become unstirrable

Ilya's not just good he's generational. Both he and Shane are supposed to be SO absurdly good compared to the rest of the league that they can drag their teams to cups with ~3-4 years after signing. They're not fucking Tavares man they're like Crosby and Ovechkin but better because fiction.

Anyway a guy like that, moving to a team he has no connection to, in a city that's not appealing for any obvious reason, that he seemingly has never even visited other than for game nights? And he's not explaining why? It's not TJ going back home, it's Rozanov going to a random fuck off city in Canada.

So yeah, no, I legitimately think people would actually wonder if it's some kind of mental break. Like he just couldn't handle the pressure in Boston and picked the worst team in the league deliberately to take himself out of contention for future cups.

I don't even think people would assume he had a partner in Ottawa because literally unless he was dating fucking Justin Trudeau or some other high ranking Canadian government official why wouldn't they just move to Boston, or why wouldn't he just split his time, he has the money to charter flights, like it makes no sense.

I also wanna add 2 other details that I think make this scene richer - 1 in Russia, national heroes like sports figures are treated as assets of the state. His phone was likely tapped, he was probably being followed by secret police, his apartment bugged. In actual real life Putin played a “friendly” game of ice hockey with his past and present olympians. 2 after Sochi 2014 Russia was found to have non consensually doped their players by lacing their food and drinks. So if you add all that together - being closeted in a country where it is illegal to be queer, being humiliated by how the rest of the world views said country, leading your country’s team to a devastating at home loss, knowing you’re being spied on but not how, AND being unknowingly hopped up on performance enhancers - ya I don’t blame him for being “mean” for a second.

i've been endeavoring to verify the sochi surveillance of russian athletes for a while but my success has been limited by google enshittification & monolingualism. it's aligned with my memory and the politicization of russian athletes i'm familiar with, but is unsourced as far as i can find for now. as always i'm not an authority

the doping scandal is well documented (links are haphazard, don't have time to organize robust articles). the whistleblowers fled russia & at least two people were assassinated amid the investigations. i couldn't source the claim of lacing athletes' food, albeit i remember hearing it. that said, fearmongering about russia was ablaze at the time. regardless, if they were going so far as to smuggle urine samples through the walls like a damn spy cartoon it'd shock me if uncooperative athletes weren't coerced to dope

sochi was addled by a myriad of scandals, including the immediate invasion of crimea 3 days post. but russia's anti-queer legal precedents were a cornucopia of global contention after the "anti-propaganda" law in 2013. to the extent that athletes were coming out, obama sent queer representation in the american delegation to make a point, and putin personally commented on it to warn athletes & kneecapped protests