Trending Topics is a column that looks at the week in hockey, occasionally according to Twitter. If you're only going to comment to say how stupid Twitter is, why not just go have a good cry for the slow, sad death of your dear internet instead?

All it takes is one mistake.

As you might have heard by now, Russian hockey players are, by nature, at least one of all of the following things:

Lazy, selfish, quiet, obsessed with their homeland, loners, bad teammates, lazy, lazy, selfish, lazy, and of course enigmatic.

But no one was paying a particular amount of attention to the work of Russian players in these playoffs, at least not through the lens of, "Look at what these Russians are doing," and were instead just judging them as players.

We have by now all seen Keith Jones' brutal takedown of a guy who we can now at least guess was at least overtired if not actively hungover, and there's no excuse for that kind of behavior from a team's leading scorer in the playoffs. The most of it was disingenuous, with Jones pointing out missed nets on the rush and turnovers along the boards in Game 1 as signs he's not performing up to standards. He even blamed a point man bobbling a pass on Radulov almost-losing a puck.

Then Jeremy Roenick added his two cents on the subject — which was worth far less than that — about how they must not track plus-minus in the KHL (and childishly pretending he didn't remember the league's name) given that it's such a telling and important stat; which is funny, because they do track plus-minus in the KHL and Radulov was a plus-98 in the last four seasons. He's also a plus-29 in the NHL in less than two seasons of work.

But nonetheless, it was fair enough, even if it continued NBC's proud tradition of slagging off European players given the slightest opportunity. Radulov had a just point and only one shot to his name in the first two games of the series, both of which Nashville lost.

Then it came out that Alex Radulov and Andrei Kostitsyn stayed up late drinking in Glendale, had a bad Sunday, and thus started a firestorm of xenophobia and anti-North American prejudice that you've come to expect from that kind of incident.

To be sure, their decision was selfish. Radulov looked lazy. And you can certainly argue with some amount of success that this makes him a bad teammate. That hits enough items on the checklist for this kind of talk to heat up in a hurry. But what that doesn't do is give everyone the right to start bringing up the dilemma Russian players pose for teams that employ them, which has been a topic of conversation throughout the week.

Everyone came out of the woodwork, including legendary Edmonton Sun writer Terry Jones to have his rather bigoted say on the subject earlier this week.

"The way the Russians are going in Stanley Cup playoffs, Oilers better give a real, real, real, real good hard think about Nail Yakupov, huh?" spewed the actual Hockey Hall of Fame writer.

And that was before it was ramped up most considerably when Radulov and Kostitsyn were told they'd be watching Game 3 from the press box.

We can all agree that people are not defined by their nationality except for maybe, like, their traditions and the languages they speak, right? At least, not this broadly.

You know, no one would ever call Pavel Datsyuk a "lazy Russian" even though he finished the Wings' one-and-done playoff appearance, despite putting up just one goal and two assists in five games, none of them particularly important in the end. And why? Because his game has a terribly North American flavor. He plays with extreme defensive responsibility and a dazzling skill set. And therefore, even though he wasn't even born on this continent, he's a good guy, and all the mean stuff everyone says about Russians doesn't apply to him.

The same is not true for poor Evgeni Malkin and Ilya Kovalchuk, who bore a considerable amount of slings and arrows for their performances.

Malkin's performance in the Penguins' meek bounceout against the Flyers was actually criticized, despite what logic should dictate. What a bum, shut down by a rookie and held to only eight points in six games! He was only second on the team behind Jordan Staal, who had the series of his life, probably because he's a Good Canadian Boy From Thunder Bay Let's Go. If he was the true leader his team needed, he would have used some KGB mind control to make Marc-Andre Fleury not wet himself every time Claude Giroux came into the attacking zone.

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