Hockey Archives - Page 5 of 9

The top ten Christmas or holiday gifts for a sports fan

The Friday after Thanksgiving is infamously the first day of the holiday shopping season. Black Friday, as it’s called, is a time for sales of questionable worth and dangerous hordes of stampeding shoppers. The whole phenomenon is a funny one though, because by and large, the only people I know who actually get their holiday shopping done before the last minute are all people I would classify as being the least likely to riot over reduced-price electronics. Most of my friends are just rounding into shopping form now, with plenty of gifts left to buy before the 25th. Their motto (our motto, I suppose I should say,) is “if you leave it until the last minute, it only takes a minute.” Here are the top ten sports related gifts that I’ve reviewed over the last couple years. All are guaranteed to bring a smile to the face of the sports fan in your life!

Bob Ryan’s Scribe

Bob Ryan is one of the best known and most respected sports writers in the country. He started as an intern at the Boston Globe in 1968 and retired from full-time work there in 2012 after 44 years as a beat writer and columnist. He is a Boston sports writer, through and through — never bothering to adopt the feigned objective neutrality of many journalists in sports. Although he is “retired” now, he remains almost as prolific as he ever has been and this book is proof of that.

Stadium prints

We’re always on the look-out for tasteful ways to represent beloved sports teams in home decor. Items that fit this bill are worth their weight in, well, not gold at current prices, but aluminum at least. They give the sports fan in the household a way to express pride and love while simultaneously giving their family, partner, or housemates a chance to express their own tasteful sense of home propriety. The large selection of colorful stadium prints from City Prints fits the bill on every detail.

30 for 30 sports documentary box set

ESPN and Bill Simmons’ series of sports documentaries, released under the 30 for 30 brand name, have been home to many of the best sports documentaries of the last several years. Their model of targeting filmmakers from outside of the sports media conglomerate and then asking them to work on a subject of their choosing has produced some very interesting pieces. My favorites (Once Brothers, The Two Escobars, and June 17, 1994) from the series are all included in the box set of twelve films.

NBA player art

Baseball is the sport of the trading card but that leaves some very interesting niches for other sports to fill in. Seattle-based illustrator Matthew Hollister decided to create player artwork for every basketball player in the NBA. He displays and sells these funky and attractive prints at his site, EveryPlayerInTheLeague.

The Stanley Cup of popcorn

This gift should be a perennial on every top ten list of gifts ever written. It’s hard to beat the combination of the Stanley Cup, the greatest and most desired trophy in all of sports, with the equally desirable delicious goodness of home-popped popcorn!

Baseballism shirts

The holidays are the perfect time to invest in some stylish, clever baseball apparel for yourself or for the baseball fan in your life. Baseballism is a great place to find baseball apparel that looks and feels good. Their style plays on the traditional aspects of baseball without taking on the conventional and a slightly ugly characteristics of old-school baseball uniforms.

The Blind Side

A best selling book and Hollywood movie, Michael Lewis’ The Blind Side remains a classic and incredibly contemporary. On top of being a touching story and a great tactical history of football, The Blind Side, is an insightful, challenging book about America, one that has incisive insight into this fall’s cultural issues.

Baseball stadium prints

Not only are these minimalist baseball stadium prints by S. Preston great presents but they’re also a good defense against the fan in your life buying a regular sports poster to remember the season by; one that you will not want hung in your living room. A gift of one of these prints says, “I like how big of a fan you are and I support your team” without saying “let’s turn our house into a locker room.”

Rep your school this holiday season

For fans of college sports, December is not just the holiday season, it’s also the time when college football enters into its postseason bowl games and when college basketball starts its regular season in earnest. It’s a great time to pick up something sports related as a gift for yourself or the college sports fan in your life. Here’s a selection of college sports gifts that range the gamut from useful to kitschy.

Sports books for children

How better to pass on the gift of sports than to give a young sports fan a book that will spark their imagination and inspire them? Two of my childhood favorites, Freddy and the Baseball Team from Mars by Walter Brooks and Ice Magic by Matt Christopher are joined by three wonderful baseball books, Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates, You Never Heard of Sandy Koufax?!, and You Never Heard of Willie Mays?! by Jonah Winter.

