence” observed in nature.

Two- war contains “the play of chance and probability” rewarding “creative spirits”.

Hockey’s play with #1 has finished. It’s time for #2 to take center stage.

Abusive Categorization

We watched Fire of Love last night a movie about Katie and Maurice Krafft, a husband and wife pair of volcanologists. The movie shares the videos and photos from their archives telling the story of their adventures watching unique lava flows and splatterings around the globe. It’s a good movie, I recommend it.

At one point Maurice mentioned the ‘abusive categorizations’ thrusted upon volcanoes by scientists that strip volcanoes of their identities and deprive a meaning behind studying them. For instance volcanoes are often simply shown to be either ‘red’ or ‘gray’ volcanoes with the color categorization signifying whether the earth’s fault at the rupture point is either diverging (red) or converging (gray) making for bespoke rupture characteristics. But a volcanoe’s story goes much deeper than this categorization as Maurice eludes to. Its even mentioned how the speed and magnitude of a rupture we still cannot measure beforehand.

So Maurice proposes a relational orientation that inspires his work and peaks the interest of all volcano enthusiasts. He reveals how categorization is only useful to a point and that you must go beyond them echoing Piaget.

Elasticity

Smushkin would always talk about the elasticity built into hockey agility. Interesting parallel here to the gains Patrick Kane made abandoning weights for movement pliability workouts. There’s something to the mind agility that a movement regime focus affords that weight training cripples. Relative power is more important than raw power in hockey. Leave it to the best in the game to trust their instincts.

Jantelagen - Balance

This article from ESPN on the Swedish concept of Jantelagen I highly recommend reading for its relevance to two way hockey. This article confronts the primary issue two way hockey faces.

How do you properly balance the needs of the team with the needs of an individual player?

The author defines the Swedish concept of Jantelagen. “Essentially, it's putting the success of the group before the accomplishments of the individual, and it has been part of the traditional cultural belief system in Sweden for hundreds of years.” He proclaims Swedish hockey players are bolstered by this cultural sword.

But Filip Forsberg, a Swedish NHLer, has a different opinion. "I don't think anybody's necessarily striving to be average, and I think that's a little bit of the problem," Forsberg said. "You're allowed to be good. I think that's the biggest part of it. You have to be allowed to compete, be allowed to try to achieve excellence and sometimes, the Swedish way is a little bit, 'good is good enough,' and I don't necessarily agree with that."

Forsberg doesn’t recognize the primary purpose of hockey and deprives himself of the highest individual excellence found in hockey. Recognizing the imperfections in his own game more acutely would have carried him beyond his current form. They would have highlighted the gaps in his own beliefs. His pursuit of value would have revealed the blemishes in his values.

There is a reason why he plays in the NHL, the league primarily located out of the United States. "Does Jantelagen still describe modern Scandinavian society? Less and less so… But if you are comparing it to America? Yes. Maybe it's the pressure to conform or if you take the average Swede, average Finn, average Norwegian and compare them to the average American, Jantelagen is a way of looking at this traditional belief." Only in America is the insufficiency at the moment celebrated. And too, here in the States only has the proper balance arisen between team and player, one where the game becomes a refinery for the principles necessary to overcome life’s challenges and not just a manufacturing mechanism for ignorant player or team executive narcissistic jaunts at the tribes expense.

So insufficient examples of individual excellence and collective achievement both on and off the ice are proffered. A better average of the goals shared by individual players and teams will be struck soon for the tribes benefit.

“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and its always balances them.” - Anais Nin

Canadian Lacrosse

Lacrosse is played ambidextrously. But in Canada, where they claim ownership of hockey, lacrosse is played with the dominant handedness only.

Apparently Canadian lacrosse players take this cue from their experience playing box lacrosse on a smaller playing surface. Time and space is limited so they prefer to work together with their teammates in quicker and more simplified ways. It’s interesting critique if applied to Two Way Hockey.

Two Way Hockey creates more time and space for players that utilize their subdominant handedness in the right situations. But thinking and playing two way hockey is undoubtedly the games highest form.

Stage Managing

there is so much context hostility in the game today that players are failing to see through the avenues of play. That’s where two way hockey comes in.

Performative Contradiction

There is a performative contradiction in hockey.

Hockey is a team game played in part to rehearse positive adaptation. In the rush to fight and win supposed players handicap themselves and teamplay abilities. In doing so they shield the game from this positive adaptation process which further veils any direct references to solidarity and transcendence.

This play limitation opposes player dignity and excellence. Therefore the game has a performative contradiction.

A Two way hockey as I think about it brings those deeper cultural dynamics referenced earlier into clearer intelligibility inside the game. This will afford players a more direct opportunity to overcome harsh realities. Articulating why this grappling process is important, why these dynamics are essential to any thriving hospitable humane game I will not.

