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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   2738 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 6, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Not white but I’ve been keeping an eye on Thomas Booker in terms of students of the game. He could have held his own as an NFL D-line coach coming out of Stanford at 22. Was only a fifth-round pick, so the Texans’ expectations weren’t more than rotational player. Also, guys that play as a 4/4i tend to do the dirty work so their teammates can put up stats. But rooting for him to develop.

Is hockey exempted because it’s mostly white? If not, when Kirill Kaprizov was drafted he was seen as crafty and undersized. Turns out he’s sufficiently crafty to compensate.

Is hockey exempted because it’s mostly white?

I'm not familiar with Hockey or how it plays into it. I would probably expect the opposite: for Black or Mexican players to get overrated because the league desperately wants a minority player to point to. Generally speaking, I mentally downgrade my expectations for most white prospects in Basketball-Football-Baseball because the demand for white sports heroes has outstripped the supply for basically a century now if you count Boxing (which, ironically, came back around to a decent number of white champions just in time for it to become culturally irrelevant). The "student of the game" thing is just icing on the cake really, but it tracks as an "intangible" that people will hang on a player they value for emotional reasons.

Hockey has similar rules to soccer and baseball in terms of the field of play — there are minimum and maximum rink width and length requirements but not one, standardized official rink size. The NHL rinks as a whole skew toward the smaller end of those tolerances.

Bigger rinks favor speed and smaller rinks favor strength, not that both aren’t broadly useful. So, smaller players aren’t always given their due by NHL teams. The 5’10” Kaprizov wound up on the Wild’s radar when a flight delay prompted some of their scouts to check out a Metallurg Novokuznetsk game in which Kaprizov was playing given they were stuck in Russia for another night. He would go on to sign the largest contract extension for a second-year player in NHL history.

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