"Hockey captures the essence of Canadian experience in the New World. In a land so inescapably and inhospitably cold, hockey is the chance of life and an affirmation that despite the deathly chill of winter, we are alive." — Stephen Leacock (1869-1944)
I couldn’t let a full year as president of Div. 49 go by without writing about hockey. After all, I’m Canadian, sorry. Hockey is pretty much the only thing that Canadians are better at than any other country in the world. (By the way, nobody in Canada calls it “ice hockey;” it’s “hockey.”) Sure, as a country we produced the occasional basketball star (remember Rick Nash?), we have been largely responsible for Saturday Night Live (Lorne Michaels, Mike Myers, Dan Aykroyd) and we produced some great female pop singers (Joni Mitchell, Celine Dion, Alanis Morissette). Some Americans might envy our health care system. But what Canadians really care about and do best is hockey. Like American football and its military unit metaphors, hockey is truly a team sport – it is a group whose performance relies on the cooperation of individuals (see, this is relevant to Div. 49) who can only succeed if they function as an interconnected collection that work toward a common goal. (Here’s my bias: unlike American football, hockey is beautiful to watch because of its groupness – like seeing a flying flock of swallows shifting its collective shape as it moves across the sky, but I digress). Yes, there have been great individual stars in hockey (Bobby Orr and Wayne Gretzky changed how the game was played), but hockey is fundamentally a team sport that relies heavily on group dynamics and cooperation among individuals for the group to succeed.
To make my point, I will discuss the lowly Ottawa Senators hockey team. I could have written about the great franchises in New York, Chicago, Boston or Detroit. I could have even picked storied Canadian teams in Montreal or Toronto. But no, the downtrodden, small-market, low-budget, my-home-team Ottawa Senators will provide an apt example of what happens when individuals fail to cooperate. Two seasons ago, the Senators went from zeros to heroes within a couple of months. In February, they had less than a five percent chance of making the playoffs (the season was going badly), then a minor miracle happened. They won most of their remaining games to squeak into the playoffs (okay, they had some help from the Toronto Maple Leafs, who as tradition dictates, stumbled at the very end of the season). Then, the improbable run continued into the playoffs. The Ottawa Senators came within one goal of making the Stanley Cup Final series, hockey’s World Series or Super Bowl game. Though disappointed, my heart soared and I waited with great anticipation as the next season approached – surely, my team would continue its magnificent run. But as in many previous seasons, the Senators broke my heart. Not only did they not make the playoffs, they imploded in a most spectacular fashion. Same players as the previous year, but very, very different results. Why? Low cooperation among individual team players. I won’t go into the sordid details, but several players and their respective spouses grew to dislike each other a lot, and it got ugly.
How could individually talented players underperform so badly as a team? Cooperation involves individuals putting aside their own needs in order to work together toward the greater common goal of the group. Cooperation is necessary for a group’s success. Cohesion, which is cooperation’s cousin, refers to the sense of we-ness or bonding among group members. Group cohesion is key for an individual to benefit from the group. Whereas group cohesion functions in the service of the individual who is the benefactor of the whole, cooperation involves individuals setting aside their personal aspirations for the good of the whole. I like to think that that is one reason why Canadians love hockey so much – the winters have required us as individuals to cooperate, our survival as a collective has depended on that cooperation, and hockey is one expression of that.