On military appreciation day and in front of the largest crowd of the season, the Wolverines (7-4) fell to the #1/#1 Maryland Terrapins (9-0) by a score of 20 to 12. Ryan Cohen had four goals and one assist for the Wolverines and Isaac Aronson had three goals and two helpers. Four players for the Terrapins tallied a hat trick for the team in red (Murphy, Khan, Donville, and Wisnauskas). Coach Kevin Conry falls to 0-6 against the team he was a defensive assistant for before becoming the second head coach of the Wolverines men’s lacrosse program.

Through one quarter, in a game between two of the highest-scoring teams in the nation, the defense was the biggest factor. Michigan played a tight and physical style of defense that forced the Terrapins to take inaccurate shots that sailed wide of the net more often than not. On the shots that were on target Shane Carr, who leads the Big Ten in save percentage, was able to come up big for his team with two strong saves within the first five minutes to keep the Terps off the board. Carr struggled after the first intermission allowing two goals within 30 seconds of each other twice in the second frame and as the second quarter carried on, the Terrapins continued to expand their lead over the maize and blue. Maryland started to have an easier and easier time getting players open and in all alone against Shane Carr. Too often the Michigan defense allowed players near the crease to have all the time and space they needed to make a move that Carr bit on and lob the ball over the goalie to dent the twine.

    ​After the Washington Capitals won the Stanley Cup in 2018, things have consistently gone downwards for the team. Despite 3 straight seasons finishing with an impressive 105 points (including 2019-20 when scaled up to 82 games), the playoffs have been a different story. In 2019 the Caps lost to the Carolina Hurricanes in double overtime of game 7 after a 2-0 and 3-2 series lead. In the Corona-Cup of 2020, The Capitals came in third in the seeding round-robin losing to the Tampa Bay Lightning in a shootout and the Philadelphia Flyers before beating the Bruins. Then in the first round of the playoffs, they lost in 5 games to the New York Islanders.

    ​Holtby has been in net for all but 2 playoff games since he debuted on the Capital’s major league roster during the 2010-2011 season. With his contract ending this offseason (whenever that may be), it’s time to look back at how he has performed in net, what’s next for him, and most importantly, what roster will he be on at the start of the 2020-2021 season?

    Braden Holtby has been outstanding during his decade-long tenure with Washington for whom he has played 565 games, 97 of them in the postseason. He is a 2-time all-star, a Vezina winner, a William M. Jennings Trophy winner, and led the Capitals to a Stanley Cup championship. The team pays him 6.1 million dollars in cap hit which is high for a goalie but not in the top 5 most expensive netminders. The only problem with Holtby is his apparent decline. At the end of the 2016-17 season, Holtby got the second most all-star votes for a goalie, won the Jennings Trophy, came second in Vezina voting, and 10th in Hart voting. That season was also the last where he would receive any votes for any NHL awards or make it to the all-star game. The graphs below show Holtby’s numbers compared to the league averages in the two most useful goalie stats: Save percentage and goals-against average. As you can see, his GAA is increasing and his SV% is decreasing. On both stats he is sub-par. He’s on the wrong side of thirty and it looks like, assuming that he signs a long term contract, this will be his last serious chance at free-agency. How much money will he get?

    ​It’s a complicated question to answer. The first issue is the flat cap. Every year since its inception, the salary cap in the NHL has increased (except for the lockout-shortened season of 2012-13). Due to the coronavirus, the sports world has faced financial complications. 10-12 games per team were left unplayed and the postseason is without fans so a lot of ticket money was lost. Not to mention the fact that finances went down across the globe. NHL insiders have made it believed that the salary cap for the 2020-21 season will remain the same as the 2019-20 season at 81.5 million dollars.

    The second kink in the chain is the reality of Holtby’s stats. As commented on above, Holtby appears to be past his prime and in a period of decay. His numbers are in a death spiral and it is yet to be seen if he can pull out of it. A smart team would recognize that the likelihood of Holby performing as well as he did in D.C. is slim and would offer him less money than he is making now. However, this is NHL and smart teams are hard to come by. Last year, there was a goalie who was up for a contract negotiation like Holtby, was nearly the exact same age as Holby is, and was on a 3-year decline like Holtby: Sergei Bobrovsky. Bobrovsky left the Blue Jackets, where he developed into a generational talent, and signed with the Florida Panthers for a cool 10 million dollars. Bobrovsky proceeded to have the worst season of his career. The Panthers won only one postseason game: a qualifying round victory over the Islanders, and would fail to make the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Will teams learn from what happened to the Panthers or make the same mistake and roll the dice again? It’s yet to be seen but I’m not too optimistic.

