NFC on the Road: Genève-Servette HC @ SC Bern
Nordiques Fan Corner goes to Switzerland
Note: This is the first in a series of posts, which I hope will happen occasionally forever, in which I attend non-NHL league games. Because I live in Europe and my job requires me to travel around Europe, I think most of these will be European professional leagues. I’ll go to games when I can, which won’t be regularly or often, and then write about them. These won’t really be game reviews, or recaps, but rather reflections on travel and the experience of non-NHL hockey. Enjoy—NFC.
Like a lot of okay-but-not-great beer league players, I think I’ve always had a latent impression that I could do most of the stuff an NHLer could do, just slower and worse. Nathan MacKinnon can skate; so can I, sort of, but not in such a dramatic, blazing, galloping way. Sidney Crosby can pick corners on the backhand, and I can do that too, albeit not very reliably. Trevor Zegras can score Michigan-style goals so easily that they now seem like just another type of legitimate scoring attempt; if you give me fifty thousand tries and keep the defensemen away from me and the goalie is unconscious, I can probably, eventually, score a Michigan as well. What these guys are being paid for is the ability to do it faster, more consistently, and against better competition; but someone like me could, in principle, be the Connor McDavid of a sufficiently inept group of hockey players. Put me on the ice with literal kindergartners who don’t know the rules, and I’ll look pretty good.
I don’t mean to sound insane. I understand that a former Junior C stay-at-home defenseman could spend a decade living off of Moosehead and Harvey’s and then dangle me repeatedly until I died of humiliation. But the assumption that I think a lot of players at my extremely modest level make is that we might be able to pull off skilled plays, given the time and space to do so, and that the difference, going up levels, is that there just isn’t nearly as much time or space. What Artemi Panarin can do in a split second in a phone box, I might be able to do if you gave me a month and an empty rink to do it. Call it the commensurability principle: hockey is basically hockey, dialled up or dialled down a little as befits the salaries and prestige involved; but basically, we’re all drawing from the same general box of tools. Hockey is, in a sense, fractal: we are all playing more or less the same game, with a few fairly minor variations.
I was in Bern, Switzerland, a little while ago, visiting my friend Annie, who has at no point in her life had any exposure to hockey. I love Switzerland, and Bern is a great little city. It’s not the very best of Switzerland (see: Zermatt; St Moritz) but it has a wonderful old town, a lovely river winding through the centre, great restaurants, and a generally delightful Swiss vibe. The city’s name either literally means bears or sounds so much like “bear” that its coat-of-arms has featured bears since at least the 13th century, and Bern has traditionally had a couple of live brown bears in a big enclosure (the Bärengraben) by the river. You can, as Annie and I did, lean over the edge of the enclosure, feeling the evening breeze, watching the town’s charming skyline darken and sharpen into a Christmas cake version of itself, while a few metres below you, the bears laze about in the way that only bears can, belying their deadliness with an unmistakable impression of bored contentment—Bob Probert dozing in an armchair, that sort of thing.
Bern is also the home of SC (Schlittschuh Club) Bern, one of the best-funded and best-branded teams in Switzerland’s National League A, country’s the top level of professional hockey (during NHL lockouts, SC Bern has welcomed, among others, Daniel Briere, Dany Heatley, Marc Savard, John Tavares, and Roman Josi). SC Bern is bear-branded, bear-coded, and completely bear-pilled, with a bear in the team’s logo and bear-themed iconography everywhere. They are not officially called the Bern Bears, but they might as well be. When I found out I’d be passing through Bern, I looked up the team’s schedule, found a home game that overlapped with my visit, and bought two tickets; the task of convincing Annie, a general sports sceptic, to join was secondary, and I presented her with a fait accompli. This was my first Swiss League game, and I was pretty excited. The Swiss NLA is one of Europe’s top two or three hockey circuits, and Swiss hockey is reputedly more physical and “North American-style” (whatever that means now) than other European leagues (although I’ve also heard this claim made about Finland’s Liiga).
Annie was up for it, and after dinner in the Altstadt and a visit to the eponymous bears, we got in line with a throng of excitable Swiss fans (I had never before, in many years of occasionally visiting Switzerland, seen the Swiss excited; a good omen). The building had weird sightlines, which I count as an asset. I’d rather a strange, idiosyncratic barn than an identikit McArena. In that sense, Bern’s arena was great; it wasn’t all that similar to anywhere else I’d attended a hockey game. The rink itself smelled the same as hockey rinks everywhere. You know the smell I mean. I have never been able to figure out what that smell actually is. Are they all using the same kind of chemicals to keep the ice fresh? Is it something that old wooden beams release when exposed to cold? Is it the smell of teamwork? Whatever it is, it’s beautiful, and the rink in Bern had it.
