As It Occurs6:21Marie-Philip Poulin followers defend the hockey champ’s nickname
Olivia Huffman has made it her mission to call out NHL teams who declare hockey champion Marie-Philip Poulin’s “Captain Clutch” nickname for much less deserving gamers.
Poulin, captain of the Montreal Victoire and long-time Crew Canada star, earned the moniker for her historical past of scoring game-winning targets in high-stakes moments, together with throughout three separate gold-medal Olympics matches.
“In hockey, particularly, like, this technology, she’s actually earned that title greater than virtually some other participant I can identify,” Huffman, a hockey fan in Ottawa, instructed As It Occurs host Nil Köksal.
So when Huffman noticed the New Jersey Devils claim the title on X when its captain scored a aim within the first interval of an everyday season recreation — on March 1, the primary day of Ladies’s Historical past Month, no much less — she wasn’t having it.
“Captain Clutch?,” she replied. “However I did not see Marie-Philip Poulin on the ice.”
She made similar comments a few days later when the Buffalo Sabres claimed the nickname throughout a recreation they in the end ended up dropping to the Montreal Canadiens.
She additionally called out the Ottawa Senators for labelling their captain, Brady Tkachuk, “Tkaptain TKLUTCH” for scoring the aim that pushed the staff into additional time in opposition to the Washington Capitals.
“They’re Canadian. You’d suppose they might know higher,” Huffman mentioned. “And so they misplaced that recreation, too. So, you understand, not so clutch.”
‘The one identify is Marie-Philip Poulin’
Paradoxically, the famously modest Poulin is reportedly not a fan of the nickname, preferring to share her success along with her staff. Her teammates told Sportsnet they dare not utter the phrases “Captain Clutch” in her neighborhood.
However that hasn’t stopped Poulin followers and hockey commentators, alike, from defending the Victoire phenomenon’s nickname from would-be usurpers.
Nearly each NHL staff that is tried to assert it in current weeks has confronted the snark and wrath of a number of Poulin followers of their replies.
When Poulin scored yet another game-winning goal on Tuesday night time in opposition to the Minnesota Frost, Skilled Ladies’s Hockey League (PWHL) announcer Daniella Ponticelli exuberantly declared: “Once we say Captain Clutch, the one identify is Marie-Philip Poulin.”‘
Ponticelli later added on social media: “I mentioned what I mentioned.”
Poulin’s own team also took to X to declare, in each French and English: “THERE’S ONLY ONE CAPTAIN CLUTCH.”
Not for run-of-the-mill targets, says hockey author
Hockey author Jared Guide says the nickname did not originate with Poulin, and is not essentially unique to her.
However he says NHL groups are being far too liberal with a time period he says ought to be reserved for gamers who rating memorable, high-stakes targets.
“There’s no one that has the historical past that she does when it comes to developing in massive moments,” mentioned Guide, deputy editor of Eyes on the Prize, a website that covers the Montreal Canadiens.
“I feel NHL groups, basically, must pump the brakes somewhat bit, for certain.”
Montreal defeats Ottawa 4-1 for his or her third consecutive victory. Marie-Philip Poulin scores the second hat trick of her PWHL profession.
He, too, poked fun at the Sabres for invoking “Captain Clutch” throughout a recreation they misplaced within the Victoire’s personal metropolis, simply two days after Poulin was victorious in the identical enviornment.
“If they’ll use it in Montreal, I feel they need to have a normal of no less than successful the sport,” Guide mentioned.
He says it has been hilarious to look at Poulin followers teasing NHL accounts, and that it is all good enjoyable. However not everybody sees it that manner.
Huffman, 22, says her posts have gone unexpectedly viral, drawing the ire of a whole bunch of offended male followers, a few of whom she says have made demise threats in opposition to her.
“And that is, like, over a nickname,” she mentioned. “It is actually not that severe, you understand?”
The rise of girls’s hockey
What’s severe, she says, is girls’s hockey.
Because the PWHL was based simply two years in the past, it has seen attendance steadily rise.
Huffman, a season ticket holder for the Ottawa Cost, says she’s been to about 20 video games thus far.
“Each time I’m going to a recreation … I simply take a second to take all of it in and notice that two years in the past, this may have damaged the world file for many attending a [professional] girls’s hockey recreation, and now it is simply the norm,” she mentioned.
Guide, too, has observed a long-deserved “swelling of help for ladies’s hockey” lately, and says Poulin is an enormous a part of that.
“I feel it says quite a bit about the place the sport is that … whenever you say ‘Captain Clutch’ most individuals know who you are speaking about.”
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