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puckpocketed · 1 year ago

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2/1/2024 Winter Classic - Seattle Kraken vs Vegas Golden Knights

The Summer I Fell For Hockey - The Perfect Day: On Yanni Gourde and the Narrative

A bank of fog rolls over the new year, over Seattle’s skyline, over the morning of the Winter Classic. T-Mobile park, after weeks of preparation, is transformed; sprouting up from the baseball diamond is a construct of ochre-red wood and glass, freshly frozen paint and ice, and boards that flash with sponsorships. A sea of people all in red, cream, navy and pale blue flood in to fill up the stands, 47,000 strong. There’s the retractable roof for insurance, in case Seattle weather decides to get in character, but for once the air stays dry and sunlight cuts through the fog in time for the match, winking warm and yellow and sweet from behind sparse cloud cover. In the future, today will be remembered as a near-perfect day for outdoor ice hockey. Continents and continents (and a hemisphere) away, the chime of a phone alarm rings out into a damp summer morning. It’s 6:30 am. It’s Kraken game day. I jolt awake.

The Vegas Golden Knights enter the arena dressed collectively as Elvis, shirts split open to the belly button, reflective of their city’s desert-dwelling glitterati. My Kraken come as fishermen, in work boots and hot red overalls, outfits made complete with fluro orange caps and stuffed fish. When it comes time to get onto the rink in their gear, the Kraken are introduced by Sir-Mix-a-Lot in a truly terrible mashup of his hits and ad libbed lines. As they make their way down the faux boardwalk, jets of fire spew forth intermittently, and real fishmongers from Pike Place Market toss fish between the players in an ode to their post-game tradition (the stuffed fish yeet) and the city of Seattle. The anthem is shredded by a 14-year-old local on electric guitar, to the stoic, patriotic acceptance of everyone watching. (Gods but hockey is such an unserious sport, and for this it will have my heart in perpetuity)

The rink is mic'd today, and I’m grateful. I love the sound of hockey; I love the sound of skate blades carving sibilant lines, the way sticks will clack against each other, against the gritty ice; and when the puck hits someone’s tape just right, there’s a now-familiar little zing deep in my reptilian brain that heralds satisfaction. One day, when my city hosts the AIHL (Australian Ice Hockey League), I’ll be right next to the rink and able to hear it all for myself, but for now this will have to suffice.

The Kraken start dominant, winning the first faceoff and instantly initiating a dump-and-chase. Their cheeks are blacked in an effort to stave off ice blindness, but I like to think they’ve donned war paint. In line with this, Tanev starts the festivities by slamming the Golden Knights’ Whitecloud in a brutal check. Today, with the mics hot, every thump and bump gets caught as bodies hit the boards. Neither team is holding back, some mutually agreed upon level of violence dialled up three notches. Unlike the check-heavy games I’ve watched in the past, there is no pall of malicious intent, no thin veneer of civility to cover up simmering anger from the get go. No; today the hits start clean. No penalties are called for first period.

Had it been two weeks ago, I’d have jumped on the opportunity to extol the virtues and skillset of our starting goalie, Joey. Later, the entire arena will shake with cheers of his name. Because I can’t resist, I’ll say this: he’s still unerringly good at trapping the puck to stop play and cause a reset, shuttering any build up of momentum and opportunities for rebounds; still going on his heart-stopping adventures out of the net and catching compliments from the broadcast on his exceptional stick handling; and the puck at times seems magnetised to his glove. Spoilers for the rest of the game: it’s a shutout, and after all those incredible stops I’m sure Jack Eichel will be kicking himself about being read like a book for days. 35 saves (his exact jersey number) and the first shutout in Winter Classic history. The story writes itself. But enough of that — Joey’s low-hanging fruit. And besides, I’ve already put pen to paper on the Dacs propaganda; it all still stands.

