Boston Bruins
In a project like this, there are easy ones and harder ones. This is an easy one. The Bruins are a good hockey team thanks to some savvy leadership knowing when to dump perpetual losers like Joe Thornton and Phil Kessel before they could poison the locker room (not to mention they play in a league where it’s largely ok to up-axe a guy in the dick like a team that absolutely loves up-axing guys in the dick). Also like a hockey team that’s only been really good for a relatively short time, they have a fanbase which largely doesn’t deserve to have a good team.
The Bruins are easy to hate because they are a not-entirely rare combination of actually good at hockey and actual despicable people. They’re like a clone of the 2006-07 Anaheim Ducks team that was abandoned in a bar and brought up by a dock-worker’s drunken father.
What to Like About them
Like I said, the Bruins have savvy management who knows when to cut ties with a guy. When Peter Chiarelli dumped the disgusting pigbrained Tyler Seguin onto Dallas and got back the classy, beautiful Loui Eriksson and Reilly Smith, he may have made his team a bit worse, but he made them cleaner. As we all know, cleanliness is next to Godliness.
What to Hate Most About Them
This one is tough. Their owner was basically the mastermind behind the last lockout and is so despicable that not even his own fanbase will defend him. If we’re going to give them a pass on Jeremy Jacobs though, then we should probably stick with how the team plays as a combination of BOTH meatheaded dinosaur poopforts AND cowardly diving chickenhearts. There’s something in every person who has a right to call him or herself human that knows that you can’t be both a snake and a weasel. These assholes are the kind of people who would rewrite Rikki-Tikki-Tavi as a love story.
How to Take the High Road
When it comes to flipping shit at an opposing team or its fanbase, it’s important that you act with a bit of grace and dignity. We should strive to keep the topic to hockey itself. It’s even better if we have an opportunity to grab a position from the moral high ground while we’re at it.
For the Bruins, you simply have to keep reminding them that Milan Lucic is a crybaby sore loser who would rather ruin the sanctity of a handshake line by threatening to kill a person than suck it up and act like an adult for even 30 seconds. Every single argument against that is either a dumb-yet-convenient dismissal of a tradition older than most of us or it’s a proud admission of liking human waste. Either way, you needn’t muddy your boots stepping over that.
How to Deliver the Low-Blow
While I never ever EVER support taking cheap shots at your opponents’ expense first. Sometimes they ask for it. You can pretend to cast your eyes down at them from your ivory tower or you can jump in the muck with them. Here’s how to do the more-fun version.
Boston fans are racist. They prove it again and again. Yeah yeah, I know: #NotAllBostonFans. Whatever you say, Chad. (All Boston fans are named Chad too, even the females). Even better, when you point this out, they act like they’re the victims of this grand pan-sports conspiracy to sully their good name. They’d actually weed out the bad apples giving them all a bad name, but they’re too busy pretending like those people don’t count as real fans (or perhaps they only count as 3/5ths of a fan? I don’t know how it works, exactly).
