Patrick Johnston: How is it possible that Canucks fans are not the most dramatic in the NHL?!
This is one of those moments where the email lands, you read it carefully, then you read it again. Then you scratch your head.
What, exactly, am I looking at?
There are four fanbases that are more dramatic on social media than those of the Canucks, and three of them are in Canada?
Say what? Are the people who designed this study really aware of reality? And what is in this study anyway? We look at the methodology and see some words were pulled from a whole bunch of social media posts, but we don’t know the timeframe, nor do we know why the words in question were chosen.
According to the study, put together by a gambling company, they looked at eight million posts on Reddit and the service formerly known as Twitter, searching for a collection of keywords that they felt expressed emotion about sports teams.
Words like “warrior,” “heart-and-soul player,” “meltdown” and “outrage.” (The list is 46 words long.)
Somehow Canucks fans were found to have used 71 per cent of the so-called dramatic words in the sample in a positive way, just 29 per cent in a negative way.
Does this reflect your reality? If so, good for you, I guess. You’ve been able to stay positive despite all the madness that being a Canucks fan entails.
Further, the study also doesn’t even really prove what it thinks its proving. How are fans “dramatic”? The adjective the study’s designers chose to guide the overall picture is important to understand — they’re using it in the sense of a sudden or striking change.
That certainly is the essence of fandom: A fan will react to a moment in such fashion and if they deploy words that reflect those words, sure, you can see why you’d try to measure the volume of those words. But what if Canucks fans, for instance, don’t use the words in their narrow data set?
For example, “love this” or “I hate this team” or “this is another disaster” are expressions I’ve seen Canucks fans use on social media, but none of those phrases feature in the study.
No, in the end, this study just proves how often fans are using particular phrases or words.
Want another way to understand how flawed this study is? It’s not about trying to argue that fans of the Oilers, Jets, Maple Leafs and … yes, the Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers, are in fact less dramatic than Canucks fans — spoiler alert, the study says those are the four fanbases that are more “dramatic” than Canucks fans — it’s about where the Montreal Canadiens sit.
Fans of the Habs, if you can believe it, are the least dramatic fanbase in the data set.
Yes, fans of the most storied team in hockey have nothing to say. Supposedly.
Of course, now we remember that most of the Habs’ fanbase is engaging on social media in French. So if you can’t be bothered to design a study to capture the reality of one of the NHL’s most deep-rooted, passionate fanbases, what are we even doing here?
We’re chasing after headlines and engagement. It’s a post-truth promotion. The data’s depth — and let’s be clear, it’s very sparse here — doesn’t matter at all. Just the headline.
Canucks fans, you know you’re dramatic — and with good reason. You’ve been through a lot. You know you’ll keep going through a lot.
To quote the title of former colleague Ed Willes’ new Canucks history book, sure, Canucks fandom may be dramatic in one way or another, but at its core? At its core, to be a Canucks fan is to know that life will be Never Boring.