kol my beloved you GOTTA tell me the whole story of that 99 to 69 thing. PLS
hkjdgf. i'd be much obliged but it requires some backstory re: hockey numbers and how everyone is very weird about them.
uh so when you're playing as a kid on your school team you get to pick the numbers on your jersey, and most people get pretty attached to whatever number they choose (which are often chosen to match dates of birth or other dates of significance, or are the same as/riffed on the numbers of a professional player you admire). this isn't the case for everyone--some people change their number readily when they get traded if their new team already has a player with that number. but suffice it to say, most hockey players want to wear THEIR number and do not want to change it.
but there are lots of situations where a player may have to change their number, usually temporarily--such as for the olympics or worlds, or when being traded to a team that already has a player with that number, etc.
in this specific case, i don't actually know why nicklas backstrom didn't wear his usual #19 when he signed with the russian team dynamo moscow (which is a whole thing in and of itself. there was an nhl lockout during the 2012-2013 season, meaning no-one could play games. most north american born players went to foreign leagues, and most european players went to play in their countries leagues. nicklas backstrom, who is swedish, was apparently hounded into signing with alex ovechkin's--his captain and... close friend... --team in the khl during the lockout. ovechkin called him every single day for weeks until he showed up and then was positively gleeful about it when he got there), but either way, backstrom reportedly wanted a number that ended in 9, which is a pretty standard request.
for some reason, he chose #99, which is very famously wayne gretzky's number. without getting into who wayne gretzky is, let's just say that he was arguably the best hockey player to every play in the nhl, and he set the top record for... so many things.
his number is retired in the nhl, so no-one is allowed to use it. not so for the khl, however--wayne gretzky never played in the khl, so they have no rules against it.
that said, pretty much everyone who cares about hockey noted, with raised eyebrows, that he'd chosen #99. most people found it disrespectful.
well, according to an interview not long after that news broke, backstrom said he was changing his number, as #99 felt wrong and he regretted choosing it (it's possible he forgot #99 was gretzky's number, it's possible he filled out the form drunk, who knows. lots of possibilities).
of course, he then said that the new number he'd picked was #69, which raised far more eyebrows.
popular opinion (at least on tumblr when this was happening) held that backstrom had been blocked from choosing #19 and chose #99 as a fuck you, but it had slightly the wrong effect in that everyone got mad at him, so he changed it to #69 as a different (sluttier?) fuck you.
which is probably way over-dramatized, but is entertaining nonetheless.
anyway, he proceeded to play extremely well alongside ovechkin (if stats are anything to go by--25 points in 19 games is pretty damn good) and then went back to the nhl the next season and continued blowing everyone else out of the water, as he often does, and that's that.