The general flow of the game was pretty exciting. The hockey was chippy and physical as promised, with a few players mixing it up between whistles and getting a bit carried away in the corners, and the competitiveness felt very real. Bern and Geneva are both good, well-funded teams with big fan bases, and the atmosphere in the rink was awesome, at least as passionate as an NHL game, and in some way more intimate despite the arena’s size. One thing that stood out was that the Bern fans had a huge drum, like a Lord of the Rings war drum, and would use it to generate massive, echoing sounds every time something happened—it was a really cool effect in the slightly older, acoustically unusual building. The actual hockey was end-to-end and the action was constant and very enjoyable, but—and I don’t think I’m the first to make this observation, by a long shot—the side-to-side action was notably less, well, noticeable. There were not a lot of short, sharp passes off the rush, virtually no cycling, no lateral creativity. A rush would happen, the formation would usually get a shot off, and then the opposing defensemen would line up for a breakout and the rush would go back the other way. This, I think, was the biggest difference from NHL hockey: a play would happen, then it would end, and then a new play would begin. There just wasn’t a lot of “chaining” or building from one play into another. Even on powerplays, teams might make a couple passes and set up a big shot from the point, but the powerplay array seemed pretty basic and there wasn’t really any sense of a multistage set play being created or disrupted.
Fair enough: this isn’t the NHL. Several of the players were former NHLers (you might recognize the names of Dominik Kahun, Austin Czarnik, and Patrik Nemeth on Bern, or Sami Vatanen, Josh Jooris, and Marc-Antoine Pouliot on Geneva) but the “imports” were a minority, and it wasn’t a huge mystery that the skill level required to set up NHL-level chained plays wasn’t always there. But what I felt, watching the game, was that this was a challenge to my assumption that at a sufficiently low level of competition, I would be able to basically do what NHLers can do, only worse. That is to say: I am sure that even the worst NLA player is about one million times better at hockey than I am, so presumably very good NLA players would be able to create NHL-style plays at the slower pace and skill level of the NLA, but that just didn’t seem to be happening. The reason, of course, obvious in retrospect but still somehow not having struck me until just that moment in Switzerland, is that hockey talent is not only an individual property, but also an emergent one, a thing that can occur in its proper form only as part of a symphony. Part of what makes Connor McDavid so mystical and thaumaturgic is that the almost-equally mystical and thaumaturgic Leon Draisaitl is on the receiving end of his passes, and the two of them can do diabolical things together. But there’s a ceiling on the skill of even the best NLA players, because it is easier to teach a mediocre player to play defence than offense, and if the guy on your wing just doesn’t have it, then you can’t fully express your talent either.
That’s the beauty of hockey, really: it takes a whole team for each of us to really live our potential. A sprinter or a skier is generally just sprinting or skiing individually, but a hockey player needs other good hockey players on his or her line in order to fully self-actualize. Otherwise we’re just doing end-to-end rushes over and over again, and while that is fun, it is not, in itself, the highest possible expression of hockey ability. I am sure that Connor McDavid, if added to the roster of SC Bern, would immediately become the league’s best player and shortly its leading scorer, but the full expression of his Connor McDavidness requires a co-creator, a muse, a dance partner who truly deserves him. Achilles needed Ajax, Jordan needed Pippen, and we wouldn’t know the full measure of Churchill without Roosevelt. What makes hockey unique (even, to an extent, among team sports) is that the greats require not just worthy rivals to defeat, but teammates to augment, and to be augmented by. There is no universe in which my beer league teammates and I could ever have produced “NHL skill plays, only worse.” At our best, we surely made each other better, and on many nights in those leagues I remember the shared astonishment and joy at having pulled off something pretty special. A few of those plays stand out, memorably, unforgettably; we held it in our gloved hands for a second before it slipped away. But hockey talent scales multiplicatively, not linearly. The most beautiful expression of hockey skill is multiple great talents executing simultaneously, in unison.
Bern won on a late goal; the arena exploded. Annie, sort of it into it but not really clear on what she was looking at, jumped up and down and actually, genuinely shouted “Our little bears, they did it!” I liked the idea that Annie would almost certainly never again attend a hockey game, and would probably not think about hockey again, maybe for years, until I happened to mention it to her again in casual conversation. Outside, after the game, the crowd dissipated quickly. I am sure many fans, and groups of fans, went to homes and bars and continued the revelry, but it was really nothing like the post-game atmosphere in Toronto or Vancouver, where the surging crowd carries some shared energy into the streets and savours, together, the collective secret of their experience. Although SC Bern is Europe’s best-attended hockey team, and there is no doubting the passion or sincerity of the fans, the city itself nevertheless has other interests in a way that is not true of, say, Saskatoon. But then, being a fan isn’t just about attending games and privately experiencing passion. The highest expression of fan-ness requires sharing and collaboration; my experience of the game was richer because I was really watching Annie watch hockey, and feeling what it is like to see someone I care about having a new experience. Watching the Bern fans pound their war drum was like that, too; I enjoyed the game more because I got to see, witness, and taste someone else’s enjoyment. Fandom, like hockey itself, is a team sport.