Self-Appointed Mushroom King

There is such an ugly escalation in what happened with the Metros this season. Like I’m simply obsessed with the dynamics in my head. Imagine being trapped in a horror movie, but the horror movie is also being televised live to the entire world and you have to convince the audience that you’re in a sports anime. Like there is just something so ugly and suffocating and cloying about the conflict pre-leak that I’m absolutely enraptured by.

Coaching abuse is very common in the NHL, and it’s something that the NHL has been criminally negligent in addressing. You’ve got the litany of complaints that players have raised against Mike Babcock, who is once again being considered for a coaching position with the Oilers even though he’s psychologically tortured every team he’s ever coached. And you’ve got the more extreme examples, like the incident from the 2010 Chicago Blackhawks Stanley Cup Run. The coach was abusing his position to sexually assault players and prospective players. Those players complained to the GM to get him removed. The GM buried the complaints so as to not disturb the Blackhawks’ Stanley cup run.

They won the cup, and the coach was allowed to gracefully step down with a feather in his cap. He received glowing references from the team for his next job, which was teaching youth hockey. He was later arrested on multiple counts of sexual assault of a minor.

The GM who covered it up resigned almost ten years after it happened. That stuck for a couple of years. He is now the GM for the Oilers. Back in the saddle, I guess.

The NHL is simply fucking ass at dealing with coaching abuse. They did not even have an official mechanism to report coaching abuse until fucking 2019. Shane is still a year out from that. He is in a system ripe for abuse, and he found himself under the boot of the worst possible person.

There is this very ugly fatalism between Shane and his coach in my head. The relationship is a suicide vest. Theriault is self-destructing and he does not care. He just wants to take Shane down with him.

The Theriault that lives in my head knows that Shane Hollander is the only thing he will ever be known for. And that is one of the reasons why he hates him so much.

Theriault in snapping birch predated Shane Hollander. He’s been on the team for years longer than Shane has. He was the coach for a good portion of the team’s flop era. He failed to get them even close to the Stanley Cup for years. And so when Shane came on, Theriault was on the verge of being replaced.

Then came the Hollander Dynasty.

And that is what people call it. That is all they will ever call it. It is the era of Shane Hollander. Because there is not a doubt in anyone’s mind that Shane Hollander got the Metros to that Stanley Cup, and the one after that. Theriault’s legacy, his two-fucking-Stanley-Cups acclaim, it will always have an asterisk next to it that reads “*Courtesy of Shane Hollander.”

And Theriault never minded that until he knew that Shane was gay.

And then he couldn’t fucking stand it.

Shane would always be bigger than him. There was no escaping it. Theriault’s success was chained to his. It was secondary to his. The only thing he would ever be known for was being Shane Hollander’s coach. And he hated him for that.

Theriault didn’t care if it destroyed him too. He just wanted to take Shane down with him.

If we are talking about coaching abuse during a game, there is two main ways a coach can achieve it: he can take a player off of the ice, or he can keep him on it.

Historically, both have happened in the NHL, with taking a player off the ice being far more common. For example, Mike Babcock once benched a veteran player during his last game. That player retired with 1,499 games as a result. It was supposed to be 1,500, which is a huge accomplishment for NHL players. He took away his own player’s chance to go out with 1,500 games because he’s a pathetic little creep who gets off on his own cruelty.

Theriault can bench Shane. He can even push him down to second line. And that would be humiliating for Shane, and it would be infuriating, and it would never fucking last.

Ultimately, that humiliation is going to be temporary. People are going to get pissed that Theriault’s taken the guy who accounts for over half their points off the fucking ice. He will be replaced and go out as the idiot who benched the greatest hockey player of all time and fucked his own team’s playoff streak. Someone else will come in, and they will take Shane Hollander off that bench, and the entire goddamn stadium will cheer.

The humiliation is temporary. Shane comes out on top.

Theriault wanted to hurt Shane in a way he could never take back. So he didn’t take him off the ice. He kept him on it.

Again, this is a much rarer form of coaching abuse. But it has happened. The biggest example is one that I’ve talked about in another post, with Kovalev’s 7 minute punishment shift in 1994. But there have been other incidents.

The context and effect is slightly different, but something similar happened with Patrick Roy, a former goalie for the Canadiens. He and the coach used to be teammates and they had problems with each other predating the coach’s hiring. The coach was extremely critical of him and had publicly mocked him in the past.