    Washington is on a tight budget when it comes to the salary cap for the 2020-2021 season. They only have ten million dollars of cap space left and they have two defensemen and two forwards that need to be either re-signed or replaced. Even if all five of those players were allowed to walk by the Capitals and Washington signed five rookies at the league minimum, that would still only leave Washington with just under 6.5 million dollars to re-sign Holtby who, as we showed earlier, can fit into that budget. Of course, the Capitals could try to trade away some players to make some cap space for themselves but most of their contracts have three or more years remaining and the players are either too expensive for their skill level or not efficient financially as they still need to replace players who get shipped away. Having said that, it doesn’t seem likely or possible that the Caps can sign so many players for so little money and maintain enough cap space to re-sign their franchise goaltender.

San Jose Sharks: Could Be
    It is said that the Sharks are a rebuilding team and could definitely benefit from a veteran presence like Braden Holtby. The issues arise when you look at that statement more closely. They already have veteran presences like 41-year-old Joe Thornton and 35-year-old Brent Burns. The Sharks also already dropped a lot of cash on a 30-year-old goalie who hasn’t performed to the standards that they set for him. Martin Jones is paid 5.75 million dollars a year and since signing that contract has posted two straight .896 SV% seasons and a GAA of around 3.00. Jones also has a modified no-movement clause in which he submits a list of only three teams that the Sharks can trade him to. This essentially boils down to the fact that the Sharks are stuck with an overpaid, underperforming goaltender. Would they gamble on Braden Holtby after getting burned by Jones? Maybe, but it seems more likely that they would go for Matt Murray or Linus Ullmark who would cost them less in the event of another flop.

Detroit Red Wings: Top 3
    The Detroit Red Wings are an interesting team right now. They have 11 players who will be UFAs or RFAs in the coming offseason and over 34 million dollars in cap space. Not only that, but they have the truest mark of a rebuilding team: No contracts that go into the 2023-24 season. If the 2019-20 season was the last season of them intentionally tanking, we can expect them to re-sign key players like Anthony Mantha and Tyler Bertuzzi to long term contracts and start building the core that they will run with for the next half-decade. 

    ​The key position that the Red Wings need to fix with a free agent signing is goaltending. They started the season with their trust in Jimmy Howard. Throughout the season he played in 27 games and won only two of them. He’s old, his contract is expiring this offseason and he’s abysmal. He posted a SV% of less than .85 in a third of his starts. You might remember that a QS% of 50% is considered bad, Howard’s QS% was 26%! The goalie the Red Wings switched to was Jonathan Bernier who was better but still had a QS% of 42%. The Red Wings need a goalie and Holtby would be a massive improvement for them. They could sign Holtby and build a defensive core around his playstyle since they have zero defensemen on contract for the 2021-22 season.

​    Goaltending is the last piece that this team needs to make it deep in the playoffs. If I were Holtby and I wanted to play for the best possible team, I would go to Edmonton and sign a contract through the 2025-26 season, which is the same year that Connor McDavid’s contract ends. Edmonton would like this because Holtby’s contract would be off the books in time to give McDavid the biggest contract imaginable and Holby would like this because if his decline does continue, he’s still getting paid for years and might even get another ring. On a more personal note, Holtby was born and raised in Loydminster which is on the border of Saskatchewan and Alberta. The closest NHL team to Loydminster is Edmonton. This makes the most sense.



    The question I posed at the beginning of this article is so complex because of Holtby’s declining numbers, Bobrovsky’s contract, and each team having their own pros and cons. At the end of the day, the teams that make the most sense to me are the Senators, Red Wings, and Oilers. Out of those teams, I would say that he is most probably going to Edmonton in the offseason but no matter where he ends up, I will be watching very closely to see if it’s another flop or if he hoists the cup again.

    ​Let me start off by pointing out the fact that I am a straight, white, male who has never faced racism of any kind - stupid middle school antisemitism, sure - racism, no.

    Something horrible happened today.

    On Friday, the third of April, the New York Rangers held a Q and A session with recently signed defenseman K’Andre Miller. Miller played for two seasons with the Wisconsin Badgers accumulating 40 points off 12 goals and 28 assists. 2 of those goals and 1 assist came against the Wolverines this year. He was listed by EliteProspects as the #1 Rangers prospect in the NCAA beating out senior Morgan Barron from Cornell for that award. After signing his entry-level contract with the Rangers who drafted him in the first round of the 2018 draft, the Rangers wanted to keep fan engagement going in the Coronavirus induced pause. They decided to let 500 people in a video conference on the platform Zoom with Miller to ask him questions. In hindsight, this was a horrible idea.

