It's Time To Talk About Leno 😈

One of my personal favs

you’re ryan leonard. you go back to college again to get a second crack at the natty and prove a point to the guy who ditched you for the nhl. you lose the beanpot. you lose the natty. you lose the hobey baker. you sign with the capitals and proceed to get eliminated from the playoffs with 0 points to your name. you choose to do the stanley pup instead of playing for worlds because you’re avoiding your old situationship and usa is probably going to lose anyway. except…. usa does win. your ONE accomplishment was winning gold in the WJC and even that has been upstaged. your roommate is desperately trying to kick you out because you refuse to go back to boston and keep interrupting him and his gf every time they get handsy. and throughout all this, you have been publicly humiliating yourself and getting curved via instagram likes. no one is doing it like him

So today, in a conversation about some older hrpf fandom lore, I got asked if I could talk about Sid’s public image and fandom interpretations and Nate’s influence on him over the years. And I said, boy, can I.

So to start out, it really cannot be stressed enough that pre-2015-ish, Sid’s initial public image and his characterisation in fandom was pretty hard on the babygirlification and leaned hard into spacetoaster (the original “hockey robot” trope). this was due to a number of factors, mainly:

he was a very young and chubby-faced player in the league (and there weren’t any twinks around)

he was exceptionally good at hockey and the youngest captain to ever win the cup

he notoriously never, ever, ever gave away even a hint of his personality in front of a camera.

Sid was media trained to the gills at a really young age. some of the first articles about him in local newspapers appeared as early as ages 6 and 7, and by the time he hit around 14 and it was clear that he’d stuck with the course and was pretty set to play in the NHL at some point, more and more media attention swung his way. His first endorsement deal I think happened at age 15 or 16. After Gretzky retired in ’99, —and especially after the lockout in 2005, to this day the biggest lockout in North American sports history— most hockey fans were hungry for The Next One. Jágr and Yzerman were still around for sure, and Mario un-retired in 2000 to save the Pens from bankruptcy, but they were aging, and they weren’t Gretzky. No one was. And there were few players that seemed as promising as Sid.

So, given that Sid was drafted in the mid-2000s before social media was rampant, and celebrity information still came out mostly via wildly invasive tabloids, Sid’s early career was marked by a notorious lack of personal information about him. Basically a perfect breeding ground for fanon interpretations to run rampant, but they weren’t entirely unfounded either. Sid was clearly an absolute freak of nature (affectionate) on the ice, and some of the early information (mostly via PR obligations and PensTV) that leaked out over the years gave fans little crumbs of his personality that basically amounted to: loves being chirped; his teammates call him “Creature”; likes his fun-loving teammates (mostly the pranking ones, like Flower and Max Talbot, but Sid was never caught helping with pranks by media); is an excellent Captain; and (via whispers and rumours floating around from people that had been there to see it) he seems to be an upstanding guy that’s really involved with a shitload of charity work on the down low. A lot of this info also came after the fact via articles and short PR videos. For example, turns out that Sid personally pioneered the Little Penguins with his own money, which ultimately kickstarted league-wide initiatives for kids’ programs to learn hockey and for teams to donate equipment. In an article years after the fact, it came out he fought for some tickets to his Juniors games in Rimouski to be set aside for a cheaper price so low-income families could attend.

So that was what we knew until around 2010. He won a cup in 2009 and very little footage of those celebrations leaked out, and he won an Olympic gold in 2010 and became Canada’s Golden Boy. He only did the bare minimum of PR, and never attended the All-Star Game (10 bucks says mostly to avoid the PR there, too). It’s genuinely hard to overstate how much he avoided the public eye.

Then came the concussion years. The first injury happened on January 1st, 2011 in the Winter Classic against the Washington Capitals. It’s pretty wild to look back on it now, but Sid’s injury and everything around it ended up doing a lot of legwork towards taking concussions more seriously in the league. While the NHL still won’t admit to the long-term harm of concussions and concussion syndrome, it’s hard to describe just how long of a way they’ve come in the last fifteen years. Concussion awareness and a tightening of the concussion protocols became more prevalent after The Face of The League was injured with one for so long— of course, it’s not something you can pretend isn’t a big deal when the league’s star player spends almost two years out of commission with one.