Bonus: Who’s on first?

Holiday time is classics time in many households. It’s the perfect time to slip back into the wonderful nostalgia and legitimately great entertainment of the mid-twentieth century, back when men were real men, women were real women, and comedians were really funny. Whether it’s an introduction or a reprise for the fiftieth time, watching or listening to Abbott and Costello’s classic Who’s on First comedy bit is a great time. Celebrate the genius of their humor with this selection of Who’s on First memorabilia.

Mario Lemieux from phenom to star to owner

The story of Mario Lemieux is one of the more incredible in sports history. In celebration of 30 years of Lemieux’s involvement with Pittsburgh as a player and owner of the Pittsburgh Penguins, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has produced an excellent interactive history of his life. Written by J. Brady McCollough, this short-novel length article is well worth the time it takes to read whether you’re a fan of the Penguins, a hockey fan, or just someone who loves learning about honorable, determined, and talented people. The Post-Gazette has kindly given their readers three options for consuming this piece: read selected excerpts, the full text of the piece or browse an interactive timeline.

From a young age, Lemieux was tagged as one of Canada’s best young hockey prospects. When he was drafted and signed by the pitiful Pittsburgh Penguins, he had no idea the twists and turns and challenges that were ahead for him and the city of Pittsburgh. During Lemieux’s incredible career, he endured chronic back and hip problems as well as a bought with cancer. Lemieux was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins Lymphoma in 1993 at the age of 27, right in the middle of his prime as a hockey player. Coming face to face with his own mortality jarred Lemieux, as it would all of us, so he decided to focus his thoughts on the subject he knew the best. While his body was being treated for cancer, Lemieux’s mind lived in its own person ice hockey rink. Here’s the excerpt from McCollough’s piece:

Lemieux had spent so many nights over the years awake, thinking about what lay ahead and what he was going to do about it. With weeks of radiation therapy staring him down, that wasn’t easy to do. So, he just thought about hockey.

“I had a big lead on Pat Lafontaine,” Lemieux says of the points race. “I would stay up at night and watch ESPN and find out how many points he got, day after day. He got a lead, and that was my goal, to come back after the last treatment and step on the ice and start chasing him. That was important for me. That was a challenge.”

On the morning of March 2, 1993, Lemieux had his last radiation treatment. He had missed 23 games, and Lafontaine now led him by 12 points with 20 games to go. The Penguins were playing that night at Philadelphia against the hated Flyers, and Lemieux wasn’t going to miss it. He hopped a charter flight and arrived at the Spectrum, surprising everyone, even NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, who didn’t have time to get to Philly from New York to witness it.

When Lemieux took the ice, the Philadelphia fans who had lustily booed him for years were now on their feet, cheering him. Having not skated for nearly two months, his body tired from blasts of radiation, Lemieux scored a goal and an assist in a 5-4 Penguins defeat. That felt remarkable, but he was just getting started.

Pittsburgh ran off an NHL-record 17 straight wins, as Lemieux set his sights on Lafontaine. Playing some of the most inspired hockey anyone had ever seen — never mind the circumstances — he scored 30 goals and 26 assists after his return to pass Lafontaine and win by 12 points.

It was one of the most unfathomable seasons an athlete has had in any sport, and for a guy who valued his privacy, all it did was pull his fans and admirers closer.

“He was a superhero of flesh and blood,” close friend Chuck Greenberg says. “He hurt, and he got sick, like real people do, and he did things that only superheroes can do.

