This Week in Hockay: June 21st

The postseason is sealed. The Final was played, the first champion entered into the permanent record, and the intersaison came and went in the silence The Almighty Ice prefers. Season 02 is now six matchdays old, twenty-four cities are playing, and Le Council returns to this column after a pause it will neither apologize for nor explain.

What Le Council will address is the week itself—because this week, Hockay grew something it did not previously possess: a financial system. The shavings now sell by the kcup. The teams now trade by the share. And a quiet habit of the spring—certain wealthy citizens wiring their fortunes outward and bankrolling the petitions of strangers—has, Le Council observes, rather abruptly acquired alternatives.

Here is what changed this week.

The Shavings Marketplace

The Jambono resurfaces the ice between every period. The shavings have always accumulated. Le Council has admitted, with an embarrassment already committed to the record, that it never once accounted for them.

That oversight is corrected. The shavings are now collected and sold by the kcup (Ⓚ)—a unit of exact volume, one Hockay Puck, served in a paper cup by a vendor of uncertain origin. You buy it with Looneys (Ⱡ). Supply is not a concern; the Jambono produces shavings whether you collect them or not, and a quantity accrues to each game after every period. Unsold shavings melt twenty-four hours after the final horn. What you have collected is yours and accumulates without limit.

Prices move with prestige—shavings from a match involving a team high in the standings cost more—and fans receive a discount on shavings drawn from any match their favourite team played. The theological implications of consuming ice that has touched The Ice remain, at this time, unresearched. The Ice has been informed the marketplace exists. It has not responded. No flavour has been confirmed. No flavour has been denied.

Collect your shavings →

The Exchange

Then, the very next morning, something considerably larger.

Hockay closed its Series H round—led by Graine Wetsky Funds, an institution whose paperwork is impeccable and whose origins Le Council has elected not to examine too closely. The term sheet arrived already signed, and the terms were unusual: rather than dilute the fans, the round handed them the equity. Le Council read the document twice, found no trap, and signed.

Effective immediately, you may hold shares in the teams. Every team has issued a fixed pool of one million shares. You buy them with Looneys and sell them back for Looneys; a share is not a bet—it does not resolve and it does not expire. The book is settled by S.L.U.S.H., which does not sleep: you trade against the team's pool, at any hour, in any volume the pool can bear. The price is what the fans make it—conviction in raises it, conviction out lowers it—and beside each price the S.L.U.S.H. analysts publish a fair value drawn from a team's record, offered as a second opinion and nothing you can trade at.

Graine Wetsky Funds did not merely write a cheque. The Funds take positions of their own—buying teams they judge to be rising, selling those they judge to be falling—and their stake in each team is published, set apart from the fans, on every team's page. What the Funds know, and how, is Glacified.

Own a piece of The Ice →

The End of the Philanthropy Era

Le Council will permit itself a moment of editorial observation.

There was, across much of Season 01, a culture of generosity in Hockay. The first citizens to reach great fortunes—@i-am-tom and @jpvalery foremost among them—did not sit on them. They wired Looneys to strangers. They bankrolled petitions in which they held no personal stake. The wealthy of Hockay, for a season, conducted themselves as patrons. Le Council watched this with quiet approval and said nothing, on the principle that saying something tends to end the things Le Council approves of.

That era, Le Council suspects, ends this week. Not because generosity has been forbidden—it has not—but because a fortune now has somewhere else to be. A Looney given away is gone. A Looney placed on the curve may grow. And Le Council notes, with the same care it took when The Exchange opened, that shares are not counted by the wealth tax. Looneys parked in equity are not idle, and are therefore not idle wealth.

Le Council reported this plainly once already. Le Council reports it again here, and declines to characterize what the great philanthropists of the spring will do with the information.

The open hand, or the curve. Hockay now offers both. Le Council is interested to see which the room prefers.

On the Ice

The hockay, lest it be forgotten beneath the ledgers, continues.

Matchday 06 closed the week with twelve games, six upsets, and four contests that required overtime or a shootout to settle. The four newest teams are not behaving like newcomers: the Cairo Crocodiles edged a coin-flip with the Perth Pyres, and the Wellington Whales, Medellín Mapaches, and Gander Geese all took points—several on the road. At The Coastal Pavilion, the Rimini Rinklers and Tokyo Titans combined for twenty-six hits and a single goal, settled in overtime, a ratio Le Council declines to discuss further. Season 02 runs forty-six matchdays. There is a great deal of hockay left.

Read the Matchday 06 recap → | View current standings →

Next Week: Le Council Will Ask

One matter remains, and then Le Council will let you go.

L'Agence des Pétitions opened a channel through which the citizenry brings matters before Le Council. Next week, on the 24th, Le Council opens the reverse. For the first time, Le Council will put a question to you—and ask you to answer it.

Le Council will say only this much now: the first matter concerns Season 01, the records are sealed, and there are honours that have not yet been spoken aloud. The ballot will be finite. The count will be Glacified—no tally shown, no leader named, no citizen permitted to know how the room is leaning before they lean themselves. And the position you record will be final, because a position one is permitted to change indefinitely is, in Le Council's considered assessment, not a position. It is a mood.

More when The Horn sounds.

That is the week. The postseason is sealed, Season 02 is young, and Hockay has a market now. The shavings sell by the kcup, the teams trade by the share, and the era of the open hand is giving way to the era of the curve.

Stick around.