    ​During the video conference, Miller, a racial minority, was answering questions about his quarantine situation when an account with the screen name ‘FBI’ started to spam the chat with a wall of text that was the N-word in all caps over and over and over and over again. Any real questions got lost in the wave of racial abuse. K’Andre did not respond to the happenings in the chat but was clearly visibly uncomfortable due to what was on his screen. The individual was eventually silenced and the session continued.

    4 hours after the incident, the New York Rangers released this statement:

    While it is nice that the Rangers said this and are condemning this behavior, 4 hours is an unacceptable time frame to take between the incident occurring and the releasing the statement. The NHL also took a similar amount of time. Racism clearly has no place in hockey, or any sport for that matter, yet it exists in almost every conceivable competition. Every month, a new story breaks about a soccer player facing racial abuse from fans, a WWE wrestler getting targeted by racist chants from the crowd, the use of slurs on the football field, and many more show that this isn’t a problem keen on leaving the public view. When incidents like this occur it is up to the team and the leagues to take action swiftly and denounce this as soon as they can. The faster they respond, the more unified the response is. I am ashamed and disappointed in my favorite sports team on this planet for taking FOUR ENTIRE HOURS to denounce racial abuse on the newest member of their NHL roster. ​

    Furthermore, fans are having different reactions to this. Some are calling it out, some are calling to ignore the abuse as the person with the ‘FBI’ account was clearly a troll trying to get a rise out of people, some are thanking K’Andre for his professionalism. While it is obvious that the fan base of the New York Rangers are behind Miller and in support of the young man, no matter what anyone calls for to respond to this, a whole subsection of people attacks in disagreement. If we call it out we are being stupid and giving the troll the attention they seek. If we ignore it we are letting the hatred bubble under the surface. If we thank K’Andre Miller for being professional we are being condescending. (I don’t really understand that last one but it’s happened. I’m willing to learn as well.) When something like this happens, there really isn’t one unified correct thing to do. No one has the answer to how to get rid of racism. We should not be attacking each other at a time like this. We should be together and supporting K’Andre Miller.

    ​One response to this that I have seen that makes me happy is the masses of New York Ranger fans and players saying how they are excited for K’Andre to come to New York and sharing highlights of him, including his beautiful snipe on the power play from the blue line against the Michigan Wolverines in Yost.

    ​​We can share all the love and highlights we want but that does not excuse nor make up for the hatred that K’Andre Miller endured today. We need to see better from humanity, especially at a time like this, and we definitely need to see better from the NHl, the New York Rangers, and any league or team where a player endures racism from fans, teammates, or opponents. 

Image Credits
Yahoo Sports
Twitter

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Dear Eli Manning,
    
    I’m an 18 year old kid and honestly, I didn’t like sports as a small child. By the time I started watching sports and getting emotionally invested in the teams you were out there every game and as the rest of the team retired or left, as Victor Cruz went away, as Hakeem Nicks, Mario Manningham, Osi Umenyiora, and Justin Tuck went away, the one player left on the team from when I started watching was you. Now that’s over. No one from that 2011 team that I can recognize by name is still on the roster. It’s the end of an era.

    ​The first Super Bowl I watched was LII when the Giants played the Patriots for the first time. I watched because I was a loyal New Yorker and I had been to some Giants games in the past but when David Tyree caught that ball I had no idea about the significance of that play on my life. Over the next few years I started to watch weekly and really root for the Giants. My favorite sports moment of all time was watching Super Bowl XLVI with my best friend, a Patriots fan, and watching you go down the field in another drive at the end of the fourth quarter to put the Giants ahead for good. Everyone remembers the David Tyree catch but my personal favorite has always been University of Michigan alum Mario Manningham’s beautiful toe-tapping sideline catch that would not have ever happened without the perfectly placed pass from you. You gave me my favorite sports moment, thank you.

    ​“Continuing to move the game forward @KingJames. Much respect my brother #33644” That was the last tweet sent out by Kobe Bryant 15 hours and 45 seconds before TMZ first reported about his untimely demise in a helicopter crash. That tweet was congratulating LeBron James for surpassing Kobe on the all time point total list, bumping the retired NBA player down to 4th all time. He wasn’t upset or salty about the success of others, he was classy and proud of LeBron’s success on the court.

