This Week in Hockay: July 26th

Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. spent the week doing the two things it has spent the entire season doing, which are naming what The IceThe living force that created Hockay. It appeared. It is spreading. has already made and counting what The Ice has already put in front of it. Both went badly in the specific way Le Council has learned to expect. The names were correct. The count was one short. And then the count was not one short, because something came up off the floor of the Atlantic to finish it.

The league is forty-eight teams now, in two conferences, and all forty-eight of them are trading. Meanwhile the season that is actually being played has five matchdays left and a playoff race that roughly half the table is still mathematically inside.

Here is the week.

The Verglas and the Givre

Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. has named the two forms of ice, and in naming them, split the league.

For most of the season Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. referred to two ice signatures without naming either, on the stated grounds that naming a thing tends to precede the thing insisting on being real. The IceThe living force that created Hockay. It appeared. It is spreading. manifested twenty-two more arenas anyway. Le Council has conceded that the rationale expired.

The clear form—hard, glassy, continuous, without grain—is verglas, the ice of freezing rain. The pale form—soft-surfaced, feathered, an accretion of fine crystal—is givre, the ice of frost and rime. Every arena in the league is one or the other. None is both. None changes. Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena.'s Office of Naming Conventions, instructed to stop naming things since roughly January, was permitted to name these two and reports that it did not enjoy it as much as it expected to, because the names were already waiting and all it did was agree with them.

The operational half followed. A league of this size cannot be resolved as twenty was, one game at a time, in a single sequence of matchdays; the Scheduling Office said so without softening it. The league needed two tracks, and something needed to decide which team belonged to which. The IceThe living force that created Hockay. It appeared. It is spreading. had decided already, arena by arena, before it was asked. Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. therefore formalized the sort it had been staring at:

• La Conférence du Verglas—the arenas of the clear ice.
• La Conférence du Givre—the arenas of the pale.

Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. wishes to be exact about what this is. Le Council did not create two conferences. Le Council documented two conferences that The IceThe living force that created Hockay. It appeared. It is spreading. assembled while Le Council was still declining to name the material they were made of. Then Le Council added up the two lists and found twenty-four of the clear and twenty-three of the pale, and reported, in the tone of an institution that had checked several times and would have preferred a different answer, that one row was empty.

Read the full advisory → · Browse both conferences →

The Twenty-Fourth Was Underwater

It was not an accounting error. It was a location Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena.'s maps did not contain.

In the same advisory, Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. disclosed that one instrument at the Phenomenological Assessment Division had been returning a reading it had filed, without conviction, as error: givre, strong, at coordinates that resolved to nowhere. Le Council noted that the error had not gone away. Two days later Le Council stopped calling it an error.

The signature originates at 31°N, 25°W. Open North Atlantic. No island, no shoal, no charted feature of any kind, and roughly three thousand meters of water between the surface and the floor. The signature is beneath all of it.

Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. registers the forty-eighth team: the Atlantis AmonitesGlacified, of The Sunken HallAtlantis Amonites · 1 capacity · Ancient. The arena's listed capacity is one. Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena.'s facilities office has confirmed that figure three times and has asked not to be assigned a fourth. H.O.R.N.The Hockay Official Relay Network. reports attendance at every Sunken Hall fixture as the same number, without variation, and the seat is never empty. The ice is givre—the last of its form. Under the AncientEvery player in The Sunken Hall competes with a modifier Le Council cannot describe, because the effect of the Ancient modifier is Glacified, and this time the Glacification is not Le Council's. The modifier applies regardless of whether it is understood. designation, every player in that building competes with a modifier whose effect is GlacifiedHidden by The Almighty Ice. Or by Le Council. Or by both., and this time the Glacification is not Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena.'s; forty-seven formal inquiries have gone unanswered, one for each arena that existed on the day the reading began.

Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena.'s own summary of why the searches all failed is worth repeating. They were looking for a continent—a drowned kingdom, towers and ruins, something too large to miss—and they swept an entire ocean for it. It was never large. It is a single hall, in the one place a story never thinks to look: somewhere with nothing on it.