So Sid was essentially in and out of the lineup between 2011 and 2013, when he broke his jaw. He recovered from the concussion in time for the 2012 playoffs, but in 2012/13 the half-season lockout happened until January of ‘13, and his jaw injury was sustained at the end of March, right before the playoffs in 2013. He did play a couple games in a full cage, and he had excellent stats, but he was still injured that entire time. During his injured years there was medical information (there is footage of a really hard-to-watch press conference out there about his concussion, let me tell you) and some personal information that became known to the public, but it was kept as much on lockdown as the team could. I assume it was to give him as much privacy as possible. The big exception was, of course, his angry “I don’t like any guy on their team” monologue that burst out of him during a post-game during the 2012 playoff series against the Flyers. That was the most impassioned thing Sid had pretty much ever publicly said after years of spouting so much empty regurgitated hockey media bullshit otherwise. The media ate it up of course. In general both before and after that, there were a lot of press vultures circling during that time. After all, with all those injuries there was a lot of anxiety that, well: Sidney Crosby, generational talent and Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux’s spiritual heir, would never play hockey again.

That brings us to the summer of 2013. Nate gets drafted. Sid is looking at the starting line of his first full healthy season in three years. Now, Sid and Nate actually met for the first time in the summer of 2011 by all accounts (which is narratively interesting to me, personally), and the high-knees story is from then, but after Nate’s draft is when they really started growing closer and becoming friends. Apparently, the day after Nate’s draft is when the sand-dune story happened, and according to Nate, they didn’t really know each other much then. But it seems that since they’d been in each-other’s orbits for a while (since Nate’s early teen years they’d shared an agent, Pat Brisson, and a personal trainer, Andy O’Brien), this is around the time they started becoming friends. I imagine it happened pretty organically. Who knows, there’s not too many details out there— but I like to think they gravitated towards each other the way only two maniacally obsessive peas in a pod can, that they took one look at each other and recognised oh, yeah, this guy’s the same as me. I like this guy.

For those first two seasons after Nate got drafted, Sid was mostly focused on silencing the haters who’d been banging pots and pans since 2011 that Sid needed to be taken to pasture at a farm upstate, and Nate was mostly focused on not being a first overall bust after media pundits were traumatised by the Oilers fucking up too many top 3 picks (RIP Nail Yakupov). There wasn’t a lot of information about them out there publicly. Same old hockey robot media trained stuff you could expect from “Face Of The League” Sidney Crosby. At the NHL Awards in 2014 Nate won the Calder and Sid won the Hart, Ted Lindsay, and Art Ross, and as we found out via Geno’s instagram in 2017, Sid has the picture of the two them from dinner that evening framed in his house (very casual, Sid).

But around 2015 something funny started happening. Sid went to Worlds with Nate, despite the fact that he hadn’t gone since 2007 (where Canada placed 4th. 10 bucks says that was a superstition thing too, like maybe Sid thought not medalling gives you bad mojo or something). After that, they spent three weeks in a condo in Santa Monica together (which we found out several years later in an article). They started wearing matching socks to go golfing. Nate and Sid started doing the Tim Horton’s ads together. Sid did the inaugural Hockey School at Cole Harbour Place and Nate helped him out. Nate took part in Sid’s birthday skate. PensTV was even allowed to come film them (something they hadn’t really done too much of before) to make a little documentary called There’s No Place Like Home With Sidney Crosby, which won him his first Emmy (I assume mostly because people were so gobsmacked by the concept of him talking about his personal life that that alone merited an award. It’s either that or the magical appearance of a hummingbird behind him like he’s a fairytale princess at the end, who knows). All in all, while nothing had happened much in the public eye between Nate and Sid (apart from some wildly embarrassing tweets and instagram posts, Nathaniel), there was evidence of something monumental having happened behind the scenes. It was wild. After years of iron control and media-trained-habits-only in public, Sid was letting his personality shine through on camera and in front of the media, and being affectionate with Nate in public (who was a giant goofball around Sid, of course). And Sid looked happier than he’d been in years! Admittedly, some of that was probably because the Injury Years also just sucked, but he was openly having fun hanging out with Nate on camera, saying yes to media engagements he wouldn’t have said yes to in a million years. Willingly! Not because it was a sponsorship or a team obligation! And it kept happening! In some more recent articles, we found out fun facts like that Sid cooks for Nate daily in the summer after they work out in the mornings (which, the fact that that information is publicly out there— wild).