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    TMZ was the first major news outlet to break the news of Kobe Bryant’s passing. When I first saw it, I was in shock. TMZ is a glorified gossip magazine with a television show, they could be wrong. Then Yahoo News released a statement, then Bleacher Report, ESPN, ABC. It was real. I sat there for a long time in silence. I wasn’t alone in that. The hall of my dorm exploded into shouts of disbelief and confusion. Hockey writer Steve Dangle tweeted “At an airport restaurant in Charlotte and the whole place went quiet when ABC and ESPN broke to the news.” The world seemed to stand still and no one really had words. 

    ​Kobe Bryant transcended his sport. He was accomplished both on and off the court. He is the only person to win an NBA championship and an Oscar. Not only did he win an NBA championship, but he won 5, was MVP for two of them, has the second most three-pointers made by a player in one game, 2nd most points by a player in a game, the only player to have two numbers retired by the same organization, two Olympic gold medals, and a 17 time all-star. In a rapidly shifting offensive game, Kobe played all around the court. He led his team in scoring for twelve of his 20 years and made 12 all defensive team selections.

     On December 13th 2019, just weeks before his death, Kobe Bryant was seen helping to comfort victims of a car crash before first responders arrived on the scene. He owns the Mamba Sports Academy, a space for youth athletes to train their skills in a multitude of sports. He spent his time after the NBA being a family man and helping others. Just like when LeBron passed him on the scoring list, he lived his life with class and should be remembered as such. 

Photo Credits:
The Philadelphia Tribune
NBA
The Wrap

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​    WCBN: I believe it was the Saturday Minnesota game where it looked like the Children of Yost got censored. Did something go down there?
    John: The Children of Yost have always been rowdy, more so over the past handful of years, since we got section 18, the one right behind the opponent’s bench back. When we were meeting with the athletic department we were running over the ground rules of what you can and can’t do behind the bench and the main thing is that you can’t reach over the glass but they said pretty much everything else was up to us, as long as we don’t go over the glass, they don’t care. We tried to make that section, those couple of rows behind the opponent’s bench as rowdy as we could, understanding that as long as we’re not going over the glass, nothing is off limits. Over the past two years, especially from the ushers, we’ve received a lot of warnings for saying, not slurs or anything, but naughty language. We’ve received a lot of backlash for that which I don’t really understand. It’s part of who we are. There are obviously other ways to be rowdy which are not dropping f-bombs or whatever but, occasionally one will slip out and if they’re trying to put a damper on our rowdiness in whatever way, I think that’s going to be harmful in the long run. People will start to wonder in the long-run ‘can I say certain things or should I just be quiet and play it safe?’ We do get complaints before every game. An usher will come up to us and pull a few of us aside and say “Watch your mouth. If you say one f-bomb, you’re out of here.” I know last year we played Ohio State at Yost and that game was nationally televised. A couple of F Ohio chants got started and then grew throughout the stadium and apparently you could hear them on tv really well. The arena management did not enjoy that and since that game they have been putting the clamps on pretty tight in regards to naughty language. That’s why at soccer the ushers are more hands off. You can use that language to your advantage in a smart way.
    WCBN: Naturally, refs are supposed to be unbiased but there are a lot of Children of Yost chants specifically attacking the refs. Do you think that those are important cheers to keep in the wheelhouse?
    John: I think so. Just like the hockey team, no one is trying to do a bad job, they’re just trying to do the best that they can do, refs and umpires included. I think that that's just part of sports. We don’t take anything personally against the refs. Because of how they schedule the referees, based on location, a lot of the refs are at a lot of the games. I think keeping those is necessary because it is part of the environment. Everyone is mad at the refs and I hope they don’t take it personally. We’ve had a couple of the refs play the game a little bit. Pre-game when we’re telling them to check the net or whatever, they’ll motion that they can’t hear us, play with us a little bit. I think it’s part of the environment and less of a personal attack against referees. Of course, when we think they make a bad call, we’ll let them know. It’s not personal, it’s just part of the environment I’d say.

