#cartsrichie

13. recommend a hockey player that i should follow on twitter or instagram

I spent too much time answering the one below this so RIP

21. what’s your all-time favourite hockey drama/scandal/story?

FUNNY YOU SHOULD ASK. oh, god. there are so many good ones, but I think if we’re going story in general, it has to be the epic romance/tragedy once known as cartsrichie. I swear to god this shit could be a Shakespeare play, or at least an Academy Award nominated film. If you’re not familiar, Carts and Richie were good friends in juniors before happening to get drafted to the same place. They played together in often-drunk best bro-dom for the Philadelphia Flyers organization, where they won an AHL championship together in 2005 and grew up to be effective leaders on the big boys’ team. Richie was named captain, Carts was an elite sniper. Danny B, Kimmo, Hartsy, they were all there. They and a rising young star by the name of Claude Giroux led the Flyers to an unlikely playoff run in 2010, when they squeezed into the last wild card spot via a shootout against the Rangers, and then managed to upset their way allllll the way to the Stanley Cup Finals. They lost to the Blackhawks in 6 games. They played one final season with the Flyers in which the team had a good record but was swept in the second round of playoffs. Cue….The Trade. After that season, the Flyers front office shocked Philadelphia by trading away their captain, Richards (to Los Angeles), and one of their top scorers, Carter (to Columbus), in pretty much one fell swoop.

Carts was distraught, to say they least. Columbus’ GM had to travel up to physically collect him from his New Jersey hideaway that he sulked in for days, refusing to speak to media. For the following few months of the next season in Columbus, Carts had a middling-to-bad scoring record, and just kind of wasn’t the same.

Cue The Trade. (Part 2.)

Carter to Los Angeles for Jack Johnson and a first-round pick in return. Carts was reunited with his best friend (who of course, tweeted your stereotypical “reunited and it feels so good” tweet. #needaroommate indeed.) They moved in together and proceeded to be incredibly domestic on their way to an improbable but epic Los Angeles Kings 2012 Stanley Cup win. They’d been cast off by their former team, reunited through the unlikeliest of circumstances, and become immediate Cup champions (who would then win again together in 2014). They passed the Cup off to each other after winning and everything. It was kind of fated; a story for the ages.

But it doesn’t end like that. Mike Richards’ play had started to steadily decline over his last couple years with the Kings; in the summer of 2015, he was found carrying oxycodone without a prescription at the Canadian border. The Kings terminated his contract and severed ties. A few months later, Carts pulled an “I don’t know her” in true Mariah Carey fashion, when he said that his friendship with Richie had been hyped up by the media, and they were never really that close. It’s what’s now known as the saddest breakup in all of hockey. 

24. is there a player whom you used to hate but is now redeemed™️ in your eyes?

no one specific is really jumping to mind. what I will say is that, the kind of….converse(?) to my answer to #25 below is that there are players who used to play pretty dirty games that I think have cleaned up their act a lot as they’ve gotten older, but I don’t particularly feel like listing them out lol.

25. is there a player whom you used to love but is now dead to you?

I wouldn’t say he’s “dead to me,” or even that I particularly “used to love” him, but I tend to pay less attention to Tom Wilson these days because I do believe that he’s crossed a line in terms of reckless play and I don’t support that in terms of player safety. However I also don’t view him as the devil incarnate and I hope he continues to grow/learn/get better/play safer!  

38. if you could bodyswap with one player for a day, who would it be?