After Lemieux retired, the Pittsburgh Penguins fell on hard times financially and their owner took the rare but not unprecedented step of declaring bankruptcy. Lemieux had structured his contracts as a player to include a lot of back-weighted money so that he could provide the most flexibility for the team to pay his teammates while he was there. The Penguins owed him over $30 million dollars, money that the current owner was not planning on paying as part of the bankruptcy settlement. This was the impetus for Lemieux to attempt something that was more than rare; something that was unprecedented — he decided to buy his old team. In what were eventually successful negotiations to do this, Lemieux ended up insisting that he take all of his back wages in equity in the team, as an exhibition of his intent to buy the team for the good of the city, not as a way to recoup his losses. And this is what he has done for the last fifteen years! Here is an excerpt from the Post-Gazette piece about the fateful night at Morton’s restaurant in Pittsburgh when Lemieux decided to try to buy the Penguins:

That night at Morton’s, it was time to discuss the options. Lemieux just listened, which was his way. Tom Reich started talking, which was his way. Reich said that the only way to guarantee Lemieux would get his money — and that the Penguins would remain in Pittsburgh with proper ownership — was for Lemieux to put together a group to buy the team out of bankruptcy. It was wild, insane even. But Lemieux considered it. They proposed the scenario to bankruptcy attorney Doug Campbell, who had the legal know-how.

“I said, ‘OK, do you have any money?’ No. ‘Do you have any investors lined up?’ No,” Campbell says. “OK, so you’re telling me a $30 million unsecured creditor who has no investors lined up is going to go head to head against two publicly-traded corporations, one of which has the master lease for the Civic Arena and the other the TV rights, and we don’t even have a telephone or an office, and we’re going to outmaneuver them legally and financially and get control of the franchise?”

Well, yes.

Go check out the full story from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and J. Brady McCollough! You won’t be sorry. Again, the three options for consuming this piece are to: read selected excerpts, the full text of the piece or browse an interactive timeline. Enjoy!

Sidney Crosby and the talent penalty

Sidney Crosby is the greatest hockey player on earth today. He’s also the most hated. Wherever he plays ice hockey, unless it’s in his home town of Cole Harbor, Canada, or his professional home of Pittsburgh, PA, he is subjected to boos and curses. Last night, I went to a Rangers vs. Penguins game in New York, and despite what I would characterize as a very friendly atmosphere in the stands, I heard him described as a bitch, a pussy, and worse. Hockey fans hate Sidney Crosby. That’s a strange phenomenon in an era when sports stars, due to a combination of television exposure and a natural instinct among sports fans to admire and respect the very best in the world, are generally more liked than hated. It takes a massive public misstep like LeBron’s fateful “decision” blunder to turn the casual fan against a star. So why is it that Crosby is so reviled?

People hate Sidney Crosby because he doesn’t fit into the hockey fan’s image of how a supremely talented player should play. The greatest players in hockey history have mostly had a detachment from the physical extremes of the sport. Wayne Gretsky was 5’11 and 175 pounds. He used deceptive quickness, a preternatural ability to know what was coming before it came, and the intimidative power of some of the games toughest enforcers on his team to stay largely untouched during his record breaking career. Mario Lemieux had the size (6’4″, 230 lbs) to inflict a physical toll on anyone who tried to prevent him from scoring, but because of his chronic bad back and his elegant style, he didn’t get into too many scrappy situations. Power forwards like Bobby Hull and his son Brett or Alexander Ovechkin certainly throw their weight around the rink but their remembered more for their rocket shots than anything else and they specialize in scoring from distance.

Crosby is different. He is a pest, he’s a scrapper, he thrives in the dirty melees in front of the net. If you use Sporting Charts’ awesome NHL shot chart tool to visualize Crosby’s goals compared to one of his closest peers and biggest rivals, Alexander Ovechin, you will see the difference. Crosby scores many of his goals from only a few feet from the net. Even his most spectacular goals usually involve him hurtling into traffic to split defenders or fantastic shots he makes while being knocked over. There’s not a lot of elegance to the way he scores, he just gets it done. Even his equipment bears witness to his utilitarian desire for goal scoring — he uses one of the flattest sticks in hockey so that his backhand can be almost as good as his forehand.