The hard checks keep coming. I get the feeling that something’s different today, that there’s something in the air apart from the perfect weather. Despite Vegas’ stellar record against the Kraken to date (8-1-0), the Kraken have a vice grip on the game. I’m so used to watching them chase games to stumbling, clumsy victories that this dominance feels surreal. They kill off the Knights’ attempts at transitioning, relentless in their pursuit and determined to play along the boards, keeping the puck largely out of their offensive zone. When the Knights do manage to drag it in, the Kraken d-men spare no effort viciously batting incoming pucks away from the slot, and should that fail — Joey’s right there to remind them just how good he is. It’s still a simple game, a steady and unembellished grind the way the Kraken like to play — but something about today makes me think that perhaps the elusive, gossamer thing called ‘luck’ is on their side. Perfect days don’t exist, until they do.

My Kraken score their first goal off a stylish deflection. Dunner skips the puck at Tolvy from the blue line, over Amadio’s stick and into traffic. The puck sails past a scrambling Knights defence, where Tolvy finds it midair and smacks it down, right into the back of the Knights’ net. The second goal materialises two minutes into second period, and so does the inciting incident for this essay (blog post/diary entry/unhinged hockey breakdown). After winning the puck off a scuffle along the boards Yanni Gourde legs it, sending it into Vegas’ side of the rink. There’s some back and forth, but ultimately Borgy picks up a goal with a slapshot off the rebound.

Gourdo (or Pumpkin, if the pun appeals) is the quintessential Kraken player. From his career, to his playstyle, to how he’s never come close to stardom — he is, to quote Nick Faris, someone that, “[...]embodies who the Kraken want to be.” He catches my attention today because of his tenacity, and because the liveblog tag goes hard for him as future captain. I’ve come to learn that where esports fans call it the Script, hockey fans use a different phrase. It’s all the same underneath: when everything fits so well, when it all begins to rhyme like poetry, when it’s so compelling that surely someone must’ve made it up — that’s the Narrative.

Gourdo is short for a hockey player, standing at a modest 5ft 9in (175cm). That’s the first thing you’ll hear about him; that he’s at or below league average. The second thing you’ll hear is that he was never drafted. In a league filled with stories of stars — whose fans and media orbit the monsters of the game, a dozen or so point-scoring darlings — here’s Yanni Gourde, the man who was once a season away from giving up the ghost and getting a civil engineering degree, a rookie for the Tampa Bay Lightning at 26. This, too, is Narrative — a different kind I’d say, because when you hear about underdogs you imagine a scrappy, uncut gem finally breaking through to reach the top. Gourdo isn’t some secret prodigy, and the stats he’s put up since he got his chance in the NHL are solid, a career high of 25 goals and 64 points in 82 games during his time with the Lightning, but nothing like your McDavids or MacKinnons. But that’s all just paper. Out on the ice, though? That’s where the real story is happening.

If Sidney Crosby’s story is the Narrative, Gourdo’s story is like if the Narrative was stolen by a side character — which, fittingly, is exactly what some of the best narratives are all about. A quick Youtube search turns up the usual fluff pieces done by team media. A deeper scan reveals an unusual amount of short highlights, largely scrums and fights that he’s been involved with. In one of them he can be seen sporting his big, crooked grin. This is how I find out that Yanni Gourde is a pest. An instigator, a rat. Whatever you call it, Gourde shares hockey lineage with the likes of Brad Marchand.

In ice hockey, games are won and lost off the back of power plays and penalty kills. But with hitting and fighting at an all-time low, how does one draw penalties? Gourdo has it all figured out. He plays his own game, sticking just short of too close and pushing the envelope on interference. He’s gone on record talking about his extracurriculars, how he verbally and physically taunts opposing players after the whistle: “I know most of the time it works them up and they want to punch me in the face a little bit more. If they take a penalty on me, then, I am winning.” Gourdo treads the line of illegality and sportsmanship, and tips people over the edge in his wake, and when they retaliate they’re caught out and sent to the box.

Rats have a bad reputation in the NHL. Honour codes dictate that you back up any insults, physical or otherwise, should another player challenge you to drop gloves — the assumption being that any on-ice beef is genuine — an agitator’s actions are premeditated, calculated to wreak as much havoc as possible. This insincerity leaves a bad taste in the mouths of many. And yet, Yanni Gourde is beloved.