Getting a roster down there is, per Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena., not a problem Le Council can solve. It is a problem GWF Abyssal Logistics has incorporated a subsidiary to solve, using a single commissioned vessel, the Sounding, which GWF owns, GWF rated for the depth, and GWF collects the fare to board. External certification was "evaluated and declined on cost grounds." Every passenger signs a document first. Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. has read the document, does not endorse the arrangement, and cannot prevent it.

La Conférence du Givre stands at twenty-four. The count is even. Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. does not find this reassuring—Le Council finds it deliberate, and has spent a career learning those are different feelings.

Read the full advisory → · Visit the Amonites →

Forty-Eight Books Are Open

The ExchangeThe Hockay Stock Exchange. Buy and sell shares in the teams; settled by S.L.U.S.H. has caught up with the map. As of this morning, every one of the forty-eight clubs has a Series HThe funding round that opened team equity to the fans. Led by Graine Wetsky Funds. book, and the twenty-four that manifested this season opened for trading for the first time.

They opened cheap, and they opened cheap for the obvious reason: none of them has played a game. The new books seeded between roughly Ⱡ80 and Ⱡ105 a share, against an established league whose prices run from Ⱡ135 at the bottom to Ⱡ1,894 for a share of the Montréal MaplesMontréal. Every new club, like every old one, was issued a fixed pool of one million shares. Several of the twenty-four had already been bought into within hours of opening.

Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. makes no recommendation and states the obvious risk plainly: these are twenty-four teams with no results, no form, and no history, priced on nothing but the fact that they exist. That is either the entire opportunity or the entire problem, and Le Council declines to say which.

Elsewhere on the same books, Graine Wetsky FundsThe institution that led Hockay's Series H round. Trades the Exchange, taking positions on teams as it sees fit. Its origins are glacified. submitted an unsolicited standing offer to buy Ice Shavings back from fans, at a premium over what The JambonoResurfaces reality. Caretaker or corruptor. Nobody knows.'s own marketplace charges, recalculated continuously. Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. asked, on fans' behalf, why an institutional investor would pay above market for a commodity whose only documented property is that it melts. The Funds' representative said "portfolio diversification" four times and left before a fifth question could be asked. The offer stands until GWF says otherwise, which it is not obligated to announce in advance.

Trade the new books → · Sell your shavings →

Five Matchdays, and Two Nights That Do Not Count

The regular season ends on the 30th. S02D42 through S02D46—five matchdays, sixty games—and then the bracket.

The top of the table is close to settled and the bottom of the playoff line is not settled at all. Guadalajara sit clear at 60 points. Tokyo, Medellín, and Johannesburg are tied on 53; Perth and Winnipeg on 52; São Paulo on 50. Then the cliff: Helsinki hold the eighth and final berth on 48, one point ahead of Vladivostok, two ahead of Nairobi, three ahead of Busan, and four ahead of a Montréal and McMurdo pair tied on 44. Ten points remain available to everyone. On the arithmetic, every club down to nineteenth place is still alive for the last spot, which is a sentence Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. would like on the record before it stops being true.

Eight qualify. The bracket is drawn at random, with no seeding. Quarterfinals and Semifinals are best-of-three. The Final is one match.

And after the Final, two nights that settle nothing. A community petition for an exhibition reached threshold, which leaves Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. without procedural grounds to decline, so Le Council is scheduling one: an All-Star series, Verglas against Givre, each conference fielding a single side drawn from across its arenas. One game hosted on the clear ice of The Watch StationAnchorage Auroras · 8,412 capacity · Flicker in Anchorage, one beneath The Stone OperaPrague Phantoms · 11,111 capacity · Encore in Prague. Nothing that happens in either touches the standings, the bracket, or any club's record. The table will not so much as notice. The books, Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. notes, will still take your LooneysThe currency of Hockay. Symbol: Ⱡ, because an exhibition still resolves to a score and a score still settles a wager.

The two rosters will be published closer to the date. Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. will say only that they are drawn from the regular season and the regular season alone, that every club that iced a player is represented, and that no club sends more than three.

View the standings → · View the bracket →

On the Ice

Seven matchdays since the last recap—S02D35 through S02D41—and the loudest building in the league was the one belonging to the team in last place.

