i feel the need to talk about ilya moving to ottawa because i have such conflicting feelings about it. like obviously in the books it ends up being a good thing, and i do love the centaurs as a team (role model did a lot of work warming me up to the whole ottawa thing), and i think that it has merit as a demonstration of how uniquely fucked their situation is that this was their best option.
and i do believe it was their best option! nothing else makes as much sense and other options are measurably worse or neutrally the same (like toronto might be a neutral option if their team culture in the book weren't so terrible). shane is locked into his contract for several more years so their only other option would be ilya staying in boston, which is already the closest other hockey city to montreal besides ottawa, but with more distance and the added hurdle of a border to get across.
and I say this as someone who wouldn't move to ottawa for love or money. as someone who would not ever put even fictional ottawa hockey merch on my person (sucks for me when the rest of the show has more ottawa merch than anything else).
so, yes, i have a personal bias against ottawa that might be colouring my gut reaction to hating that particular plot point. but the other part is the hockey part. like that move is such a terrible career move for ilya. from an outside perspective it just doesn't make any sense. not just because ottawa is ranked, like, last in the books, but you're going from an original six team like boston, that you pulled up from bottom ranking back into a team that won a stanley cup and regularly makes the playoffs, to fucking ottawa? like even as a casual hockey fan i find this insane. i can't wrap my head around it.
and i think what really bothers me is how little it's addressed in the books. where is the public reaction to ilya leaving boston? where is the outcry? where is the media speculation and fallout? it's all anyone in the hockey world would be talking about. and we see none of that. (jacob tierney can you hear me please give us a media circus.)
and shane. shane is the hockey guy. there is absolutely no way that he doesn't understand the career implications of ilya moving to ottawa. (i also have a hard time believing that yuna's only sticking point is ilya's loyalty (or lackthereof) to boston and not like the fact that ottawa is just a strategically terrible career move lol especially once she begins to really care about him. imagine if shane pulled this at this point? she would have some opinions and not just about loyalty.)
i do believe that there is a part of shane that believes ilya can make any team great (to be fair, he's correct). and i think he has some hometown bias at play that makes him view ottawa more favourably than your average person. but damn. is it ever a conversation they have? does he ever say, hey, babe, are you sure? this might be career suicide. are you sure you want to take this massive career risk while i get to stay comfortably with the dynasty i've built in montreal?
i find it so difficult to believe that shane has a blind spot here! he knows hockey better than basically anyone! he knows what this move means. so unless he's doing his shane hollander thing of not looking at a thing too directly so that it can't affect him, the way he did with his relationship with ilya and being gay for the better part of a decade, idk man, something doesn't quite land for me.
i just find it really difficult to reconcile the ottawa move! apologies to any ottawans out there. i think it's a lovely city to visit. i have a lot of friends and family there, so i visit at least once or twice a year, but only the most extraordinary of circumstances could ever compel me to live there.
