Friendly Reminder: It's Okay To Already Hate The New NHL Team In Seattle
At some point today, the city of Seattle will be awarded the 32nd franchise in the National Hockey League. They will start playing in 2021. Good for Seattle and everything, I guess. And good for the NHL. Having a major professional sports league with an odd number of teams is just childish, ya know? You can’t be going around thinking you’ll ever make up ground on the NBA and NFL if you’re wheeling around 31 teams. That’s some JV shit right there. So the league needed a 32nd team and Seattle will supply that in 2021. But don’t think that just because you’re new in town that I don’t already have a deep-seated hatred toward you. Because I’ve already stated that if this team wins a Stanley Cup before the Philadelphia Flyers do, I will never watch another hockey game for as long as I live. And with how things have been going in Philly lately, that doesn’t seem like the most unlikely scenario to ever happen.
Also–I think that hatred is a very important emotion when it comes to sports. Especially so when it comes to sports fandom. Without hatred, being a sports fan just becomes like being a part of a book club or some shit like that. You have your team, you have your players, and you despise anybody who doesn’t fall under those two categories. Considering Seattle doesn’t have a roster yet, there’s nobody on that team who can outweigh my hatred of the fact that they’re not the Flyers. Maybe if someone like Johnny Gaudreau ended up in Seattle I would give them a fair chance but also probably not because that would mean that they stole Johnny Hockey from ending up back in Philly. I don’t want to welcome this team into the league with open arms. I want to welcome them into the league with clenched fists because that’s what the game is all about.
And now I wrote this paragraph roughly a year ago to the day. Actually it was 364 days ago to be exact. While Seattle may not have a physical NHL team at the moment, Seattle still has sports fans who we’ve all been exposed to way too much with the Seahawks. Granted, they love their teams. But they’re also going to become the most insufferable fanbase in the entire league. You thought the crowd in Nashville was getting too full of themselves during the Preds’ playoff run the other year? Buddy, just you wait until the Seattle team makes it to the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the first time. I can already picture it now. A 10-minute segment on NBCSN with Jeremy Roenick chuckin’ some salmon and talking about how great the fans in Seattle are at screaming really loud. “The 7th man”. About how this is the newest team in the league but Seattle is already “such a hard place to play in for opposing teams”. Frig off, ya bozos. Yelling the loudest doesn’t make you great fans. It just makes you a bunch of jabronis. It also makes you incredibly insensitive to the mute community. But all people ever talk about when it comes to Seattle sports is the noise. They obsess over it. I could do my best to ignore the fanbase when they aren’t ruining the NHL. But now that it looks like that’ll change in a couple of years, it’s time to start building up my hatred for all things Seattle. You jackasses have yelling, coffee, and rain. That doesn’t make you special.