So the United States team lost 5-0 to Finland today in the Bronze Medal Game.
There is a predictable outrage - say what you will about Twitter but its ability to convey outrage is second to none. Whether its a person or a whole team, what can be more cathartic than ripping anonymously into people you don't know in a public form?
Apparently, losing in the Bronze Medal game is "an embarrassment," and is "disgraceful."
I disagree, so how about some perspective?
These guys play an 82 game season which - though more than fairly compensated - takes a toll on one's personal life. They are forced to travel almost daily, live in hotels, and miss a lot of time with their girlfriends, family, friends and children. Now they have been asked to travel half way across the world, and play in a tournament of which the pressure to perform compared to the relative randomness of hockey and said tournament makes absolutely no logical sense.
For instance: In the Olympics, the chance of the best team winning is worse than the playoffs. In fact, relative to the pressure of winning, I'd say it's probably worse than most sporting events. A seven game playoff, 16 team tournament does not do enough to compensate for random bad luck and as such, the team that wins the Stanley Cup is rarely the best team in the league.
In reality, the results of the 82 game regular season are far more indicative of who the actual best team is. We have to account for the fact that sports are not a logical business. Fans don't care how the winner is determined any more than they care if about "excuses" if their team wins every category of a game except the score. I am also not saying they should - its a slippery slope and where would you stop?
The regular season might be tougher to win and a more accurate indicator of who the best team is, but no one cares, nor should they. Even me, the guy pointing this out, still cares about wining the Stanley Cup ten thousand times more than the President's Trophy.
Hell, if the Coyotes and Boston traded entire rosters, I wouldn't suddenly become a Bruins fan. Logic is about as important to sports as it is to love. You just kind of go with it.
But in light of a bunch of guys who did nothing wrong being called embarrassments, maybe some consideration is warranted that is based on logic.
Image you are a millionaire athlete who has ascended to the top of your profession. You are one of the best players in the world and as such are called upon to play in the Olympic Hockey Tournament. Despite the fact that you barely see your family or friends for 9 months out of the year, you forgo your vacation and travel to Russia to intentionally decrease your standard of living for two weeks, all the while trying to balance fears of terrorism, fatigue, and pressure with the fact that you are an athlete expected to perform at the peak of your game.
An inordinate amount of pressure. Win and you are heroes, lose and you are chumps. You are taking a massive risk with your career and livelihood to play for free in a tournament in which the best team or players are not even likely to win. The tournament is as arbitrary as the designation of importance placed upon Olympic Gold.
But you gladly suffer all this for the supposedly crucially important "right to represent your country." It's not that this isn't a great honor, it's just only worth as much as you choose to value it, since its rewards are not monetary or tangible, really, in anyway.
So, you put up with all this pressure and then play in a series of games whose pressure may not even be close to compatible with its reward. And, since luck and randomness play such a large factor in the outcome, you are - in reality - under pressure for something you can barely control - i.e because the best team won't always win and a significantly higher than usual amount of the outcome is beyond your control.
Now image that you are this player and you did all these things, only to be the best team in the tournament and have the Gold Medal within your sights.
And the whole entire time, you are up against the backdrop of the "Miracle on Ice," so you know and are very aware of how intensely rewarded and possibly legendary you will become if you can pull it out.
(I don't think anyone ever even attempts to understand the pressure these guys are under. If anyone does, it is usually met with "well they are millionaires," or "they play a game for a living." Which might be fair answers if the people who gave them put hockey in anything close to the proper perspective, world wide, and in light of war, starvation, corruption and poverty that it deserves.)
And as the tournament progresses, every day is additionally stressful and is another day you are away from home and then it all comes to a head and you are tasked with playing the pseudo-Gold Medal game against your biggest rivals and the best team in the world.
And for reasons that again defy logic, you are the favorite. The rosters are woefully uneven, but four preliminary games against vastly different (and thus incomparable) competition have somehow conspired to make you the favorite, at least with casual observers and those who are not hockey experts. For practical purposes, this just means that the pressure has been ratcheted up even higher.
So image what its like going into the quarter final, and image you lose by a single goal.
You would be exhausted. Worn out, ready to go home. The reward you took as fair compensation for all the crazy pressure and added responsibility and challenge is no longer possible.
But instead of going home, you have to wake up the next day and play for third place.
How could you possibly get up for this game? If you are Finland, Bronze is exciting because it means you exceeded expectations. But, just like I would be happy to find a hundred bucks in the street and would probably talk about it for days, for Patrick Kane, who has millions of dollars, finding a hundred dollar bill in the street wouldn't even be worth mentioning.
So, after all these guys have gone through, how can you possibly expect them to care in anyway about a Bronze Medal? Not only is it illogical, it is grossly unfair of you to expect this.
They just want to go home, see their kids, maybe rest their injuries and relax. They will not be rewarded in anyway for winning Bronze. The incentives are literally non-existent.
So it isn't embarrassing for the players to lose 5-0. It's embarrassing for anyone who calls them out for it.
Thanks for reading, tweet me:Coyotes1234