One game, Roy was struggling in the net. Rather than sending in a relief goalie the way he should have, his coach hung him out to dry. He let him stay out on the ice to struggle, and Roy ended up letting in 9 more goals—which 1) is humiliating and 2) fucks with his stats as a goalie. That coach let the entire team take a humiliating 11-1 loss just to spite this one player.

Theriault didn’t care about winning anymore. He didn’t care about the team. He just wanted to hurt Shane in a way that fucking stuck. He wanted to make Shane a worse player. He wanted to take his legacy from him because he felt like Shane had taken Theriault’s legacy.

And so he picked door number 2.

The thing is? Shane’s punishment shifts are not sustainable. Shane is way too famous and beloved for this to go on for very long. The first time he did this, the fans nearly shattered the glass to kick his fucking ass. Theriault knows someone is going to stop him sooner rather than later. In my mind, he actually pivoted to primarily putting Shane on punishment shifts during away games because metros fans were so fucking angry at him that it was legitimately interfering with his ability to go after Shane.

Theriault knew that eventually, someone would decide that the negative attention was too much and that he needed to be ripped out and replaced like a fucking rotten tooth. But he had time before then.

There is no watchdog. There is no mechanism in place to address coaching abuse. The closest thing Shane had to a mechanism for protection would be if he personally filed a lawsuit or called Theriault out in the media, and if he did either of those things, he’d be outed. Because even if Shane didn’t say it was because he was gay, Theriault would out him the second Shane stopped playing along, and they both knew it.

Shane had to come up with ways to excuse his own public torture to the fucking media. Because if he didn’t hide it for Theriault, Theriault would stop hiding his sexuality. It was humiliating, and Shane did not have any easy way out.

In my mind, Shane genuinely thought that Theriault would try to keep his retaliation to behind the scenes before that first game of the season. He’d be a fucking asshole to him and undermine him and humiliate him at every turn. But he’d keep it out of the games, because that was in Theriault’s best interests. And Shane thought Theriault would act with some modicum of self interest.

In my mind, Shane had this moment during that first game where he was five minutes deep into his shift and he realized with this cold water certainty that this was going to be a murder suicide. Theriault was willing to kill his own career and he would try to take Shane’s down with him. He would not be reasonable or rational, and that made him so, so dangerous.

There was so much raising tension pre-leak, like oh my god. The line shifts kept getting longer and Shane kept digging in his heels harder and Theriault kept acting like a man with less and less to lose. The longer it went on the harder it got to hide it and the more questions people asked. And Shane knew with this horrifying certainty that however this ended, Theriault was going to try to destroy him with it. He was not leaving without a pound of Shane’s flesh.

Shane knew they were headed for a fucking cliff. He just. Did not think. It would be this. Specific. Cliff.

I think one of the things Ilya likes most about Shane is just how much Shane surprises him. He is such a structured and dependable guy that you think you can predict him easily. And then he comes out of left field and does the absolute last thing Ilya expected. He is bewitched body and soul. Shane Hollander is the most interesting person in the world to him.

Like. I love the ecstatic grins Ilya gets whenever Shane surprises him. Shane folds his clothes during the first hook up and Ilya looks enchanted. Shane says that he hired a stylist and Ilya is overjoyed. Ilya calls himself lazy, something everyone in his life agrees with, and Shane’s immediate reaction is “I don’t know that side of you at all.” And Ilya can’t help but smile. He didn’t think Shane would say that. And he is so in love with him for doing it.

Like. I think Ilya just loves how much Shane surprises him sometimes. The man is simply enchanting to him. He is obsessed.

The first time Ilya gets into a car with Shane, he thinks he knows how it’s going to go. He has his Boring Slow Driver Jokes in the fucking barrel. Because Shane Hollander drives a sensible car. He gets excited about sales on snow tires. He lectures Ilya about smoking. He is Mr. Canada and surely he reads the motor vehicle code to himself each night before he drifts off to dreamland. He already knows that Shane Hollander drives with a religious vocation towards safety.

That is not how Shane drives.

Ilya cannot feel his own legs by the time the car is parked.

He has absolutely no idea what the fuck just happened.

What? No, no one is going into the store to buy a fucking tooth brush. They are turning the car around and going home. Ilya needs to fuck him immediately.

