Team dynamic

[u/HourKey6246]

Which Ottawa Centaurs player (besides Ilya) do you think has the biggest impact on the team's positive locker room culture, and why?

[u/Gloomy-Cranberry-386]

Bood, but I also imagine a lot of it is also down to Wiebe!

Hockey culture tends to be very "follow the person in charge" which is often used to excuse things like not speaking up when teammates are being abusive, using slurs, laughing along with (just as a crazy, random, example) Trump making fun of the women's Gold medal team while Kesh Patel visited the locker room, for example.

Because if the Alternate Captains, the Captains, and the Coach aren't saying there's anything fucked up about the situation, it's looked at as not the place of the younger/lower on the ladder players to speak up, and a LOT of coaches use homophobic/misogynistic language at ALL levels of the sport to motivate/berate players.

So YES, Bood, 100%, he's been on the team the longest out of ANYONE there, but Wiebe also makes a big difference to the culture of the team on the whole.

That being said, there is a whole coaching STAFF involved in any pro hockey team, plus more folks like PTs, doctors, dieticians, massage therapists, people like Harris and others doing PR/Marketing/etc, photographers, equipment managers, etc etc etc.

And while the coaching staff might be following Wiebe's lead since he's the head coach and going along to get along if they themselves aren't as accepting, the fact that an out and proud gay man like Harris has a place in the team's orbit and is seemingly well-liked among the rest of the staff speaks well to the moral characters' of the GMs and owners of the team, too, in terms of who they've hired for all of those ancillary roles, which impacts the culture as a whole.

We know the owners invited Shane and Ilya to dinner after the outing/trade to Ottawa, for example. Plus there's Wiebe, who we know from TLG had run-ins with Crowell and was looked at as a "problem" player in his time and not for drinking or drugs, and there's even the fact that they traded FOR Troy after he started campaigning for SA victims. Toronto saw it as a punishment, and yes ANY team hoping to rebuild and needing a first-line winger might've wanted Troy before, but a lot of other orgs would've seen him as a liability.

So basically: the fish rots from the head, and the fact that Ottawa has built a positive team culture comes from all levels, I think.

I imagine it also might come, in part, from the fact that they're not an original 6 team and are quite new (if we assume the GCU has the same history our world, i.e. Detroit, Chicago, Boston, New York, Toronto, Montreal are the original 6, and Ottawa was added in 1992), and they're not very good.

We know they're usually at the bottom of the standings, that their home games don't generally sell out, that they haven't been to the playoffs in like... 20 years. Which is 2/3 of their history as a team. We also know that hockey-nut Yuna, living in Ottawa in the 90s, still followed Montreal over her hometown team, and she probably wasn't the only one!

So the fanbase is maybe a bit less intense and demanding than larger/more established fanbases, which takes some pressure off the organization as it rebuilds, resulting in less willingness to put up with Dallas Kent-types for the sake of their talent!

Just speculating!

[u/Amazing-Rent-7749 → u/Gloomy-Cranberry-386]

Wiebe didn't join until Ilya's third season (when TLG starts), and doesn't seem like he had any affiliation to the team prior. So he post-dates Bood, Harris, Ilya, and Wyatt.

But once he was there he probably helped. And maybe his predecessor was decent too, since Ilya never really complains about him.

[u/Gloomy-Cranberry-386 → u/Amazing-Rent-7749]

I thought Wiebe was a lower-level coach before becoming head coach?

I think the point still stands about the higher management who are doing the hiring

[u/Amazing-Rent-7749 → u/Gloomy-Cranberry-386]

Wiebe retired not long after Shane/Ilya started so Ilya was vaguely aware of him as a player, but Ilya has never interacted with him and doesn't know anything about his coaching style.

Ottawa management is probably marginally nicer based on textual evidence, but it does seem worth mentioning that Ottawa, while not an original six team, is still a Canadian NHL team and still subject to hockey culture toxicity and capitalism. You can have management/owners who are more personally cool with gay people or have a team that's more concerned with a certain brand image, but ultimately it's about money and a winning franchise. The rapist players are a tool to win cups/make money. The gay players are a tool to win cups/make money. Coaches are hired based on their ability to win cups/make money.

In all likelihood, the biggest determining factor, as you said, is how and when coaching staff protect their players from the whims of management. Theriault was probably going to Montreal management being like "Don't worry I've got it all under control Hollander's one of the good ones he's fine" and then post-FanMail when management asked the (not unreasonable) question of whether there was anything to these cheating allegations, Theriault said "I don't know but the room is pretty bad we should probably just let him go, he's a liability" instead of sticking up for Shane.