The Cairo CrocodilesCairo are twenty-fourth on 25 points and have spent the last week refusing to play like it. On Matchday 39 they hosted McMurdo at The Pyramid BasinCairo Crocodiles · 29,700 capacity · Dangerous Waters and lost 10-8 in a game that produced eighteen goals, a Black Hole Net that made the difference in seven of them, and four goals from Nour El-SayedC · CAI · ●●●●○ · Awake, Magnetic, as many as anyone managed anywhere all week, and nothing to show for them. Two nights later, at the same building, Cairo blanked tenth-place Nairobi 5-0. They also took Anchorage to a shootout, scored four in a loss at The Oldest RinkMontréal Maples · 31,272 capacity · Syrup, and lost by one at The Red FurnacePerth Pyres · 16,849 capacity · Melt. Nothing about their season has changed. Everything about their week was worth watching.

Around them, the goalies had the better of it. Johannesburg put up the week's most complete performance, 8-0 over Mumbai at Die Goue MynJohannesburg Jaguars · 24,637 capacity · Altitude behind two apiece from Thabo MokoenaLW · JBG · ●●●●● · Foggy, Heavy, Doubled, Clumsy, Luminous and Thandiwe RadebeD · JBG · ●●●●○ · Wandering, Foggy, Quiet, and followed it with a 3-0 shutout at The Still StraitStockholm Sirens · 14,263 capacity · Lure. Havana, twentieth in the table, walked into The Stone OperaPrague Phantoms · 11,111 capacity · Encore and beat Prague 7-0 on the road. Vladivostok shut out McMurdo 4-0 at The Last TerminalVladivostok Vodkas · 9,871 capacity · Isolation on Matchday 35 and were then blanked 3-0 at home by Tokyo on Matchday 41, which is the whole of Vladivostok's season in two results.

Four more hat tricks, all of them consequential. Lucas PelletierRW · MTL · ●●○○○ · Hollow, Clumsy scored four in Montréal's 7-4 win at La LaderaMedellín Mapaches · 31,400 capacity · Brazen, which is a hard place to do that. Petteri SalonenLW · HEL · ●●○○○ · Ancient, Foggy, Echo, Brittle got three in Helsinki's 4-1 at The Sandy ParlorDakar Djinns · 19,482 capacity · Wishes, and Jenni LaineLW · HEL · ●●●○○ · Brittle three more in a 5-2 over Ushuaia at The Dark SaunaHelsinki Howlers · 13,780 capacity · Steam—both wins the Howlers now need, holding eighth by a single point. Amira HassanD · MCM · ●●○○○ · Tidal, Foggy, Wandering, Heavy, Burning got three in McMurdo's 5-3 over Stockholm, and Valentina OspinaC · MDE · ●●●●● · Awake three in Medellín's 6-1 over Havana.

And the bubble kept churning. Helsinki beat league-leading Guadalajara 3-1 at The Dark SaunaHelsinki Howlers · 13,780 capacity · Steam on Matchday 40, then lost 6-3 at The Salt PavilionMumbai Monsoons · 67,843 capacity · Downpour the next night. McMurdo won 5-4 in overtime at The Oldest RinkMontréal Maples · 31,272 capacity · Syrup, then handed Perth a 5-1 at The Remote RangeMcMurdo Monoliths · 2,347,816 capacity · Penguins. Gander took Montréal to a shootout and won it, then beat Perth 6-3, then lost 7-1 at The Ochre ReserveNairobi Narwhals · 22,316 capacity · Displacement. Nobody in the chase is stringing anything together, which is the only reason the chase still has this many teams in it.

View the standings →

That is the week. The two forms have names now—verglas and givre—and the league has two Conférences drawn along them. The twenty-fourth Givre arena was under three thousand meters of the North Atlantic the entire time, and the Atlantis AmonitesGlacified bring the league to forty-eight. All forty-eight books are open on the Exchange, twenty-four of them for the first time this morning. Five matchdays remain, half the table is still chasing one berth, and Cairo—last in the league—had the loudest rink in it.

Stick around.