Following the Canucks' beautiful double-crosschecking of McDavid ...

“They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.”

- The Untouchables

“Don’t mess with the bull, young man, you’ll get the horns.”

- The Breakfast Club

“If it bends, it’s funny; if it breaks, it’s not funny.”

-Crimes and Misdemeanors

FOR ALL THE STEREOTYPES—always apologizing, humble, respectful, and weirdly placid—Canadians really aren’t nice people. And that goes double when they are from the hideously ugly, culturally barren hellhole known as Edmonton during playoff season in the NHL. 

Last night’s game three between the Edmonton Oilers and Vancouver Canucks ended up with a beautiful moment: Oiler captain Connor McDavid getting an instant karma lesson from Canucks defensemen Nikita Zadorov and Carson Soucy. 

The Biblical explanation of the action might go something like this: “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” 

If that’s too difficult to understand, how about this from The Official Survivalists’ Guide to Living in East Van: “Fuck around and find out.”

The drama started when McDavid two-handed slashed Soucy seconds after the game was over. And then, it was cause and effect time, leading many—including yours truly—to celebrate the moment with this post on X. 

https://twitter.com/MikeUsinger/status/1789877650049159643

The response from an innocuous post celebrating the tradition of teammates simply standing up for each other in a timely, and quite frankly really fucking funny fashion? 

That would be proof that Canadians, far from being nice, are actually kind of nasty and classless. 

Over the past 12 hours, it’s been suggested on X that I’m a caveman, a deranged lunatic, a piece of shit, a fentanyl addict, a moron, an inbred moron, a dipshit, disgusting and classless, a waste of skin, gross, a trash fan, and a flaming fuckstick. (Alright, the last one I just made up, but someone will eventually get to it.) 

Tweets from the Edmonton faithful have been racist: “Vancouver fan base is about 1/4 born in Canada so of course they don’t know much about hockey.” 

They’ve been oddly sexual: “This moment will be played in Oilers Stanley Cup DVD. When they whip their dick over ur dumb Canuck faces.” 

They’ve been vaguely threatening and even more vaguely illiterate: “kekw you need to be dropped off a 2 story building like you’ll eventually be fine, but it’ll take abit and that’s ok”. [sic for that whole thing, obviously]

They’ve been fatphobic: “all you guys are a bunch of fucking losers and pricks that’s no one likes and all you do is whale watch in vancouver and looking at your wife doesn’t count”.

One tweet came with a photo of mammoth wang, strapped to the flatbed of a truck, so large that great Charlestown Chief’s coach Reggie Dunlop would have been licking his beautiful lips.  

Again, all because of a simple and harmless tweet, inspired by one of the year’s most cathartic moments. A beautiful—and actually weirdly hilarious—moment where, in the end, everyone involved skated away, with no one injured. 

In the flash of a second, Zadorov and Soucy instantly made up for all the shit that Vancouver Canucks fans have had to put up with during the first three games of round two: 

Evander Kane slewfooting Quinn Hughes and receiving no penalty.

Darnell Nurse piledriving Elias Pettersson headfirst into the boards with no penalty. 

Evander Kane kicking Nikita Zadorov in the head with his skate and receiving no penalty.

Connor McDavid high sticking Quinn Hughes in the face and receiving no penalty. (With added insult to injury including Hughes being told to get off the ice immediately by “referee” Clueless Kelly Sutherland until he stopped bleeding from a high sticking that two refs and two linesmen impossibly didn’t see even though 18,000 enraged Vancouver fans did.)  

If you caught the McDavid double-decker sandwich incident in real time last night, consider yourself deeply blessed, because you saw a future GIF for the ages the exact moment it was created. 

The “no injuries” angle here is important. Because as Woody Allen once sagely observed: “If it bends, it’s funny; if it breaks, it’s not funny.”

Despite Conner McJesus skating away humiliated and enraged, he wasn’t injured. (On that front, let’s head you off at the pass here, forget “He could have been”—close only counts in horseshoes.)  

Today, it’s crystal clear I wasn’t the only one in the world who found the whole thing funny, because “McCrybaby” has been trending on Twitter all morning.

For those not lucky enough to live here, it’s worth noting that, out here on the West Coast, we’re not only always apologizing, humble, respectful, and weirdly placid—we also have a deeply empathetic streak. So much so that we feel deeply sorry that all Edmontonians have to live in a hideously ugly, culturally barren poophole. 

Despite my deepest sympathies for all of Edmonton, on Twitter the attacks on yours truly keep coming.

Some are deadly accurate and amusing. 

https://twitter.com/osselotmusiq/status/1790095412789129504

Most of them are kind of vitriolic, even when I’m polite to them in my responses. 

https://twitter.com/connorsbedard/status/1789889902135431506

And, so, with McDavid-gate raging on, you're showing your true selves, my fellow Canadians. 

And as sure as Zadorov and Soucy have become instant folk heros in this town, you can be summed up in a couple of words: nasty and classless.

That, behind the façade, is sadly who you really are. You aren’t nice people. 

Go Canucks!