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hils79 · 9 months

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Hils Watches The King's Avatar - Ep 34

I'm trying not to think about how few episodes I have left

Wait, I thought that WAS the official verdict. I'm assuming that because this dude has been sitting here gloating for like an hour that it's going to be overturned somehow.

I love that this is a gathering all all the team captains plus Wenzhou's husband

Still unclear what he did to warrant a lifetime ban.

Okay now I want Shaotian to lead a revolution where no one will play because there's no point if their most worthy competitor has been banned.

Yes! Lead them into a strike! Also, this is my 700th screenshot of this drama. Nothing else I have liveblogged (or livetweeted as I used to do) has come anywhere near this amount and I've watched stuff WAY longer than this. Well, maybe my Lost Tomb Reboot rewatch but nothing else!

Wenqing is like 'I'm not sure 'friends' is the word I'd use for what we are'

Are you sure about that?

See, this is why I love them. Shaotian is loud and passionate, Wenzhou is quiet and rational. They balance each other perfectly and they love each other so much

I love that during his whole speech Wenzhou has his hand on Shaotian's shoulder. Probably to stop Shaotian from launching himself across the table and fighting the chairman of the league

It's a good thing Shiqin is there as the Excellent Era vice captain because Sun Xiang would never admit this even if he knows it's true

Not me crying because, for the first time, Shaotian decided to be tactful and stay quiet but his husband is there to encourage him to speak

So this dude said 'I can only overturn the ban if you give me a good reason', the captains gave him several good reasons, and the response was just 'cool but you have to respect the decision to ban him'. Well, that was a waste of 5 minutes (apart from letting me see the Blue Rain husbands who I have missed)

Okay, next we need the fans to protest I guess? If the pros and the fans all protest you don't have a league anymore

It seems weird to me that the captains of the other teams know Ye Xiu has been banned but his own team doesn't. Anyway, they've made him a sub which I hope means he's going to get unbanned in time to show up and help them win

That is not a good tactic. What if he doesn't show up? Also, you told Mo Fan to stall for time and he got a yellow card

Oh I hope she ends up having to fight three of them by herself and wipes them all out like she said she was going to do. Fighting!

Nope she got killed again. So much for getting to redeem herself.

Okay, I'm glad they rescinded the ban. But how do you even enforce this? Didn't he win them the championship a bunch of times? Are they going to take that back and give it to another team?

Sucks to be this guy though. And hi Blue Rain husbands in the background. I can't believe they've decided all of this in less time than it takes for Team Happy to finish a tournament. If this was real life there would be months, maybe even years of meeting with lawyers and league board members etc

I choose to believe Shaotian and Wenzhou are holding hands just out of frame

They could at least have given him a ride back to the game that they pulled him out of instead of making him try and find a taxi

He has friends who were in that meeting even if the league weren't prepared to drive him back to the game. Does no one in this universe own a car?

YAY! I have no idea how he got there so fast given he was hailing a cab like a minute ago but let's just go with it

I love her! Plays for another team but just walks on stage and sits with Team Happy in front of everyone after dropping off Ye Xiu

Aww you must be new here

Okay, it's not very clear in the screenshot but Baozi just punched the ground so hard he collapsed the cliff everyone was standing on and It Was Awesome

OH SHIT HIS UMBRELLA BROKE

And they lost. Devastating. What happens now? Are they out of running to win the league?

God I can't stand it when he's sad. It was bad enough when his dad made him cry. This is way worse

Well, that was a real downer to end on. More tomorrow I guess.

#hils watches #hils watches the king's avatar #hils watches cdramas #the king's avatar #cdrama

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himbeaux-on-ice · 3 years

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Hello! I was wondering if you could please explain to me what Robin Lehner said yesterday about vaccination and competitive edge? English isn't my 1st language and from what I gathered NHL and PA promised VGK that if they get vaccinated the restrictions on them will lessen and they can freely leave their houses. And when they players got vaccines, NHL changed their promise and said players can't do that until all of the teams across the league are evenly vaccinated (shitty move from NHL, 1/2

2/2 as always). But what did Robin mean talking about competitive edge? I rewatched the video 3 times and I still don't understand :( Did the league make it a competition between the teams? "The sooner you all get vaccinated, the sooner there'll be no resctions on you?" I hope, I'm not completely missing the point, sorry about that. Big respect for Robin for speaking up and calling out the league. I'm really happy seeing players speaking up for themselves and their teams

Hi anon! I’ve spoken about this already a bit here and here, in case you haven’t seen those yet and think they might answer some of your questions. But I’m happy to elaborate further! I hope I can clear this up for you.

