May I submit an addition to your fine idea?
Reporter Shane is one of few in the media pack that used to play hockey and was really, really good, but a very bad injury ended his dreams of becoming an NHL player. So, Shane is really good at asking questions that players don’t absolutely hate, catches the really cool things they did in small moments and calls attention to the levels of skill required to make technically intensive movements look run-of-the-mill and easy to miss. He’s also absolutely not afraid to call out dumb stuff and horrible plays… except Mister Polite Canadian is so good at saying these things that lazy players don’t always catch it, the ones that do can’t complain about it because there’s nothing they can latch onto to say that he was out of line, and he’s absolutely right in his assessments that brought the questions into the scrum.
Shane Hollander becomes the good players favorite media guy, the bad players politest worst nightmare, and the fan-favorite guy in every interview. He’s so good at hockey questions that get real engagement from the players, every team’s PR guy either loves him for making their guys look so good, or makes them want to walk into the ocean by placidly highlighting how poor the team plays in a way that is unmissable by any metric.
There is a (sort of) joke petition going around to get “Shane Hollander, star reporter” pro hockey coaching credentials.
Shane thinks he’s low-key being made fun of, but Ilya loves it and immediately signs the petition the moment he finds out about it.
The petition has five hundred thousand signatures by the end of the season. It hits one million by the end of the second year that it cycles around the Internet. The group of Centaurs fans that started it as a funny little thing to email around the other Ottawa fans they knew keep trying to close the petition, but every time they do, they get so many messages from people around the continent who were upset when they heard about the petition and went to sign it and couldn’t because it was “closed” that they have to open it up again.
By the time Ilya Rozanov moves from Boston to Ottawa because of Reasons (he was ready for a change, and why not check out the hometown of the best reporter to ever step foot in a locker room? And if it’s horrible he can always move to another team), the petition has also reached the ears of the greater NHL management teams at large.
Some think it’s stupid. Some think it’s a funny idea. Others have actually floated asking Reporter Shane Hollander to be a guest for a training camp, to drum up some hype in their team for the new season. Ottawa has floated the idea a few times of actually asking Shane Hollander to try out for a coaching staff position. They think about dangling their newest acquisition out as bait. “Hello mister reporter man! Would you like a little fodder for an article? It’s a good one! Here, little reporter man! Pspspsps!” Even if this stunt gets them nowhere but a fun article, hoping that the league’s top scorer is enough to get Hollander to play along for even just a day, and it’s only a cherry on top if he’s actually any good at coaching-adjacent anything. The franchise is just terrible enough that they would see the joke and take the good part as a “Well, it couldn’t possibly be worse, could it?”
Reporter Shane Hollander would probably see the email invitation as a scam and delete it immediately.
The Ottawa Centaurs office would follow up with two more, and then with an actual courier visit to his office at whatever newspaper/local news station he worked at.
Shane would still be skeptical and think he was being pranked. The courier would carry that back to their office like “You’re not gonna’ believe it! He thought I was a prankster and told me to go find someone else to be mean to!”
So, Coach Wiebe, having a sense of humor and the very fortunate mistake of having been in the social media office for an entirely different reason and overheard this from the head of the department’s office when the poor guy who’d gotten shut down by Hollander like a teenage prankster got back to their little “bullpen” thing out in the main area and moaned about how he has no idea how to actually pull this thing off like he’d been tasked to do… and Coach Wiebe decides it would be intensely hilarious to show up and extend the invitation himself.
It is actually very funny to see the look on Shane Hollander’s face when Brandon Wiebe gets shown to his desk and sticks his hand out with “I heard you didn’t want to come watch us practice.” That alone makes it worth the trip, to Wiebe, even if Hollander doesn’t accept.
For the first time in all his years covering hockey and talking to players and coaches and general managers and franchise owners, Shane Hollander is speechless. He almost forgets to shake Coach Wiebe’s hand in his shock (it’s a very close thing).
Wiebe invites him (again) to come take a peek at one of the Centaur’s practices, to which Shane agrees in faint shock, and that is that. Shane Hollander gets slated to show up at ungodly-o’clock in the morning to watch his hometown team start back to practice after the summer.
Shane never lives down the fact that he brushed off three different official invitations as pranks, and that it took the actual head coach coming down to convince him that it was a genuine thing.
So, Shane shows up at the facility at the ass-crack of dawn, before anyone else gets there. He sits in his car awkwardly until Ilya arrives, spies a vehicle he doesn’t recognize, and immediately goes to smash his face against the window, grinning at Shane like a maniac.
Shane scowls and shoos him away so he can open the door and scrub the face-markings off his window, because that’s nasty.
Ilya chirps the whole way from the car to the door and inside, Shane turns back the ones he can, lets the nonsense ones roll off his back, and slips questions about the day in between them all. He doesn’t realize he started smiling halfway to the player lounge.
Social media picks him up, takes him around while the rest of the players troop in and get ready, and Shane makes a point to apologize to the poor guy he’d all but tossed out of his office with a polite scolding to not “prank people while they’re at work, please and thank you.”
The guy thinks it’s funny, and there’s no hard feelings.
Then, Shane gets collected by one of the coaching staff to go down to the ice.
What unfolds from there is almost comedic. It’s definitely theatrical. Nobody really expects it.
Shane Hollander actually knows hockey. This is a known fact. Nobody is surprised by this.
Shane Hollander has a damn good set of eyes. Everyone knows this as well.
Shane Hollander is a real-time diagnostic machine that intakes a whole player, his every move, the drill he’s doing, and/or the system he’s running, and outputs an itemized list of everything he did, right, wrong, and otherwise, and the solution to fix him.
Nobody believes it the first time the assistant coach turns to Hollander while the third drill is being performed and asks him what he thinks, and then gets a slightly horrifying answer on the players who are lagging (most of them), what they’re doing wrong (most of it), and how each should fix it (personalized of course).
Shane is generally oblivious to the look he’s getting from the staff who overheard, because he’s squinting at the players on the ice.
Except the next run, when everyone does just as badly, the assistant coach calls over a few of the more affable players and gives them some of the corrections Shane had, but doesn’t say where they came from. Just, as an experiment.
That drill runs a little smoother.
The assistant coach taps Coach Wiebe’s arm with wide eyes.
“I think the fans were on to something with this guy.”
So, he gets the go-ahead to hand Hollander a pad of paper with the barest suggestion something along the lines of “in case you think of something and want to write it down.”
Shane, for his part, doesn’t catch the undertone of “we’d love to see what you think about everything”, but he does take advantage of having a place to write down everything he’s been seeing, which is a lot, and literally map out each player as they practice. And because it’s Shane, all of this is thorough and itemized and very neat.
Coach Wiebe makes the mistake of coming over at some point, noticing Hollander after a long while, because he’s quiet and sort of easy to forget he’s there when he’s just sitting there with his pen and paper, lost in watching and writing.
He looks over Hollander’s shoulder and sees he’s used about a quarter of the pad already, both sides of the paper, and he seems to be in the middle of diagnosing one of the call-ups as “talented but completely unrefined- could be faster, leans too hard on left edges, sloppy on the right…” and on and on, and it’s a lot that Wiebe has seen for himself, but it’s so weird to see written down, and especially by a journalist and not another coach, and that’s a lot of pages he has filled, so who actually knows how much he has on the team?
Suddenly it feels like he should be interviewing this guy for an actual position, not humoring the fans with a fun little day and a guest at camp. Which Wiebe was not prepared for in the slightest.
…um, this got away from me.
Well, I’m gonna’ be done here because I don’t know what should happen next.