    WCBN: Any last things you want to say?
    John: We’re always open. Children of Yost are always open for new people. As I said, I didn't get into it because I was elected to it or because someone chose me. If you show up to any event and you’re loud and you’re rowdy, and you’re there on a consistent basis, and you’re bought in, it’s really not hard to get noticed. Once you’re in it it’s all to you, there’s no selection process. I know Maize Rage has elections and board meetings and all that, the Ultras and Children of Yost, the two I mostly oversee, I don’t think that’s necessary. I think the people that want to be there will be there. Whichever students may think ‘I don’t know the chants’ or whatever, come try it out. We’ve got chant sheets, no one knows all the chants during their first or even their second game. Come out, we’re all about having fun, that’s the one requirement. You show up, you have fun, win or lose it’s a good time.

    ​If I were to sum up what I took from my conversation with John Bartman in one word, it would be atmosphere. There is no energy like that in the Ultras section during a corner and hell hath no fury like playing against Michigan with the Children of Yost present. I would recommend that everyone makes it to a hockey game as soon as they can and a soccer game next year, they’re free for the students and you’ll never forget it.

Photo Credits:
Michigan Ultras
John Bartman
Michigan Daily
University of Michigan
Evan Pesch
Ann Arbor News

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        ​Hockey is the least watched of the four major sports in America. In fact, in a 2018 Yahoo Finance article comparing the viewership of sports, they neglected to even include the NHL (1). As someone who has been a hockey fan since I still had all of my baby teeth, I think that America’s ignoring of hockey is a sin. I am here to give you, the average American Joe, five reasons that you should turn on the television and find a hockey game to be absorbed in.

Reason One: It combines the best aspects of every sport Americans like
        Hockey is undoubtedly a bizarre sport. Ten skaters chase a rubber circle around with wooden sticks trying to slap it past a goalie with to score a goal. Despite being like no other American sport, it has all of the best parts of every other sport followed by a majority of the country. 
Americans love violence and football has it in spades. Football actively creates situations where the only way to stop the opposing team is by forcing a player to the ground through hits and tackles. Hockey has the same big hits without them being a necessity on any given play. An offensive rush can always be stopped with a fancy move from a stick but hits are undeniably a part of the sport.

        Hockey has a similar speed to Basketball. Play on the basketball court goes back and forth without much of a break until one team scores; hockey is very much the same. While play on the rink does stop for non-scoring reasons more often than basketball, play stops due to scoring much less often. In addition, the players on a hockey team are able to make substitutions on the fly, ensuring that everyone on the ice is fresh and able to move at a pace that fans find entertaining.
        ​The best aspect of baseball is that it is truly a team sport. Hockey also has that emphasis on the team. In football, there is no doubt that without a decent quarterback, your team has no shot. In fact, the NFL MVP has been a non-quarterback only four times since 2000. Football has approximately 12 positions depending on how you count them and only four are represented in the history of the NFL MVP award since its inception in 1975. Basketball teams can rise and fall with one player. When Lebron James was with the Cavs, they finished first in the central division every year. They also made the finals all four years. When he left, they fell to near the bottom of the eastern conference. While there were other lineup changes between those two years, most of their offensive production walked out the door as Lebron went to free agency. Hockey is like baseball in  that the MVP award is tied to no position and no team’s success is determined by one player. For example, in the summer after the 2017-18 season, John Tavares left the New York Islanders. Tavares was the team’s captain and had 84 points (37 goals and 47 assists) after playing in all 82 games. He was an important figure both on the ice and in the locker room. When he left the team to play in Toronto, a significant portion of the team’s offensive production left with him. This didn’t cause the Islanders to fall to the bottom of the league like the Cavs, quite the opposite happened. In the 2018-19 season, the Islanders went 43-27-7 and finished 2nd in the Metropolitan Division. They actually improved by a sizable margin after losing their captain despite the fact that no player on the 18-19 Islanders had over 62 points, 26 less points than Tavares had during his first year in Toronto. When the best player on a hockey team leaves, the team isn’t doomed to failure like in the NBA.

Reason Two: The referees are awful
         I know that sounds like a bad thing, but this isn’t an article on why the NHL is a good league, it is about why Americans should watch it. The NFL is the most-watched league in the country and one of the hobbies that football fans enjoy most is complaining about bad officiating. Whether it is about pass interference calls, questionable catches, or roughing the passer, the referees in the NFL get a lot wrong. They get calls wrong that can easily be corrected through the usage of replay. 
        The NHL is very much the same. In the first round of the 2019 playoffs, the San Jose Sharks were down three goals to none against the Las Vegas Golden Knights. Off of the faceoff, Cody Eakin cross checked Joe Pavelski in the chest causing him to fall backwards. In a freak occurrence, Joe fell on his head and he started to bleed. The referees saw Pavelski down in the ice and bleeding from his head so they assumed Eakin cross-checked Pavelski in the head. They gave Eakin a five minute major for this perceived act.