First, just as a note: Right now it doesn’t seem to exactly be clear what the NHL and NHLPA did or didn’t promise players in terms of easing restrictions, but it seems like Lehner was definitely given the impression by somebody that a team getting fully or mostly vaccinated was the ticket to not being under such strict isolation. The NHL for their part seems to be claiming they promised no such thing, but it’s hard to know right now whether that’s just them covering ass, or if there was just a misunderstanding somewhere in which what they actually said was not fully clear to the players. [Elliotte Friedman voice] More news may be yet to come on this.

Right. So as far as “competitive edge” goes, I can definitely explain that. You’re only a little off the mark. What he means in this case is that the NHL is concerned that letting more fully vaccinated teams live under a less intensely restrictive set of internal rules (regarding things like dining together, exercising together, sitting next to each other on planes and busses, having more group off-ice social time, sharing hotel rooms, having in-person coaching meetings again, etc) will lead to that group having an on-ice advantage in their play over other teams who are less vaccinated and still have to live under full restrictions.

Because the NHL is intensely obsessed with “parity of sport” (trying to make the conditions of competition the same for all teams regardless of outside factors wherever possible), they always in as many situations as possible want to eliminate any potential leg up one team could have over others. This is why we have things like the salary cap, rules about scouting players, rules about how draft picks are distributed that try to make sure struggling teams have a chance to draft well, rules against signing your best players for 20-year contracts so nobody else can have them, etc.

In general theory, being parity-oriented is good! It aims to make sure that the success of teams on the ice and in the standings is determined by the hockey play/skill alone as much as possible, not by franchise wealth or other things they did to get an unfair jump on the competition. And that should make the games more fun and less boring/predictable in most cases! As far as sports leagues go, the NHL has pretty good parity of play overall — there are only a few REALLY good teams and only a few REALLY bad ones, and everybody else performs within a pretty similar range most years. This is why back-to-back Cup wins are so rare in the current era, because due to all the rules to enforce parity there are relatively few teams that are THAT dominant over the competition for a long stretch of multiple seasons in a row, and the odds of any given team winning each year are much more similar. (As compared to like that period in the late 70’s when it was like “who won the Cup? oh surprise surprise it’s the Habs AGAIN 🙄” lol).

However, sometimes the NHL gets unrealistic in its pursuit of making sure everything is exactly the same for all teams. We’ve seen it already this season with the stubborn insistence on making sure the Canucks play a full 56 game season like everybody else, regardless of whether it is safe or reasonable to do so in the time they have left.

This time, the fixation on parity seems to be rearing its head in the form of the League insisting that even if a team has most or all of their players and staff vaccinated, they still have to maintain the same intense restrictions within team spaces as other teams which may be WAY further behind in getting everyone vaccinated, rather than getting to benefit from the lowered risk that being thoroughly vaccinated brings within a closed group like that. And they seem to be insisting on this not because it would be unsafe to change things for vaccinated teams, but rather because of concern that doing so might make that team perform better as a hockey team.

That’s the key part here: The NHL seems to consider getting to (safely) return to a mode of team life that is somewhat more similar to what these guys have been habitually used to pre-pandemic, to be something that could translate into an unfair on-ice advantage in the quality of their play, over other teams who are still doing it all “the hard way” under strict restrictions because they haven’t been vaccinated yet. And because of trying for parity, they want avoid giving teams that “advantage” by basing restriction changes around each team’s individual situation, and instead plan to ease restrictions for all teams at the same time at some point once all teams are similar levels of vaccinated.

Now, US teams seem to be getting vaccinated faster and faster every day, but Canadian teams probably have not started vaccinating their players or any team employees under age 50 at all yet, because Canada’s vaccination process has been painfully slow. So waiting on them to catch up could leave US teams who are already mostly/fully vaccinated still stuck in those restrictive mentally draining conditions for quite some time before the other teams catch up — again, not because it isn’t COVID safe to ease their restrictions if done properly (that doesn’t seem to be a problem), but because the League sees the improvements to their mental state and team morale/cohesion that would come from living a less restricted life together and getting to return to familiar off-ice hockey routines as gaining a “competitive edge” over unvaccinated teams, which would lead to them playing better hockey to a level that can’t be matched as a result.

Which, Lehner is right, is a pretty fucked up way to look at it! “It’s an unfair advantage for you to not be miserably alone and depressed by that and frustrated and doing everything with 16 extra steps you’re still not used to, it’s an unfair advantage to get to actually act like a team off the ice when playing a team sport, so no, we’re not gonna let you eat lunch together or share hotel rooms or whatever” is not exactly a compassionate argument!

Anon I’m also really glad Robin said something about it, and I was glad to see VGK captain Mark Stone put full and vocal team support behind him when asked about it last night on the broadcast too. The mental price of these intense restrictions is something that has been weighing on my mind ever since I first heard they would have to spend all their time on the road locked in hotel rooms alone when not playing and thought “oh god, five months of that is going to be psychologically devastating”. It’s a relief to hear it acknowledged.

