The Nashville Predators’ oft-frustrating, oft-thrilling season featuring the team’s fortunes and the fans’ confidence rising and falling like the price of tulips in the Netherlands in February 1637 came to an end with the Preds #AndStill Central Division champions.
Raise another banner? Okeydoke!
The reward is a first-round playoff matchup against the Dallas Stars, winners of the first wild card in the Western Conference and a Central Division rival, with Game 1 set for an 8:30 p.m. start tonight at Bridgestone Arena. Since the latest round of NHL realignment made the two teams intradivisional rivals, Preds-Stars games have been notably feisty, with the teams developing a fairly intense feud (sportswriter Jesse Spector dubbed the game "The Chambers Pot" in honor of journeyman defenseman Shawn Chambers, who scored the lone goal in the teams’ first meeting in 1998). But like the contents of the disciplina arcani, the knowledge of this particular sectional antagonism remains a well-kept secret hidden from the hockey world at large.
The enmity won’t remain esoteric for long, though, as the teams are booked to square off at the legendary Cotton Bowl in the Winter Classic on New Year's Day 2020. Nothing ramps up a rivalry like a playoff series — familiarity breeds contempt, after all. Just look at the animosity between Nashville and geographically disparate teams like Anaheim and Winnipeg. So the league and NBC felt so blessed by the good fortune of the two squads from their made-for-TV game squaring off in the playoffs that they decided to start the bulk of the games at 8:30 p.m. local time and broadcast on USA, the first place everyone goes for hockey action, so long as they think hockey is either wrestling or whatever Suits is.
The connection between the cities of Dallas and Nashville — and more broadly, the home states thereof — dates back a lot longer than the current iteration of the Central Division. In the final scene of Robert Altman’s Nashville, Henry Gibson’s Haven Hamilton boldly declares: “This isn't Dallas, it's Nashville! They can't do this to us here in Nashville! Let's show them what we're made of. Come on everybody, sing! Somebody, sing!”
Like an ur-Glenn Danzig, Haven is asserting that Texas is the reason for political violence and that Nashville is immune. Or perhaps he just had a visceral hatred of Dallas’ cultural contributions of Frito-Lay, Ross Perot and Drowning Pool. In any event, if hating Dallas is good enough for an unlikable self-righteous caricature of Roy Acuff, damn it, it oughta be good enough for the rest of us.
Now, of course, the ties binding the Lone Star and the Tri-Star stretch back much farther, with Tennessee providing Texas a president and governor in the form of Lebanon attorney Sam Houston and a host of folk heroes during its revolution, including David Crockett, who famously lost an election in his home state and told his former constituents, “You may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas” — leaving generations befuddled as they struggled to define the difference.
Dallas itself was founded by John Neely Bryan, a native of Fayetteville, an accomplishment that ranks him third among famous sons of the seat of Lincoln County, right behind Jim Bob Cooter and Kelly Holcomb.
“Sure, J.R., but we came here for: A) insightful and data-based hockey analysis, and 2) reasons to hate the Stars in particular,” you say. To which I respond: “First, please call me J. Robert instead of J.R. for the duration of this series. As for A, really? As for 2, here goes.”
Did you know American epic television show Cheaters is filmed in Dallas, because sometimes jokes make themselves?
Like fans of many of the Predators’ rivals — notably Chicago and Detroit (neither of which made the playoffs again, by the way) — fans of the Stars will no doubt use the Losers’ Riposte after they are defeated, asking, “How many Cups have you won?” Nashville, of course, has not been able to raise a banner for that particular accomplishment, whereas the Stars have, exactly once. In 1999, six years after stealing the North Stars from Minnesota and thus being directly responsible for the existence of the Minnesota Wild, Dallas defeated the Sabres for hockey’s highest prize, capping the city of Buffalo’s run of disastrous 1990s championship appearances, as heavily alluded to in 1998’s Buffalo ‘66. Though technically anachronistic, we could also thus lay blame for Vincent Gallo’s career at Dallas’ be-booted feet.
As any Buffalonian will tell you within four seconds of learning you’re a hockey fan, the series-clinching goal by Brett Hull (whose mind wasn't completely debased by drinking the waters of the Trinity River, as he recently moved to Middle Tennessee) should not have counted, as his skate was in the crease. Though one of hockey’s stupider ideas, along with Fox’s glowing puck, the aforementioned Minnesota Wild and paying Ben Lovejoy $2.5 million, the rule prohibiting goals while a player was in the blue ice was in effect and Hull very obviously was there, thus the team’s only accomplishment is marred.
The most obvious target for boos on the current iteration of the Stars is Alexander Radulov, the former Predator who, like many unsympathetic figures after him, sold his loyalty for a mess of borscht and rubles and cast his lot with oligarchs, leaving Nashville in the summer of 2008 for a Russian team, despite having a year left on his contract. It capped a rather dubious spring and summer for the undoubtedly skilled youngster, who somehow managed to concuss captain and leading scorer Jason Arnott during a celebration in the third game of a playoff series against the Red Wings.
Radulov came back to Nashville to play out his deal in the spring of 2012 and played well until he and Andrei Kostitsyn were suspended in the second round against the Coyotes for breaking team rules after they were caught galavanting in Glendale after curfew. Any goodwill Rads generated by coming back disappeared like a Texan in the Runaway Scrape.
Joining Radulov on the big board of boos is Jason Spezza. In 2014, Spezza wanted out of Ottawa — and given what’s happened to the Senators since, who can blame him? — and his general manager worked a deal with Predators GM David Poile to trade him to the Music City. In what is considered the last documented time of someone refusing to move to Nashville, Spezza used his limited no-trade clause to nix the deal, leading the usually understated Poile to say: “That’s the way the world is right now. There’s a lot of entitlement.”
Ungratefulness is apparently the market inefficiency being manipulated by Dallas GM Jim Nill, whose record of being obsequiously lauded by data-loving spreadsheet users in spite of accomplishing very little is unmatched. An example of this Texas-appropriate gracelessness: Center Jamie Benn is, perhaps, the only man in history able to score consistently without putting in the work down low. Linemate Tyler Seguin is legendarily disgusting. And the team’s owner managed to both bloviate against this entitlement and personify it all in the same ill-advised interview.
And if all that isn’t enough for you, Slurpee — the inferior imitation of soon-to-be-Middle Tennessee cultural icon Icee — is found exclusively in 7-Elevens, once based in Dallas. (Hilariously, Icee makes Slurpee and always has and goofs who claim the Slurpee is better than the Icee are falling victim to the all-too-common Texas trope that Texans do everything better than everyone else, a point disproven by, among other things, Tripping Daisy and Rick Perry).
As always, eat local (because Lord knows Benn won’t) and enjoy this video of the greatest football player in American history dancing.