Shane Hollander is the goddamn king of bad drivers. He was an eighteen year old who drove like he had a DMV test administrator riding shotgun at all moments of his life and then suddenly he was drop kicked into an ungodly fusion between clown school and the goddamn Autobahn. Public transport was not an option for him. He was borderline a religious figure in that city. What, was he going to not get recognized? His face was on the side of the fucking bus. The city had him do the announcements for the goddamn metro every time they made the playoffs. No, he had to drive himself if he wanted to go somewhere. Or, well, he could hire a driver, he had the money for it, but Shane could not imagine the shit he would get for being the eighteen year old showing up to practice with a chauffeur. He was already worried that people would think he was full of himself considering he sucked the goddamn oxygen out of every room he had ever been in. Like it was impossible to get any attention as Shane’s teammate. It always had been, and his teammates in the junior leagues had always kind of resented him for it.

Every reporter wanted to talk to him. His team was a national news story but only because he was the news story. They were background characters in the Shane Hollander Origin Story and it made it that much harder for them to get any kind of recognition. It’s hard to standout when you’re standing next to Shane.

Shane was new to the metros. The NHL Commissioner himself had become suddenly invested in pushing his rivalry with the dude whose dick he sucked that one time. Suddenly they were modeling fucking all stars weekend around him, which the older, more experienced players on his team weren’t even invited to.

Shane was the new guy who didn’t have an established place in the team dynamic yet and he was fucking terrified about coming off as full of himself. He was not going to be giving these guys another reason to think that. He had to drive himself.

So Shane looks at his options and the absolute trash can fire that was Montreal city driving and says These Are New Skills That I Must Learn To Succeed In My New Environment and by fucking god does he do that. He is trapped on a road system with 1.5 million of the worst goddamn drivers to ever disgrace the Earth and he is dodging and he is weaving. Everything he does makes perfect sense in the context of the mass psychogenic illness that is the Montreal highway network and comes off as a psychotic break everywhere else on the goddamn planet. He Will Get You To Your Destination Alive But You Will Doubt That Fact Every Single Moment Of The Trip.

The man is a self trained stunt driver. Rose keeps threatening him with a cameo in the fast and furious movies. If she ever gets sucked into that vacuum of a franchise she is forcing him to be one of the background drivers she is so so serious Shane.

Shane has no idea what she is talking about. He is an excellent driver.

Ilya feeds this delusion but only because Shane driving is low key foreplay to him now. Yes baby you are an EXCELLENT driver please drive us home you are so so good at it. He wants so badly to be passenger princess in whatever live action Mario Kart Shane seems to think everyone is playing at all moments in every city on earth. When Shane comes to visit him in Boston, Ilya insists on picking him up at the airport instead of Shane renting a car or calling a rideshare because all of Ilya’s windows are tinted and someone’s more liable to recognize Shane if they’re in close proximity and wonder why the fuck Shane Hollander is in Boston without a game happening so really it’s SAFER for Ilya to come get him, really.

It is not because of that.

It is because Ilya has a biological need to see Shane Hollander whip his Porsche 918 Spyder across I-90E like he’s competing in the goddamn Indy 500, all while lecturing Ilya about how unsafe and impractical of a car this is. Ilya lives in a city with some very narrow streets and very harsh winters he needs to have at least one car built for the snow. Shane’s car, for example—

Ilya is not listening to a goddamn word. He never listens to anything Shane says while driving. He is not physically capable of it. All of Ilya’s mental bandwidth is dedicated to strategizing about the shortest possible path from Shane putting the car in park to Ilya getting inside of him. Ilya is playing 4D chess to make sure Shane only ever drives them home and when no one else is in the car because he needs to fuck him too bad as soon as the car stops to ever risk witnesses at their destination.

Svetlana makes the mistake one (1) time of getting in a car driven by that fucking psychopath and immediately clocks this as a sex thing. Oh, you need to talk to Shane in private immediately? Yes she bets he does. Ilyusha, how dare you risk her life for foreplay especially when she is not even invited to watc—

I don’t have strong opinions about Dave and Yuna’s driving habits. I could see them being bad drivers because they are Formerly of Montreal. I can see them having shaken that since they are now Of Ottawa. In my mind, Shane Hollander was an exceedingly safe driver turned Terrible Montreal Driver because he almost never drove himself before he moved to Montreal. He learned to drive in a driving school where he learned Good Driving Habits and then almost never got behind the wheel of the car. Other people drove him everywhere.

Like, that is a guy that got pulled out of every math class growing up. He started making waves in the hockey world before he hit puberty. His schedule would have been fucking packed beyond all reasonable limits. He has not had free time since fucking 2003. His parents were driving; he was in the backseat doing his homework and trying not to fail 11th grade English.