During the first round of the 2021 Stanley Cup Playoffs, Colorado Avalanche forward Nazem Kadri was suspended for the sixth time in his career for an illegal hit, this time to the head of St. Louis Blues defenseman Justin Faulk during Game 2 of their first-round series, a hit which ended Justin Faulk’s season (and, given Colorado’s eventual disposal by the Vegas Golden Knights, Kadri’s season) prematurely. It would be willfully ignorant to believe that the reaction of Blues fans at Enterprise Center to Kadri barreling into red-hot goaltender Jordan Binnington during Game 3 of their second-round series, causing an injury which will cost Binnington at least the remainder of their set, was unrelated to previous events.
Kadri was not penalized for what appeared to be a reckless if not patently illegal instigation, a decision which was probably not any more or less egregious than the referees’ ignoring of an earlier hit by Blues forward Ivan Barbashev on Avalanche defenseman Samuel Girard, which will likewise cause a player to miss the remainder of the series. Kadri was not sanctioned further with any sort of suspension, an outcome that never would have even been suggested had literally any other player on either team committed such a penalty—this was clearly a response to Kadri’s history, and not an unfair one given that repeat offender status is a major factor in how the NHL legislates dirty play. Likewise, the NHL chose not to suspend Jordan Binnington for throwing a water bottle at Kadri during a post-game interview, a thing that, since the water bottle was not frozen nor filled with explosives, was the only reasonable course of action.
There is a 100% chance that St. Louis Blues fans will boo Nazem Kadri profusely tonight, as they did for the remainder of Game 3 on Saturday night. Is this a rational response to a player, even if the player is deemed worthy of such scorn? Not really—it’s not like Kadri, who is if nothing else a very productive NHL veteran with a long history of being booed by opposing fans, is going to fold like a card table upon moderate heat. But the repeated “Ref you suck!” chants levied at Denver’s Ball Arena during Game 2 were productive, either. Sports fans like chanting and they like booing and doing so is a perfectly harmless pastime.
What is not perfectly harmless is what some number of dumbasses did on Saturday night into Sunday by hurling racial slurs at Kadri, the NHL’s highest-profile Muslim player, with some sending threats of violence against him. Players from both teams, rightfully, condemned the attacks, and local police have appropriately investigated the threats—even if the supermajority of them came from crackpot keyboard warriors on Twitter who would have never acted upon their words in real life, it is their responsibility to treat any threats as serious until proven otherwise.
It seems pointless to explain that, in a metro area of 2.8 million people with many more St. Louis Blues fans outside of it, the percentage of Blues fans who sent racial slurs or threats to Nazem Kadri was a minority. The percentage even represents a slim minority of those who took to the internet to criticize Kadri for his role in the play that left Binnington hobbled (a group to which I belong). And those who were contacted by authorities for levying such threats will assuredly not be among the chorus booing Kadri tonight. Those people will, um, be busy.
But for as much negative energy as there has been towards Nazem Kadri by countless NHL fan bases over the years, a force more powerful than hatred of Kadri has taken control—hatred of St. Louis. And for the life of me, I cannot figure out what the end game of this is.
Those who rationalize the Best Fans St. Louis-ification of the Internet, a collective of well-paid writers and sporting rivals who mobilize at the notion that St. Louis is a giant, regressive shithole that is a half-century behind the times, do so under the guise of civil service—that those who say racist or homophobic or otherwise problematic things (or, in the case of the Best Fans St. Louis Twitter account specifically, commit the unholy sin of referring to the local baseball venue as “Bush Stadium” or not paying one’s hard-earned money to attend a given baseball game in lieu of doing literally anything else with one’s leisure time) deserve to be called out for it. It’s not an unfair point, but in the case of those who threatened Nazem Kadri, who absolutely deserved to be called out for doing so, the feds don’t need you to research the matter yourself. Which is more likely to shut down an asshole cold in his (or her, or their, but let’s be honest—usually his) tracks: giving him a platform of thousands of Twitter followers to read his mini-manifestos, or the damn police calling him?
In America, liberals tend to view the country through a prism of red states and blue states while conservatives tend to view the country through a prism of rural and urban, which makes St. Louis arguably as universally maligned as any semi-large city in the country. St. Louis is a majority-minority city where over 80% of the votes in the 2020 Presidential Election went to Joe Biden; a city whose congressperson, Representative Cori Bush, came to prominence as a Black Lives Matter activist and is among the most far-left members of the U.S. House. About two-thirds of St. Louis city and its surrounding county voted Democratic in 2020, while about two-thirds of the remainder of Missouri voted Republican—this puts St. Louis in the unusual spot of being in two completely separate culture clashes with both the progressive national remainder and with the broader remainder of Missouri.
None of this is to say that St. Louis is perfect—like pretty much any other hockey market, the St. Louis Blues fan base is disproportionately white (the same could be said of the Colorado Avalanche fan base, existing primarily in Denver, a city which is already less than 10% Black) and there are a ton of reprehensible elements to the group. But when any and all criticism of Kadri, a thing that 48 hours ago was considered a universal truth of hockey fandom outside of Colorado, is reduced to the same omnipresent image of Get A Brain Morans Guy (you never really hear about the mostly Missouri residents protesting the Iraq War that he was counter-protesting, do you?), you are essentially telling those who by and large agree with you on most actual issues, issues far more important than whether or not they like the same hockey guy you like, to get fucked.
While major cities in the United States (including both St. Louis and Denver) are growing bluer over time, it is dwarfed in comparison to how those in red areas are growing more conservative. There are 115 counties/independent cities in Missouri, and only eight of them had Joe Biden within twenty percent of Donald Trump. But when it comes to statewide referendums, when voters are voting on specific issues rather than reflexively choosing between a D and an R on the ballot, voting is much further left than one might assume based on election results. Earlier in 2020, Missouri voted in favor of expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, and in 2018, Missouri voted to legalize medical marijuana and increase the minimum wage to $12. These may not be “defund the police” levels of leftism, but they do reflect a state that is fundamentally willing to vote for liberal Democrats (it was barely five years ago that Missouri had a Democratic governor, Jay Nixon, and a Democratic senator, Claire McCaskill, who were at the very least healthily to the left of a Joe Manchin type). Urban liberals from blue states smugly want to believe it is entirely a reflection of having a Black president, but this shift was already well underway pre-Obama—rural Democrats wanted you to treat them with some respect. I don’t condone those who felt so marginalized by those in urban areas whom they believed to be on the same team as them that they started voting for goddamned Donald Trump, but I get it. No matter how far left my politics, and they aren’t exactly getting more moderate as I age, any time I see myself being framed as some sort of racist insurrectionist hillbilly, I do ask myself why I am fucking bothering to care when it is seemingly never going to result in me feeling like I belong anywhere.