I’m not fully sure what the best solution is here, but that mental wellbeing factor absolutely must be discussed in all decisions. It would be fucked up if the League is treating that as something purely technical to be controlled like the salary cap, rather than as a key determinant of health and life (in the short and long term) that is just as important as COVID safety. The old hockey culture of “just suck it up” cannot cut it anymore.

Aside: I think it’s also worth mentioning while we’re here, that I think I do understand why players may be angry about have been talked into getting the vaccine because they thought it would lead to eased personal restrictions, and why I don’t believe that anger necessarily represents an “anti-vaxx” mindset. There are reasons they may not have planned on getting vaccinated just yet which aren’t necessarily “anti-vaxx” cult thinking (though that doesn’t mean they’re smart reasons lol) and would likely seem reasonable to players in-context. I’m gonna put that under a cut though bc this is already really long!

First, there’s the fact that we don’t know what medical conditions some players may or may not have which could make them hesitant to get some of the vaccines out of an abundance of caution. More prominently you also gotta remember, these guys are athletes currently competing their way through an extremely intense and extremely important part of the season as they try to secure playoff spots, playing sometimes as many as 4 games a week. Looking at it that way, it’s understandable why some of them would be hesitant about getting a shot at this particular time which we all know is going to whammy you with a nasty little bout of mild-moderate side effects that hit you like a bad cold for as much as a week. They probably don’t feel they can afford to be laid up with muscle aches, sinus suffering, fatigue, and all the other little fun (and eventually harmless in the end!) things that your body runs through while activating that initial immune response — because in the couple of days that it throws them off for, their team could play 3 or more REALLY important playoff-clinching games, which they could end up underperforming in or having to sit out.

If that is the situation you’re in, and you already feel like the current League restrictions are doing enough to protect you, you can see why you would say “I think I’ll wait and get it during the offseason/during the week break between regular season and playoffs, and just suck it up for these last few weeks dealing with the same ol lonely isolation restrictions I’ve already gotten used to dealing with all season long, rather than be hit with that curveball of possible temporary vaccine side-effects during this time when I need to give it my all every game.” That may sound like a selfish mindset, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that is how at least some of these athletes are approaching it, especially ones who may be single guys without families at home to worry about protecting. (Lehner, for the record, has a wife and two young kids).

BUT, if the League told you (or it sounded like the League told you) “Hey, if enough of your team gets vaccinated quickly, we’ll be able to lift some of the internal restrictions for you guys and let you like hang out and do stuff together within the team again”, and if you were REALLY struggling with the mental stress of that isolated living style, you might weigh the two options against each other and say “Okay, I’m willing to power through a week of potential side-effects and get vaccinated with the fellas if it means I won’t have to be so goddamn miserable and depressed every day.” and then you get the shot(s).

And if you did that, and THEN the League said “lol no, even though your team is fully immunized you still have to sit in your room alone every night and eat by yourself and not leave your house, because it’s not fair to other teams if you guys are no longer mentally miserable like them”, well now you find yourself in the worst of both worlds — still stuck in isolation, AND you’ve still got to play through all the potential vaccine side-effects that will leave you a little off your game during some of the most crucial games of the year.

Plus, that leaves you not feeling like you got to give informed consent — you agreed to get vaccinated (ie undergo a medical treatment) under the expectation that there would be certain rewards to be gained in terms of relief for your mental health, which made you decide it was worth the potential dent in your performance for a few games and any other worries you had about the vaccine, because the prospect of that relief was so worth it. And now, you are told by the League “that payoff you expected never existed, we never promised that, what are you talking about? we can’t change things for your mental health because that might make you better at hockey than the depressed unvaccinated teams”. I can understand how that turn of events could leave someone, as Robin expressed, feeling like they were “tricked” or “forced” into making a choice that they may have done differently otherwise. They felt that they were promised something in return that they didn’t get.

Note at the end of all this: Again, we still don’t know whether the NHL and NHLPA actually made any promises, or if they simply weren’t clear enough in communicating expectations to teams and the players misunderstood what was said to mean something else. Regardless, using the idea that being freed from having to be miserably isolated to an even greater degree than most of the US general public is an “unfair competitive advantage” to now justify not allowing reasonable adjustments to the restrictions for fully vaccinated teams is fucked up, and treats mental wellbeing as just another gameplay-impacting factor to be controlled rather than a deeply impactful part of a person’s overall wellbeing which can even threaten their life. The players must be treated as people.

#long post #asks #anon #robin lehner #vegas golden knights #covid 19 #nhl #hockey

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