When he was selected by the Kraken in the expansion draft, Lightning fans made tribute videos. When he first returned to Tampa Bay as a visiting player, the arena shook with his fans' welcome. He is universally regarded by teammates, both past and present, as a leader and an overwhelmingly positive force in the locker room; someone who knows how to get silly (krakenblr-core!), who contributes to constructing good attitudes on the ice, someone who has stepped up to fulfil leadership duties when his teammates have been injured.

Beyond his instigation (and his remarkably sparkling reputation in spite of this), most interesting to me is a distinct pattern to the rest of his shot highlights. There’s nothing too complicated about it, even I noticed as a fan who’s still learning: Yanni Gourde has that intangible, ineffable clutch factor. For every clip where he’s in a scuffle, there’s another instance where he’s scored a game winning goal.

My working theory for why? He’s the guy who didn’t give up on his hockey dream even after being snubbed by the NHL and relegated to the AHL, who debuted as a starter 6 years later than most rookies, made himself a nuisance to play against at every turn with his relentless puck chasing and instigating. He’s Gourdo. So of course he’s got the clutch factor; he snatched his entire career from the jaws of retirement in the eleventh hour.

On a day like today, where the weather is perfect and the sticky late game ice has puck bounces going the Kraken’s way, it feels like the right time for something magical. And in a match filled with physicality Gourdo defies expectations, plays his own game and manages a miracle. Early in the third period, the Knights go for an offensive reset on a loose puck in the Kraken slot that goes shooting past the blue line. It looks completely standard. I’ve seen it a hundred times by now.

And then, racing down the ice there’s Gourdo. I expect a check, because that’s the type of game they’ve primed us for. It doesn’t come. Instead, Gourdo slips right up into Cotter’s space, right under his stick. Their skates cross once but there’s no hit, and with the barest brush… the puck is lifted out from under Cotter’s feet.

This blog is named for a silly pun on ‘pickpocketed’, because it was one of the very first hockey concepts that really captured my imagination. I became quietly obsessed with the idea of pickpocketing in ice hockey, fascinated by hulking athletes who know they don’t even need to hit anyone to win. There’s something so delightful about it; the idea that in ice hockey, a game that is notorious for semi-legal fist fights and whose actual rules allow the players to throw their hundreds of pounds at each other in service of victory, you could simply lose the puck to a thief. Whatever you call it — pickpocketing, puck stripping — it’s the result of refs who’ve become increasingly trigger-happy on calls, and a league-wide shift toward protecting its superstars from concussions.

For Gourdo, it’s a matter of necessity. Being smaller than most players, he has few other options. He can’t just rely on checking; he’s part of the new wave of players who’ve bought in on the puck possession game, scrapping and digging to steal the puck away with stick lifts and finesse rather than outright force. (Funnily enough, fellow pest Marchand is named in an article as another player whose game is shifting to focus on puck possession).

In the wider arc of the Narrative, it’s a perfectly Yanni kind of play. He steals the puck away from the Knights right in their slot, and is left almost one on one with their goalie as everyone else on the ice rushes to catch up. It’s not beautiful hockey — there is no well-timed deke, no lethal toe drag release — it’s just Gourdo wrestling control of the puck from the carved up ice, awkward and off-balance. The first shot doesn’t even go in, bouncing off of Thompson’s pad. But Gourdo is right there to catch it off the rebound, never giving up, always holding on, and he scoops it right over and into the net.

I know the game is finished for the Vegas Golden Knights after this. Call me biassed about my Sharks but I’ve seen when a team is still hungry for a win, and the Knights aren’t coming to the table. More than just the number on the scoreboard, in hindsight this goal feels woven into the fabric of the Narrative. It’s gorgeously messy, unexpected. It comes as a surprise to everyone watching, the broadcast barely able to keep up before the puck makes its way to the net. It’s Seattle waking up from a decades-long slumber to remind the world that it’s always been a hockey town, and the Kraken victory a ringing statement. It's another game winning goal for Gourdo, exactly like he’s always done.

It’s not quite perfect hockey, of course, not what people think of as clean or even technically proficient. But if you’ve watched any Kraken broadcasts you know what I’m about to say.

That’s Kraken hockey, baby!