Should We Be Concerned That Putin Is Now Meddling In The Stanley Cup Playoffs?
You see…the thing is this. Vladimir Putin has had a pretty rough year when it comes to his favorite hockey teams. For starters, you had the Olympics. While the Russians ended up winning gold in Pyeongchang, they did so under the “Olympic Athletics From Russia” name and could not play under the Russian flag. This technically means that Russia has still never won a gold medal in Olympic ice hockey. They won plenty of golds as the Soviet Union. They won gold in 1992 as the “Unified Team”. But never once as “Russia”. So I’m sure Putin is at least a little ass hurt about that.
Next up Putin has his KHL team, SKA. This team is absolutely loaded. They have Ilya Kovalchuk, Pavel Datsyuk, that scumbag piece of trash Slava Voynov. And on top of all that, they are backed by Putin. So the reports were that Putin had the KHL rigged this year to make sure that SKA won the KHL championship since it would look better for him in a re-election year. However, SKA ended up losing to the eventual KHL champions AK Bars Kazan. So Putin got a gold medal that doesn’t technically belong to Russia and his KHL team didn’t win the championship. The only thing left for him right now is for Alexander Ovechkin to win the Stanley Cup for the first time in his career and bring the Cup to Russia for him. Which brings us to this moment from yesterday’s game.
So before we keep going here, yes, I understand that angles are everything here. From this angle right here, that looks like it is 100% a good goal. But if you take a look at it from a completely overhead angle, maybe the puck is just sitting on the line. In case you haven’t seen the word “parallax” being thrown around every goddamn 5 seconds since this moment, well then that’s what that is. However, I’m not fully convinced that parallax is what resulted in this goal being waved off by the officials in Washington yesterday. This explanation from the league just doesn’t seem truthful to me.
What this explanation smells like, to me at least, is an inside job. What I think happened yesterday was Vladimir Putin got on the phone, called up the league and threatened Bettman to make sure that goal got waived off. If it didn’t, then he’d bring all of the Russian-born NHL players home immediately. Because think about this for a second. The Caps were up 3-1 at this point in the game. A good goal call here would have made it 3-2 and all of a sudden that doubt would start to creep back in on the Capitals’ bench. They’d be worried about blowing another lead to the Penguins at home and going down 2-0 in the series. But no goal? Well they hold on to win the game 4-1 and head to Pittsburgh with the series knotted up 1-1. I know that on paper this no-goal call doesn’t look like it had too much of an impact on the game. But when you take the fragile psyche of this Washington Capitals team into consideration, it meant everything. And that’s all Putin’s doing right there. I am convinced of it.