in my women's hockey era

hockey sideblog - main is pottergotwholocked favorite teams are the ottawa charge in the pwhl and the wild/penguins in the nhl

[snowtamale]

Gwyneth Philips x Citadel definition

[prorneth-eus]

Mary Oliver, 'from this river, when i was a child, i used to drink'

[ID: "What, precisely, will you grieve for?" For the river. For myself, my lost joyfulness. For the children who will not know what a river can be--a friend, a companion, a hint of heaven." end ID]

[dawg4aday]

the headline i can't breathe

[breakawayinthebay]

Headline not even an exaggeration omg this is fucking me up bad, they got the whole gang absolutely baffled:

[castle-gwyn]

#i can’t fucking breathe every word of this article is gold#i’ve never seen beat reporters just entirely unable to even scramble for a logical explanation holy shit#all three of them like ‘idk man it might be lights out for chicago’ is frying me BAD#‘​somewhere in vancouver bedard must be screaming into a pillow’#‘even if Davidson is playing 4D chess… even if Jason Robertson were to walk through that door’#‘a team as unstructured and chaotic as Chicago has been’#‘the team should be focused on tweaking its scouting and developmental pipeline instead of throwing this pick away in an unbalanced deal’#‘makes this all the more asinine from Chicago's perspective’#‘may be the defining moment of a franchise that simply doesn't get it’#‘that the Sabres somehow commanded more… on top of that is absolutely ludicrous’#‘we don't know where Chicago's rebuild will lead but in the strong likelihood it fails this may be the day that decided it’#just hit after hit after hit oh my fucking god#they’re not wrong somewhere in vancouver bedard is like ‘somebody get me a gun’#rocking back and forth in a corner booth with mack and minty muttering under his breath about the sharks prospect pool and mack’s 4oa liney#but like seriously if ur a chicago fan how do you recover from this#puck talk#chicago blackhawks

(tags from @breakawayinthebay)

[pwhl-mybeloved]

from “Turban”, in Saint Agnostica by Anya Krugovoy Silver

@prorneth-eus has made this brilliant web weave and I’m in awe

[summerskies]

and don’t forget, getting emotionally attached to a AHL prospect never goes wrong

[turnagain]

beary scary 🐻 🫣

[sunshine-gumdrop]

It’s honestly unfair because he doesn’t even try to be hot. He just exists, wins everything, and accidentally has the most structurally sound ass in hockey.

Tragic for everyone else.

People talk about his hockey IQ. I'm looking respectfully at the hockey glutes.

Scientists still can't explain how one man can be simultaneously so Canadian and so caked up.

Not a hit. Not a fight. Just being moved out of the postal code by 200 pounds of surprisingly angry Canadian.

[jbergs]

i would like to use my sway in the nhl to get mats zuccarello signed for another year during which time he will be contractually obliged to teach a new forward exactly how to handle kirill when he's gone. like kk's one of those traumatised horses in a sanctuary who only lets one volunteer come close to him without kicking them but she's going to move to another state and someone has to take over or he'll starve.............

[jbergs]

[dollathrill]

low effort polycule meme for the day 🫴

[sergeifyodorov]

Fujoshi who got into hockey eighteen months ago because that one fic was really good: And ultimately I think that while sacrificing some defence for a little more offensive power is worth it when their historical problems have been lack of timely goalscoring, it looks like the Leafs have overcorrected -- that and the huge pile of defensive injuries have made them much worse for the sake of a few extra goals

Uncle who has watched 82 games a year since Borje Salming played: We need to throw Mitch Marner into the sun

[demotu-writes]

Men's Hockey RPF Stats by Pairing

I just calculated an HHI index for HRPF from 2010 to (extrapolated) 2026, because why NOT be a nerd about it. I figured other people would find it interesting.

Okay this dataset is from @unwandering11 who scraped pairing data for pairings that met either criteria:

in the top 10 ships in at least one year and more than 100 fics total

>300 fics total (this actually only adds sidnate, I believe, the first filter captures everything else).

That gives a list of 42 pairings. (I forget how she handled multi-pairing fic, FYI, but will check when she's back online. I *think* she assigned fic to the first pairing listed.)

You can really see the explosion of willmack BUT also how non-willmack HRPF is surging in the last few years (note we normalized 2026 data, extrapolating to a full year for the partial year of ~5 months of data):

So basically: willmack is a separate phenomenon. It's new fic/new writers, not (exclusively) writers from other HRPF pairings switching to willmack, and the rest of HRPF is growing faster than ever (since early AO3 days).

For fun, I calculated an approximate HHI (Herfindahl-Hirschman Index), which is a competitiveness metric. The lower the value, the more "competitive" a market is; in this case, the lower the value, the more diverse the HRPF fic offerings are by pairing (less domination by one or a handful of pairings):

The 753 in 2014 is when Kane/Toews (20.5%) & Sid/Geno (14.8%), with some Bennguin (9.3%), were the dominant pairings. Those three pairings made up~45% of HRPF fic in 2014.

The little peak of 493 in 2018 is due to a bit of a resurgence of Sidgeno (17%) and the rise of Matthews/Marner (9.2%), but you have to add the next three pairings to get up to the 45% mark (Bennguin, Ovi/Backstrom, Kane/Toews, in order).

After that the pairing diversity of the fandom really increases to 2022 as the HHI bottoms out. The rise of the HHI in 2025 and then extrapolated to 2026 is all willmack becoming the most dominant pairing. It was 16.4% of fic published in 2025, and is extrapolated to be a whopping 35% of fic published in 2026. 🤯 (The HHI label in 2026 didn't export for some reason but it's 1296.)

Without willmack, however, HRPF is more pairing-diverse than ever, with no other pairing cracking 5% (Sidgeno is 4.5%, and then Jack/Nico is all the way down at 2.2% for our extrapolated 2026 dataset).

There really are two different fandoms inside HRPF right now: willmack, and everybody else. I'm not in willmack at all and only have a couple people who put it on my dash (hi @hokeypuck), but I feel like that checks out. 😅

[elvain]

congrats to the ottawa senators for their freedom. and congrats to team usa for another successful round of tampering! ❤️

[jarvycule]

[defensivemidfielders]

men's sports rpf is ethical because i'm making that man significantly more empathetic and emotionally intelligent, and with a much richer inner world. he should be thanking me, actually

[starrynet]

if I have to see one more tweet comparing a real life hockey player with their own personality and life story to a heated rivalry character…. 💣

[starrynet]

the thing I’m talking about. it’s not about a player of color for once, so at least there’s that

[ehghtyseven]

malkins, man and boy geno & nikita watching the big screen at geno's 500th goal celebration

and sometimes it's not about watching what's on the screen at all <3

[ryancartersummer]

this father's day weekend please be sure to celebrate eternal teen dad jared spurgeon as he deserves