NOTE: A always, this appeared first at RandBall, your home for beer drinking.

A couple of days ago, Will Leitch – who, let’s be clear, is one of my very favorites and will remain so – wrote an article about hockey fans titled “The Greatest Fans in the World.” In it, Leitch writes, “There is no such thing as a casual hockey fan,” an opinion he bases off watching a Rangers-Canadiens game at Madison Square Garden. He writes about how into the game everyone was, how obsessive the fans were, how they were die-hards in the truest and happiest sense of the term.

Now, I have no doubt that Leitch is relaying his experience correctly. But I do know for a fact that his experience, as wonderful as it might have been, simply isn’t applicable elsewhere. I’ve been at the Xcel Energy Center when the building was positively sparking with energy, but I’ve also been there on nights when most of the crowd seemed to barely notice that a hockey game was taking place. And St. Paul isn’t the only place this happens; one need only look at the empty seats (and empty suits) that fill the lower bowl at the Air Canada Center in Toronto to know that hockey fans aren’t immune to the kind of show-up-late, leave-early, check-the-phone-in-between fandom that afflicts so many other sports.

Leitch also writes that “hockey fans could care less whether or not you accept their sport.”. But tell a hockey fan that hockey isn’t a major sport, or mention ESPN, and watch him fulminate and shout. Sure, some hockey fans are happy with their fandom and don’t care about how you feel, but most hockey fans want as much coverage as possible of hockey, and therefore want the sport to be accepted and loved. Of course they care whether their sport is accepted. It’s only natural.

What really bothers me, though, is the assertion that hockey fans are somehow a different tribe, a tribe that wants no contact with the outside world. It’s dismissive of a sport I love as a novelty – an unknowable, inscrutable ritual that can’t be understood unless one was born into the tribe and accepted through its traditions. And that, I think, is the part that really just isn’t true. Hockey’s fun to watch, whether you grew up watching Hockey Night in Canada and playing hockey every day after school, or whether – like me – you never saw a game live until you went to college. Hockey fans aren’t a breed apart. Hockey fans are the same as any others. And to treat them as otherwise, even in a complimentary way, diminishes them.

On with the links:

*Let’s start with the Twins, now that spring training is in full bloom. Over at Twins Daily Jeremy Nygaard talks with Twins West Coast scouting supervisor Sean Johnson, and Parker Hageman tells you to watch out for Brian Dozier’s swing.

*Grantland looks at the Vikings offensive line – and the team’s desperate need to re-sign Phil Loadholt, and to figure out what’s going on at the guard spots.

*Jonathan Mahler at Deadspin reminds us that, concussion controversy or no, television will ensure football doesn’t go the way of boxing quite yet.

*In the aftermath of Taylor Hall kneeing Cal Clutterbuck on Thursday, it’s good to review Sean McIndoe’s seven levels of dirty hockey. Hall reaches Level 3, though he – rightly – got suspended for his actions.

*And finally: a self-promotional link. I’ll be writing a soccer blog for startribune.com called SoccerCentric, and I’d like you to check it out, if you could spare the time. I’ve got high hopes for this venture, and I hope you’ll end up enjoying it too.

I never officially announced it here, but my days of writing for SB Nation Minnesota are over, as of early January. SB Nation decided, and I think rightly, to use their regional sites (like SBN Minnesota and SBN Boston) to highlight content from the team-specific blogs in each market and content from the central site, rather than producing original content for the regional sites that cover those same teams. If you head over to SBN Minnesota now, you’ll find a combination of articles gleaned from team-specific sites and nationally-produced news updates. I think that’s fine – I write for Twinkie Town every week, and I’ve written for Canis Hoopus, and I could never quite figure out why I was writing about the same teams for two different sites that were part of the same company.

The one problem was, I was also writing about Minnesota Stars soccer for SBN MN, and there is no team blog for the Stars. I had brief conversations with the higher-ups at SB Nation, but they didn’t have much interest in that coverage, so I was forced to go elsewhere.

Luckily, I’ve found a home – and even more lucky for me, it’s on the most-visited website in Minnesota, at startribune.com. This week, the SoccerCentric blog was launched, with the goal of filling in the cracks and covering the Stars in the way they should be covered.

I really hope you’ll visit and bookmark and comment. The more visitors, the better.

Note: this the first SoccerCentric post of all time, and appeared there first.

On this week’s episode of The Sportive, the gang and I get depressed about basketball, then depressed about the Twins. But first, a recap of a Western Wisconsin bar tour – and later, some absurd and absurdly fun ideas of how to improve the NBA.

There are probably more than ten guys who have a chance at being in the Twins’ Opening Day rotation. However, after writing short profiles of the first ten, I lost the will to live.

Four of these guys had surgery to remove bone chips from their elbows in the off-season. Two are returning from Tommy John surgery. Another is the most injury-prone pitcher ever and hasn’t thrown a pitch in a baseball game since 2011.

You could be forgiven for assuming the Twins will lose 120 games, with the starting rotation they’ll trot out this year. And now that I’ve typed that, they’ll probably win 105.

*NOTE: As always, this also appeared at RandBall, your home for karaoke. *

Every so often, I will read a quote from some sports team or league executive about promotion and marketing, a quote that’s some variation on this misbegotten theme: “We want to promote our team / league / sport as an entertainment product – as an alternative to the movies and TV.” In practice, what this “entertainment product” generally means is some combination of cheerleaders, rock music, and scoreboards – effectively, distracting attendees from the action on the field.