The fate of hockey lies with the appetite hockey fans have for an illusion at the expense of forging truly strong characters who play together in innumerable ways. We must afford players the opportunity of choosing between the two.

Efficiency and Evolveability

We are trying to oscillate between efficiency and evolve-ability. -John Vervaeke

Hockey is betweenness.

Hockey Sur Glace

There is a poetic danger in hockey players aren’t feeling in the culture of safety today.

The following is an excerpt from Peter Lasalle’s book Hockey Sur Glace.

“The clubhouse of the Winter Club in Lake Forest is American Tudor with at least a half-dozen gables. The shingled sides are green and the crisscrossing beams were probably once bright buff. But the buff has turned to tan under a coating of the thick soot that blows down from the factories in Waukegan. This particular Saturday morning in 1972, fat flakes fluttered like moths and every once in a while the sun appeared in between moving clouds. Chicago lawyer John Fontaine— he had been starting right defenseman for the Harvard team in 1957 and 1958—slammed the black lid of the battered white Volvo wagon. He wore his shin pads underneath the sweatpants. He had bound them tight with hospital tape in the living room while his wife said what she always said: “I don’t know why you put yourself through it. I’m only going to have to listen to you moan about your knees for the rest of the weekend.” She kissed him on the top of the head. “You’re like a kid.” His stick was a stock Northland “Pro” with a five lie for a right-hander. It was new and one of the four he had bought from the remaining supply in the sports shop on LaSalle Street. The salesman told him that Northland had discontinued the straight blade in its top “pro” line and the company now turned out only banana curves. They had come into fashion long after John had stopped playing regularly. The ruddy-faced German attendant, Max, was behind the equipment counter at the club, smiling his usual toothy grin. The dressing room wa s long corridor with benches, and framed photographs of old curling teams formed a string like boxcars along each glossily painted wall. Some of the brown-and-white group shots dated back to the twenties and before. The men in heavy coats wore matching tams for the poses and had lined up in front of the same clubhouse. The white script below listed the squad and year of each: “LFWC 1922,” “LFWC 1923”. Dozens of them. At the far end of the bench, Ed Ridley laced on his scuffed skates. He seemed to sew the brass tips of the broad, dirty laces through the holes. Half finished, he stretched out one leg and with a grimace he tugged on the two taut strands, as if yanking the reins on a runaway horse. He was only a year or so older than John, but without his hair he looked maybe ten years older. He wore an old Brown University uniform jersey made of wool. The chocolate color had faded and the red stripes at the biceps were sewn-on satin and equally dull. Big moth holes sparred the back. They stretched even bigger as he leaned his overweight body down to continue lacing. John dropped his canvas bag and sat down beside him. “I keep telling you,” John said, “that sweater dates you, Ed. You’ re as bad as I am with my antique Northlands. I think I’ve bought out the last of the straight blades in Midwestern captivity. I can’t get used to the curves.” Ed didn’t seem interested in such talk about equipment....”

— Chapter Hockey pages 149-151

Coach’s Preferences

Coaches would appreciate players who play two way hockey. They’d admire their penchant to try something new, to play a different way, to stray from the norm and go against the grain pursuing a bunch of a better way to play. Any level of goodness requires this investing. If one does not experiment with new ways no new gameplay capabilities can unfold. Good coaches encourage these traits in players.

Playfulness in Hockey

Hockey is a social game but is it more domineering than assertive according to the game constraints promotes today? I see a tricky authoritarianism in hockey that handicaps playfulness.

most play is social play. Social play is the academy for learning social skills.

The reason why play is such a powerful way to impart social skills is that it is voluntary. Players are always free to quit, and if they are unhappy they will quit. Every player knows that, and so the goal, for every player who wants to keep the game going, is to satisfy his or her own needs and desires while also satisfying those of the other players, so they don’t quit. Social play involves lots of negotiation and compromise. If bossy Betty tries to make all the rules and tell her playmates what to do without paying attention to their wishes, her playmates will quit and leave her alone, starting their own game elsewhere. That’s a powerful incentive for her to pay more attention to them next time. The playmates who quit might have learnt a lesson, too. If they want to play with Betty, who has some qualities they like, they will have to speak up more clearly next time, to make their desires plain, so she won’t try to run the show and ruin their fun. To have fun in social play you have to be assertive but not domineering; that’s true for all of social life.

Excerpted from the play deficit by Peter Gray. https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-play-deficit?fbclid=IwAR2HDsbupgwnmO17LqSyh9Gd_ENdZVZeX6rJibJB9eo7YI3cKo4f_sqqoZs