Something I absolutely adore about Hollanov is how their hockey playstyles are clearly so different, and also so intertwined with their personalities.
Ilya is a professional ragebaiter, and is also really good at connecting with his teammates. How he communicates is how he plays. Not only does he taunt his opponents into making mistakes, but he actively forges connections with and uplifts his teammates. He's good at speeches, he's good at understanding what people need, and he's good at maintaining these relationships. His social skills are intrinsic to how he moves through the world, and critical in shaping how he plays because he's always, always, always playing that Social Game. (This is part of why I love that Svetlana was made into a long-term friend for him in the show. It just makes more sense.)
And all this is likely part of what makes Shane such an equal in his eyes. Because Shane?
Shane doesn't have those strings.
Aside from relationships that form over the course of the story itself (Hayden, J.J., Rose) Shane has two (2) established relationships. The first is his parents, who I am counting as one (1) because like. They're his parents. The other? A figure skater he used to train with. A figure skater they never show him talking to. (I'm not counting his ex girlfriend.) Shane is even noted to be unsociable, almost never joins the team for social events, doesn't really go outside unless it's for something related to hockey, and that scene in episode 4, when he's scrolling down to find Lily in his recent texts? He didn't really have to scroll very far to find a thread that hadn't been touched in months.
Shane's play style is solitary. Individualist. He's just good. It's all self-improvement. It's not about connection. It's not about teamwork or communication—it's about hard work and control. Control of himself.
So when Ilya asks, "Will you disappoint them?"
Ilya's MO is making teams disappoint their fans. He lives for when the fans of the other team get so dispirited that the stadium grows deathly quiet. He makes them angry, and then they make mistakes.
But Shane doesn't have strings like that to grab and yank. Not until Ilya ties them himself, tightening them year after year after year. It's not something he'd have had to deal with before—someone so perfectly immune to his chirping. So he ties those strings, but you can't just build a connection from nothing. There has to be another end to them, and for the first time he finds himself tied up in and tripping over the strings he tied. If Shane is playing bad, Ilya is playing bad. Because the fact is that Ilya doesn't tie strings to the people he ragebaits—he ties them to teammates. And usually he doesn't tie them so tightly.
But Shane is not a teammate.
And Shane lets him tie them anyways.
So ultimately, when Shane is dragged down, Ilya is dragged down with him.
Shane and Ilya's connection on the ice is part of what makes them such good rivals, yes, but it's what makes them so much better teammates. And lovers. It's like they're standing back to back, looking out at the hockey world and seeing something completely different from the other... until they turn around. Until they look at each other. And then it's just them. The hockey world they see is just... them. Filling up their vision, the ties Ilya rushed to knot binding them so tightly they can't look away.
So yeah. I just think that's neat. :)
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