In 2016, after he won the Cup again, he did another Tim Horton’s Ad with Nate. In early 2017 he attended his first All-Star Game in 8 years (and finally scored a point), and PensTV captured footage of Nate and Sid joking in Sid’s hotel room while Sid was getting dressed for an ASG event (??? WHEN will someone explain to me HOW they weren’t fucking beforehand?? WHY was Nate in Sid’s room while he was GETTING READY, I want ANSWERS—). And then, of course, the Pens won the second back-to-back and Nate fully BUILT A HOUSE almost on top of Sid’s and Sid willingly changed the build of his driveway for Nate to be able to build his house. Nate got a therapist in 2017-2018 and became a hockey monster, and then they did another Timmies commercial, yadda yadda, another million weird and codependent things have happened since then (yeah, I’m looking at the Buddy Basket for Avs’ Better Halves and the congratulatory vid for Sid’s 1000th game that was “too private to air” and the fact that Nate had to talk about Sid 0.5 seconds after winning the Cup). The point is that there’s a pretty obvious catalyst for all this shit happening, and his name starts with N and ends with athan Raymond MacKinnon.

And I know what you’re gonna say, there’s no proof Sid went to Worlds in 2015 or started being more open in public just because of Nate. They haven’t explicitly said that. But like. What else is there? Nate’s low-key been doing small local TV and media gigs since his teens; they even did matching His&His couples’ podcast episodes for Spittin’ Chiclets in 2019. You really wanna tell me that wasn’t Mr. Nathan I-Have-An-IMDB-Page MacKinnon? All I’m saying is that I only need to look at that blooper where Sid loses his shit just because Nate said “Sidney” to know that that’s love, baybey.

(i know that’s a gif from a different year, 2018, but i can’t find the right gif right now and sid cracking up because he thinks nate is thee most hilarious person on earth will always be great to see)

something i find really interesting about will is how he's so extremely conscious about the fact that he's really goddamn young in the grand scheme of things. no rush to check off any box or marker of "true adulthood", comfortable being doted on by his parents even now. every other interview he does, he's like: "well mack and i are just kids" or "it's nice to have someone my age around when all the other guys have families and other responsibilities and adult lives outside of the rink" etc. he's having fun! he's right that he can't really relate to the guys on the team who have kids. he's living in the moment but he's careful about it exactly because he knows that that's what he's trying to do. he's making all these memories and he's taking note and he's going to be nostalgic about a moment just a month ago because well now is the youngest you will ever be again.

versus mack who's kind of always getting spoonfed the "well you're very mature for an eighteen year old" narrative who is mostly careful not to talk about being a kid but still can never escape from it, because, well. he is a kid and it shows. mature in some ways because he left home young and maybe internalized some of the 1oa hockey robot story but childish in other ways, how he waits on those around him to see how he's supposed to react, how it's patently obvious that he just wants to be wanted, even if he doesn't know that that's what it is....!

what's poetry like by bianca stone

the last one is for me specifically

marc andre fleury + the light that shines when things end

hi mikko. mikko's tongue.

wpg@dal 05.17.25 | round 2 game 6

ptolemaea — ethel cain i am the face of love's rage

(special thanks to @celbrini for brainstorming with me)