clions2010: Yawn.Who needs this affirmative action bullshit?Can we see highlights of all the times he actually protected the puck?Oh wait.There are none.
nathan_gilbert: Hey Phil, it’s me, the kid in the stands!Drafted third round to Nashville and killing it in the AHL!
(Video posted in The Rookery, the direct-to-consumer streaming service of the San Francisco Sea Lions and all associated teams, on 10/14/2024)
Phil grimaced as he watched the Sea Lions give up another goal on screen.The team hadn’t been playing fantastically so far this season, but usually, Jax and Tom managed to find the puck and keep it.Tonight, the rest of the team’s pervasive mediocrity had infected them as well.
No, that wasn’t fair.
Tom’s play was fine.
Jax, however, had been replaced by a beer league amateur.
The Philadelphia Magpies captain, Tyson Fuller, took a frankly obnoxious victory lap.Phil booed at the TV.He’d never liked Fuller.Phil tried to project a facsimile of polite friendliness toward everyone in general, and in the league specifically, but some guys were assholes.In the privacy of his own home where they couldn’t hear him, with no wife to impress and no kids to influence, Phil had no compunction about telling them so.
Tom’s line took to the ice again, with Abrahamov lined up for the face-off.So Morris had switched the lines back.Phil eyed the TV screen in apprehension.At least Morris was finally showing some backbone; when Tom and Jax had asked to be put on the same line at practice last week—the day Phil got injured—it struck him as weird.Lineup decisions were a coach’s purview.Phil grabbed a pillow to hold on to as he watched Abrahamov lose and chase after the puck.
This was worse than Tom and Jax bullying their way into shared ice time.Why did every coach they’d had insist on playing Abrahamov in the first line?He was a nice enough guy (probably—he’d been in San Francisco for three years now and still spoke very little English), but he kept losing face-offs, and he never managed to hit an empty net.Additionally, pairing him with Tom was like forcing two magnets with the same polarity against each other, an exercise in repelling forces.Tom needed people who could draw him out.People like Phil.People like Jax, though Phil didn’t relish admitting it.
“Change lines, you idiot,” Phil told the TV.Abrahamov had run out of gas ten seconds ago, and Morris still hadn’t made the call for a line change.What was hedoing?
The game ended in an ignoble 3–1 loss, and only a few choice saves by their goaltender, Dmitriyev, prevented a worse goal differential.
Well, Dmitriyev’s saves and one or two flashy, creative plays by Mazetti.But Phil didn’t want to think too hard about that.
The postgame interviews were worse than the game itself, with the Sea Lions taciturn and embarrassed.Morris loosened his tie midway through, practically an admission of his own discomfort.
He looked good with his tie half undone.The peek down his shirt collar revealed that his flush went all the way from his neck to his chest.With his red-blond hair a mess from running his hands through it, he could pass for a guy who got really emotional about a hockey game.Phil liked that in a coach, and so far, Morris had been way too sanguine about losses.Plus, something about the lighting in the locker room made his eyes shine.Phil had never noticed them before, but in close-up, he couldn’t help but zero in.They weren’t wide and big like Mazetti’s, whose were so expressive Phil had noticed them even in full hockey gear, or piercing like Tom’s.But something about the crow’s feet and the combination of his surprisingly dark eyelashes and light brown eyes made Morris look approachable, as though he were smiling over some joke he couldn’t wait to tell you.
Phil blinked at himself.
The solitude must be getting to him.
Waxing poetic about his coach’s eyes?He needed to get out of the house, talk to a real person, and stop obsessing about his hockey team struggling with the roster.It happened every year, the only difference was that this year, Phil had to watch it happen from his couch with a slowly melting ice pack on his knee.
He changed the channel to ESPN, where no one cared about mid-season hockey games.He could handle football talk.Hearing talk show anchors decimate San Francisco’s NFL team, the Bobcats, made him feel less pathetic about sitting by idly while his team lost miserably.
Especially when one of the standout stars had replaced him in the lineup.
Phil had met Luca Mazetti briefly during rookie camp in the summer.As he understood it, taking the team’s prospects out for meals, getting to know them, and giving them advice about life in professional hockey was a captain’s job.As a prospect himself in Raleigh, the captain of the Carolina Twisters had taken Phil out for an awkward lunch along with all the other guys who hadn’t made the starting roster.In San Francisco, the alternates did it.Phil couldn’t picture Tom issuing the invitation to go out to a restaurant, let alone tactfully explaining to a group of young men who’d dreamed of this chance that they were going to the minor leagues for the foreseeable future.
In all honesty, Phil doubted his own suitability for the task.He’d grouped them wrong.He’d taken Kilian Howard out with the guys he was sure wouldn’t make it and Luca Mazetti with the guys he thought would.Some of the blame for the mishap, he placed squarely on the shoulders of Coach Ben Morris, who hadn’t bothered to inform the team leaders before making cuts and signing players to entry-level contracts, leaving Phil relying on his gut and his experience.The rest of it, Phil blamed on his own overzealous desire to make the prospects feel welcome.
He remembered how it felt at eighteen, as a prospect hoping for a shot and not getting it, and at nineteen, getting traded to a new expansion team with no warning and starting off in the big leagues with so much pressure to do well and so little guidance.If a little work on his part could stop today’s crop of prospects from feeling as alone and overwhelmed as he had, he would put in the time and effort.
To that end, Phil considered shooting Mazetti a text to congratulate him.But Mazetti probably wouldn’t want to hear from him after Phil had made him think he’d cracked the roster only to get sent down to San Diego.
Tom and Jax were unlikely to be in the right mindset to support a new teammate.Jax had just played the worst game of his career, and Tom was never in the right mindset.He led the team by providing a wonderful example of good sportsmanship and work ethic, but given the choice between sitting alone in his room contemplating the power play and speaking to another human, Tom would always choose the former.
Well, almost always.He’d gotten the baffling notion of forcing Phil to host a team barbecue a few weeks ago.Phil had no idea where that had come from, but he appreciated the effort.
Since Mazetti deserved some praise, Phil shot off a text to Hayes, the team’s other alternate.He ignored the four texts from Tom asking about his knee.Hayes got back to him within seconds, letting him know Breezy—Chris Calabrese—had rallied the team’s young guys to celebrate Mazetti’s first game.
Phil breathed a sigh of relief.Breezy was a hockey player through and through, small of brain, thick of ass, and always up for a good time.No one enjoyed being on a team as much as Breezy, and he would know how to make Mazetti feel welcome.
With one worry taken care of, Phil relaxed into the couch again.
His knee throbbed.
