The Stanley cup Final is set, and the hockey world is talking about…state tax again. Oh boy.
Welcome back! I hope you’ve enjoyed your week.
The Stanley Cup Finals are a rematch; the Edmonton Oilers versus the Florida Panthers. Both processed their foes in 5 games, and it was only ever competitive for a very, very brief stint of time. Will Connor finally take his crown? Or will we all pretend this is Brad Marchand’s great hurrah where he takes on an entire hockey team at once and wins?
The hockey watching world is naturally, not focusing on that, because otherwise both series were kinda dull and both conferences have plenty of reasons to dislike their representatives this year.
Instead, a good number of them from certain parts of North America are complaining about how US states without income tax seem to be in the NHL Conference Finals a lot. Which sure is an…interpretation of how teams end up where they do.
Ignoring that the whole income tax thing is completely misunderstood, I’m pretty sure the reason Vegas, Dallas, and the Florida teams do so well is that they either established a culture from jump of winning by identifying weaknesses in the market, or bled themselves raw until they could effectively remake their identity in whatever image they wanted after years of wandering the wilderness. I’m sure the incentives are nice, but you can still suck out loud in warm weather. Go ask Dylan Guenther how fun playing in a state with at best a token income tax was.
Maybe I’m just looking at this narrative and wondering if they’ve created a tulpa out of State Income Tax in order to villainize things they don’t like about their own teams but don’t want to verbalize as active criticism. Was State Income Tax really paying a first and Fraser Minten for Brandon Carlo after an offseason of a defense getting older, slower, and not very interested in leaving the zone under their own power? State Income Tax forcing your entire team to play “Petey or JT” all year? State Income Tax making your goalie fall apart and badly expose the system that made him so great? State Income Tax holding the mayor hostage so that Josh Anderson got top six minutes? Did State Income Tax tell you to get three aging forwards; all of which wouldn’t be at all what you needed to start your “rebuild”? Of course not.
Those were choices made in clear mind and conscience, and with the expectation that the teams could pay for them. State Income Tax didn’t force your GM to do dumb things; they did all of that on their own time.
I dunno man, maybe it’s just a smokescreen for “I’m getting mad I fell for it again”.
Anyway the Stanley Cup Finals are happening on Wednesday. Let’s all try to focus our brainspace on that and the potential hire of someone for the job of Bruins head coach. That seems like a much better use of our time.
What’s on tap? What did you think of Pete DeBoer throwing his goalie under the bus in the post-game, that was nuts, right?