Complaint #030: Pittsburgh Penguins

Look, I am not a hockey fan. To me, the hockey season just started because the playoffs are the only thing that matter in an 82+ game season. I think Friday night was the first time I realized it was a penalty to clear the puck from your goal in hopes to run down the clock (icing, which seems like an idiotic penalty). But if there's one thing I know about hockey, it is this: I don't want to be a Penguins fan, or more appropriately: I don't want to be a Penguins fan if there's an option to be a Flyers fan. This really comes down to one reason: toughness.

Hockey is a contact sport. In fact, hockey is probably the contact sport. Hockey is more fast-paced than (American) football and has harder contact than basketball and soccer/football. Baseball has no real contact (one slide into home plate every 43 games doesn't count), and no other sport is popular enough to warrant mention. Hockey is also the only sport that allows fighting. Sure, you may get penalized for engaging in the timeless art of fisticuffs, but there's a good chance you're not getting ejected and suspended for a quarter of the season (and if you're an NFL player, you'd probably have to go to a six-week seminar on concussion education and if your name is James Harrison you'd get fined $400,000 (OK, now I'm just complaining)). It's for those reasons I mentioned at the beginning of the paragraph that I'm going to root for one of the (if not, the) toughest team(s) in the league (Hey, it works for the NFL, why shouldn't it work for a tougher sport?)

Now, I'll make a concession here. I can't continue to be a Steelers fan (and maintain my belief that they've become the greatest franchise in the NFL) and tell you that the Flyers are a better franchise than the Penguins. It cannot be true because the Penguins have more Stanley Cup victories than the Flyers (and all of them more recently than the Flyers' last one). So the Penguins franchise may be a better franchise now than the Flyers (and it's been true for a number of years), but they certainly are less respectable as a franchise.

Why do they deserve less respect? It's because of toughness. No one questions the toughness of the Philadelphia Flyers. Everyone is free to do so with the Penguins. Sure, a single Penguin (by the way, that's a fantastically fruity mascot if you ask me (although, to be honest, paper advertisements (Flyers) aren't too scary either)) player may accidentally be tough once (I mean, look at Malkin, he's an ugly Russian, I'll give them that), but the team is far from tough. Watching the playoff game now, I can see the Penguins with their playoff "beards"; they each look like they can grow a beard as well as I can (that's an insult to them, or it should be). The face of the franchise, Mr. Sidney Crosby (no surprise that he has a unisex name...), would probably lose a fight to a Care Bear. I think the only battle that co-owner and previous face of the franchise, Mario Lemieux, won was the battle to open his container of hair gel this morning. On the other hand, when you look at the Flyers, you get a group of guys with shovels as faces. I think the entire team combined has fewer teeth than I do. Bobby Clarke's image makes toddlers (and even some of the weaker adolescents) cry.

So Penguins fans, when you call us "Philthy", we take it as a compliment. Also, please stop pointing out small exceptions to the rule: just because a Penguin has a single tough moment, doesn't mean your franchise is tough. No one questions the toughness of the Broad Street Bullies. Well, no one has and lived to tell about it.