        ​For those who don’t know, in a normal penalty the offending team plays with one less player on the ice for two minutes or until the other team scores a goal. A five minute major, on the other hand, is a stretch of five minutes where the offending team plays a man down no matter how many goals the other team scores. 
        The referees made a judgement call based on the aftermath, even though there was a massive scoreboard right above the referees’ heads showing the replay again and again. The Sharks scored four goals on the power play to make it a 4-3 game. Las Vegas tied it up but lost the game in overtime. Did I mention it was game 7 in a best-of-7 series

Reason Three: The game is fast
        Baseball was once a sport known as America’s pastime but recently people have stopped watching. Baseball viewership is plummeting because fans think the game is too slow. According to the Wall Street Journal, a baseball game has about 18 minutes of action. Action is counted as any time the ball is in movement from when the pitcher throws the ball to when the play has stopped or when the catcher catches it. Baseball is given a three hour time slot on television. This means that the action of the game is only 10% of a broadcast.
        American fans like fast-moving sports such as football and basketball where the breaks in action are limited. Basketball is a 48 minute game played on a 2.5-hour time slot equating to action being 32% of the broadcast. Football is similar as it is a 60 minute game played in a three-hour time slot so it has an action percentage of 33%.
        Hockey has the highest percentage of action. It is a 60 minute game and it is broadcast in 2.5 hour time slots. This means that 40% of a hockey broadcast is time spent playing the game. Hockey is played in three periods so there is less time between sections of the game, and stoppages can be as much as 8 minutes apart because there is no set way to break the flow of the game. Of course, it should be noted that soccer has an action percentage of 75%.

        ​Some sports have predictable playoffs. No one is ever surprised when the Patriots make the Super Bowl. Lebron James made the NBA finals eight years in a row with two different teams. In the second half of that stretch, his Cavaliers faced the same team all four years. People were starting to tune out of the playoffs until the final because why should someone watch a series if they know what the outcome will be? 
Hockey is one of the least predictable brackets in sports. In the NHL playoffs there are four 1, 2, and 3 seeds, one from each of the four divisions. During the first round of the 2019 playoffs, all four 1 seeds lost to the four wildcards. That includes the Tampa Bay Lighting, a team that tied the NHL record for regular season wins, getting swept. The eventual Stanley Cup champions, the St. Louis Blues, were a 3 seed and had to upset four separate teams on their way to winning it all.
        When looking at 2019 and all of the major sports tournaments in America, the Stanley Cup playoffs had the most upsets. The graph below plots what percentage of series, or single games in the case of March Madness and the NFL, ended in an upset. The World Series had plenty of upsets while both basketball tournaments went mostly as predicted.

by Joshua L. Tenzer

        It’s no secret that New York sports fans are among the most insane anywhere in the United States. They are fickle, rash, illogical extremists yearning for the good old days of the 80s and 90s, and I am proud to be one. If you sift through the hot takes, the calls to fire whoever, the constant panic, and the armchair GM-ing, every once in awhile you find one having fun. When you do, you find some of the funniest and most devoted fans in existence. The perfect example of this: Ryan Mead and the Church of Kakko.

        Kaapo Kakko is only 18 years old and has only played 8 games with the New York Rangers, but he is already seen as the future of blueshirt hockey. Drafted #2 overall in the 2019, the Finnish 18 year old already has a spot as a top 6 forward in the garden. He competed in three international competitions before being drafted winning gold in all three. In the 2018 IIHF U18 World Championships, he tied for leading his Finnish team in points racking up 6 goals and 4 assists in 7 games. He has an assist and a goal through his first 8 games but a plus/minus of -8 and a negative point share. Regardless of these early concerning statistics, rangers fans are sticking with the young man and putting all their faith in him, most notably Ryan Mead.

        At first glance, this church seems like a joke taken very far but under closer inspection, it is what sports fans can be at their absolute best. Throwing all your faith behind a player to the point of forming your own church for him is an admirable task. As fans we all love to love our team so even as Ranger’s fans expectations of Kakko are reevaluated, the church continues to grow. Yes, the Church of Kakko is silly, ridiculous, and bizzare and yes Ryan Mead has made a cult but it’s also just a concentrated form of how good it is to love your team.

        Praise be to our lord, Kaapo Kakko.

Photo credits to:

• Getty Images
• The Church of Kakko
• MSG
• Nick Depalo (The Bishop of Branding)

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