Shane stares at him, uncomprehendingly, for a second before slowly replying, "...I didn't."

Holmberg gives him a deeply skeptical look. "I've seen the way you react when people flirt with Roz in front of you," he says, "there's no way you guys have an open relationship."

"No," Shane clarifies immediately. He would rather set himself on fire than have to live with sharing his husband with another person. "No, we're exclusive," he confirms, "but I never asked him to stop sleeping with other people. He just kind of... stopped. I didn't even find out until a few months after it happened so, I don't know, maybe just wait it out?"

Montreal and Boston are meeting in the playoffs and there’s a group of very drunk Boston fans discussing the upcoming series who reach the final conclusion: the only way they’re losing against Montreal is if Hollander is playing. Ergo, if Hollander is not playing, Boston is going to win for sure. Now what’s a loyal fan to do? Their part obviously! And especially Rozanov, who hates Hollander, will think this is funny. And they’re not going to hurt him, obviously. Like Hollander is the enemy, but he’s like a good guy, probably, for a Metro, so they’re just going to grab him before the game, and then the Metros will lose the first two games, and then they’re going to let him go and it’ll be fine. Because the first two games are in Boston, so they’re just going to stash him in Randy’s basement, and they’re going to wear cool masks, like those bank robbers in movies, maybe with presidents’ faces—that’s way too political, shut up, Tommy—and they’re even going to give him food and a bucket and stuff, and wouldn’t that be hilarious? And no one will ever know they helped their team win the Cup, but they will know, and maybe they will wink at Rozanov, and he’ll get it and then Rozanov—Ilya fucking Rozanov himself—will buy them a beer in his favorite bar.

Randy wakes up the next morning with a giant headache and a pounding coming from his back door and is like what the fuck, and then he opens the door to Tommy and Steve holding a guy between them who’s got a bag over his head and Randy thinks he must still be drunk because surely he's only dreaming that his friends actually went out and kidnapped Shane fucking Hollander.

Note: this is specifically intended for a Heated Rivalry audience, and I'm not trying to make a comprehensive post about the history of players of colour in ice hockey. There are other resources that do that far better than I ever could, and I know I haven't linked enough about it, so if anyone can point me to more, I would appreciate it.

Ice hockey is by far the whitest of the Big Four North American sports. In 2021, there were only 44 active non-white players in a league of over 700 players. There are a variety of reasons for this, like the high monetary barriers to entry and the racism that goes unchallenged from commentators and players (see the media's reaction to PK Subban refusing to be made small and personality-less, and the fact that notorious racist Tony Deangelo is still in the league). There are so many double standards -- Black players are considered too violent, even by white men who insist that violence is an essential part of the sport, because they mean white violence. Asian players are considered to not have enough "grit" (see: Jason Robertson being left off the Olympic team), playing into the stereotype of Asian men being feminine. The majority of players of colour are Black and/or Indigenous, with the number of Asian players even smaller. Moreover, NHL staff in 2022 were found to be 84% white, so many players of colour don't have any staff they can talk to who understand their unique experiences. Indeed, there are many instances of NHL staff including coaches and GMs calling the players of colour who work under them slurs.

One of the good resources out there is Game Misconduct: Hockey’s Toxic Culture and How to Fix It by Evan F. Moore and Jashvina Shah, which I encourage people to read. If anyone has further resources about Asian experiences in the sport, please link them in reblogs!!!

Because there are so few players of colour, it also means that the NHL has developed xenophobia that might be foreign to US Americans, so I wanted to make a post about how it would affect Ilya. Assume everything from now one has an invisible "white" before the nationality, since Europeans of colour are going to face both axes of discrimination that blend together to make things even worse for them. There are also a small number of players who come from somewhere that's not NA or Europe, but I'm not sure what stereotypes the xenophobia decides to place on them.

The ideal hockey player is a white anglophone Canadian, preferably with their personality completely media trained out of them. It's not enough to be white -- you have to be the right kind of white. Francophone Canadians are mocked if they're not good enough at English, even when they're also white Canadians (see: Patrick Roy), even when they're playing for the Montreal Canadiens, the francophone team. US players on Canadian teams are often assumed to be more likely to abandon Canadian teams to go play in the US (which has not be helped by the recent drama with the USA Olympic team). But where the xenophobia really gets going is when you're from Europe. This is magnified if you're Russian for the obvious geopolitical reasons, but the stereotypes are essentially the same, and some overlap with the racism against players of colour. They include:

Europeans don't care as much about the Stanley Cup or about the game of hockey

Europeans are too flashy/celebrate too much (see: Don Cherry criticising Kuznetzov's bird celly for being too "flamboyant", Tomáš Hertl cellying "inappropriately" leading to the famous "I'd have my cock out" Joe Thornton quote)

Especially if they're Russian, they're considered to have too much of a personality (this isn't the words people use, but it's what they mean)

If their English isn't perfect, they're assumed to be stupid, or at least less intelligent than they are

They don't fight enough OR they fight too much and are uncontrollable

They're a problem in the locker room (even if they're the wronged party in some dispute)

If they don't get along with coaches, they're written off as uncoachable much faster than NA players

If they get mistreated, it's just a misunderstanding or they just don't understand NA culture

They're "lazy" because the systems they learnt in their home country are different from NA ones and often emphasise more skill than hitting. They also might have more of an adjustment to the NA style of play (e.g. Evgeni Malkin mentioned once that he was shocked when one of the Penguins coaches encouraged them to "dump and chase", because that's a thing you actively avoid doing in Russia).