It’s worth considering this, because while sports may be entertaining, sports fans don’t experience them in the same way as they do entertainment, unless they genuinely don’t care about the outcome of the game. It is possible, for example, to enjoy going to a baseball game just for the experience of sitting outside on a warm night, eating hot dogs and drinking beer; indeed, this particular passion has been the genesis of 99% of the St. Paul Saints’ revenue over the years. But, save for a few die-hards, most of the people who go to a Saints game can’t tell you a week later who pitched, who the Saints played, or even who won.

It’s also particularly strange that while sports fans have a more personal connection with a team than, say, music fans have with a band, the sports fan’s outward expression of that passion is – unlike the music fan’s – entirely impersonal. For example, those that wear a T-shirt or hang a poster of a favorite band or movie or Internet comic strip are doing so to express something about themselves as a person, in terms of this thing they like and are passionate about – but you would never, ever, hear the same person refer to that group as “we.” Sports fans’ love of a team is entirely personal, but the outward expression is to show off that they’re part of something bigger than themselves. The depressed-looking folks in Wild jerseys walking the streets of St. Paul tomorrow evening aren’t donning red and green to tell the world something about themselves, personally – they’re doing it because they are Wild fans, part of a plural, and wearing a jersey to the game is what Wild fans do.

The point I’m trying to make is that entertainment is transient, but fandom is permanent, and that those who’d try to sell sports as entertainment are always destined for worries about the box office. I enjoy going to Saints games, don’t get me wrong, but I’m always going to weigh my options, because it never rains at the movies and my backyard is just as warm as the ballpark (and has cheaper food besides). But the Twins – I’ll plan ahead for the Twins, I’ll pay actual money for the Twins, and all because they’re my team and I want to be there when they win so that I can be part of something that’s bigger than I am. Even when they’re terrible. Even with Kevin Correia on the mound. They’re not competing for my entertainment dollar. They’re competing for something else entirely.

*On with the links:

*John Rosengren heads up to Warroad to catch the latest Warroad-Roseau game and write about it for SB Nation Longform. It’s such a well-known rivalry that it borders on the cliche, and yet Rosengren’s story is captivating, as it’s told through the eyes of the fans and – especially – the parents that are drawn into the great historical circle of Warroad-Roseau for one night.

*Wright Thompson of ESPN profiles the 50-year-old Michael Jordan and discovers what we might have expected: without the competition of the game, Jordan seems completely and profoundly miserable.

*At Esquire, Tom Junod talks to NFL players about injuries – not just head injuries, but the day-to-day painful existence of football. In all of the discussion about safety in the NFL, it is worth remembering – it’s surprising, even frightening, but still worth remembering – that most of the guys who play in the NFL are willing to trade daily pain and lifetime health problems and shorter lives, just to keep their spots and help their team win.

*Sports Illustrated went to Antarctica for the Swimsuit Issue this year, and Steve Rushin went along for the ride. (WARNING: cheesecake photos of penguins.)

*And finally: Let’s all watch Phil Mickelson fall over.

The Timberwolves have lost 16 of their past 19 games. That’s pretty bad, but after watching the team for the last decade or so, I’m used to it.

Another thing I’m used to is being told that one young player or another is “figuring it out.” Over the past few years, we’ve been told that Randy Foye, Corey Brewer, Rashad McCants, Wayne Ellington, Jonny Flynn, Michael Beasley, and Wes Johnson – among countless others – have been on their way to “figuring it out,” even as we watched the Wolves lose eight straight of fourteen of fifteen or that sort of thing. What I’ve learned is that “figuring it out” is a nicer way of saying, “Boy, this guy has been completely lost and useless this year, but he’s not so tonight – why, he’s almost league average!”

Wednesday night, Derrick Williams played what may have been his best game of the year. He attacked the basket, he made a couple of three-pointers, he rebounded well, so despite shooting 41% from the floor he managed to score 24 points and grab 16 rebounds in 37 minutes.

You may hear someone, today, wondering if Williams has “figured it out.” Or “turned a corner.” Or “started to get comfortable.”

If you hear someone say that today, you have my permission to think back to Jonny Flynn or Michael Beasley, and then punch that stupid person right in the face.

Episode 2 of The Sportive is up. We talk Percy Harvin in this one, along with some Wolves talk and some college basketball prospect talk. We also discuss why wrestling is being removed from the Olympics, and Brandon comes up with the single worst idea to fix hockey of all time.

Head over to The Sportive to download, or check us out on iTunes.

That headline is misleading. I don’t actually know how to fix the Wild, short of petitioning the league to allow the team to play all of its remaining games at home.

I do know that the solution that most of up have come with involves firing head coach Mike Yeo or general manager Chuck Fletcher, or both. Now, Fletcher probably deserves to be fired entirely for the time he traded Nick Leddy for Cam Barker, one of the dumbest trades in Minnesota sports history that wasn’t orchestrated by Mike Lynn. But Yeo… I don’t know enough about hockey coaching to understand what is, and isn’t, his fault.

Is it Yeo’s fault that the Wild lose every single battle for the puck in their defensive zone?

Is it Yeo’s fault when then team can’t deal with even the mildest forecheck without being harried into making a bad pass?

Is it Yeo’s fault that even chipping the puck out to center ice is difficult for the team’s defensemen, never mind actually breaking the puck out?

Is it Yeo’s fault that the team’s forecheck is so terrible that dumping the puck into the zone is tantamount to just passing it directly to the opposition defenseman?

Is it Yeo’s fault that the team plays 49 different line combinations every night, and not one of them appears to contain two players who have ever met before?

Like I said, I don’t know. But I wish somebody could explain this to me.

The ZiPS projections, which try to predict the numbers for pretty much every potential player in the big leagues, are out for 2013. Over at Twinkie Town, I look at a few selected projections for the Twins, and make some wisecracks along the way.