GRANDPAJOJENS!!!! I AM SO HAPPY THAT YOU CAME INTO MY INBOX TO ASK ME THIS QUESTION!!!!!! i love it for a lot of reasons, like:
- hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
- jeff carter
so the truth is that i can’t really talk a whole lot about why of The City of Philadelphia v. Carter & Richards, because as a pens fan i make it a point to aggressively not pay attention to the inner workings of the flyers organization, except to shout things like, “ORANGE IS A STUPID COLOR!!!” and “YOUR MOM’S CHEST HAIR, RON" at my television whenever they happen to be on it.
from what i understand, though, the flyers’ GM paul holmgren basically looked at his roster and was like, “you know what? fuck this. fuck that. fuck this guy in particular.”
this was tricky for philly for a couple of reasons, like the fact that mike richards was the team’s captain and was obviously right at the start of his prime. holmgren maintained that it was for hockey reasons, like wanting to Build A Better Tomorrow, Today, though some unnamed but “dEFINITELY dependable we’re SURE of it” sources suggested that it was because carts & richie were the subject of that immortal eddie murphy/rick james collab, “party all the time.”
this is a song that i love unironically and with great joy, and if you’re like, what is eddie murphy doing in a recording studio being sad to synth pop beats about a party girl?? then you are asking the RIGHT QUESTIONS.
then-coach peter laviolette had asked the team to commit to not drinking for a month, and carts and richie (and a few others) turned their bartleby the scrivener impressions up to 11 and preferred not to. they preferred not to all the way to the bar, where i’m sure they made a lot of mistakes and said things to each other that they’d rather forget.
so either holmgren got rid of them because of Locker Room Issues with capital L-R-I, or because he genuinely thought that he could get a lot back for them. (here’s an argument that thinks maybe he did.) WHO KNOWS.
- (we all know.)
- (we’re all like 99% sure.)
ANYWAY, richie went to LA, where he seemed to make do okay. carts ran away to his beach house to be grumpy and sad and not do his job, which is to play hockey wherever you’re getting paid to play hockey. CBJ was like, “jeff. jeff. you have to come. it is your job." and jeff was like:
eventually, CBJ’s captain rick nash had to track him down to his hideaway to shout: YOU’RE A GROWN ASS MAN. YOU CAN BUY BEER AND GO TO WAR AND RENT A CAR WITHOUT PAYING AN EMBARRASSINGLY HIGH PREMIUM. YOU HAVE TO COME.
so jeff went, and was openly miserable, and didn’t give a shit about anything, and was basically like a sad bag of moldy airheads that no one wanted to eat and were stinking up the locker room. so eventually CBJ was like, “FINE. FUCK YOU TOO, BUDDY,” and sent him to LA in return for jack johnson aka JMFJ aka WINNING THE BREAK UP.*
- *in my opinion, which has everything to do with jmfj being a stand-up young man who by all accounts was delighted to go to columbus and totally changed their locker room attitude from “let’s not lose by more than one!” to “CUP OR BUST, MOTHERFUCKERS!!!”
- jmfj would have agreed not to drink for a month. i’m just saying.
anyway, carts and richie reunited in LA where they shared an apartment and like a dog or something and won the cup. it was the story of romeo and juliet, if shakespeare had been like, “you know what? tragedies are overdone. let’s give this sucker a happy ending.”
molly did you seriously just spend 10 minutes of your life making this?
DAMN RIGHT I DID
ps. it’s shark week, so i am, as predicted, doing badly.