Crosby is a physical player. He’s got a low center of gravity and he’s incredibly strong but unlike Ovechkin or Eric Lindron, that doesn’t translate into highlight producing body checks. Instead, Crosby uses his strength defensively, to withstand the fierce body checks that his opponents throw at him to try to tire him out, wear him down, or intimidate him. Indeed, he often bounces off the player who’s trying to hit him, leaving them in a worse position than when they started. When Crosby does use his strength aggressively, it usually comes out in a slash of the stick at an opponents unprotected wrist, a dangerous slew-foot, or a seemingly casual elbow that just happened to connect with an opponents jaw. Crosby also has a reputation for the darker arts of hockey: diving and for complaining to refs.

Crosby probably doesn’t sound like a very nice guy from this description, at least on the ice. That’s true, he’s probably not, but the curious thing is that fans normally love players like that. Every fan base has their favorite pest. The pest’s job is to play on the third line of forwards and go up against the best players on the opposing team, play solid defense, and annoy the shit out of them. The goal is to be so annoying, that the opponents best player is knocked off their game. If your team’s pest can convince their opposition that winning tonight is not worth the effort, bruises, and cuts or switch the opponent’s focus from winning to beating them up, your team has a significant advantage. Often these pests are also surprisingly effective as offensive players. They fight their way in front of the net and tip shots in or bang rebounds into the back of the net. Just off the top of my head, I can list some examples of players of this type who were absolutely loved: Dino Ciccarelli, Tony Amonte, Jarkko Ruutu, Johan Franzen, Mats Zuccarello, Sean Avery, Brad Marchand, and Max Talbot.

That is exactly how Crosby plays, except Crosby also happens to be the most talented player in the world. If he weren’t, he’d probably be happy to be a pest, toiling on the third line, killing penalties, making his living annoying his opponents with trash talk and a never-ending flurry of slashes, cross-checks, and face washes. And trust me, he would be embraced and loved by his teammates and fans. Fans of opposing teams wouldn’t like him, but they would respect him and if he ever ended up on their team, they’d embrace him as “their pest.”

Sidney Crosby plays hockey the way the players we love to love play hockey but because he’s so talented, we love to hate him. In Chuck Klosterman’s mastercollection of essays, Eating the Dinosaur, he has an essay exploring a similar phenomenon in the career of the supremely talented but mostly unloved basketball player, Ralph Sampson. Sampson was a 7’4″ center who enjoyed playing the more highly technical, less physical game on the perimeter of basketball games. “Why” fans asked themselves, “does Sampson play so delicately? If I were 7’4″, I would dunk on everyone.” It’s the same thing with Sidney Crosby. Fans believe that if they had the advantage of talent the way that Crosby has, they would play more honorably. And yet, they, we honor the less talented players who play the vital pest role on team’s third lines. Why do we penalize Crosby in our judgement for the talent he possesses?

The greatest hockey player in the world is a pest stuck in the body of a superstar. Why is that so bad?

Five rules for being a fan of the away team

Dear Sports Fan,

I’m a Boston Celtics fan living in Charlotte, North Carolina. I’ve got tickets to see my team play later this week and I’m super excited about it. But then I started thinking about going to the game and I realized that I don’t really know how to act or what to wear. Can you help?

Thanks,
Kirk

Dear Kirk,

You are a sports fan. You spend dozens of hours watching your team on television. You read about your team obsessively, you follow players on twitter, you know the names of your team’s beat writers, and you have more than three bits of team paraphernalia in your closet or on your walls. You don’t live in your team’s city anymore (or maybe you never have) but you haven’t let that stop you from rooting for them. Finally, your team comes to town and you splurge for some tickets. You’re excited to see your team play in person. It’s the day of the game and suddenly, you starting thinking… oh man, what am I going to wear? How should I act? Is everything going to be cool? I’m rooting for the away team tonight. How should I act?

It’s an age old conundrum: how should you act as a fan for the away team?

I’m going to a hockey game as a fan of the away team tonight, so this is something I’ve been thinking about today. At first I thought I would write this piece with a certain amount of uncertainty. “I’m not sure what I think,” I thought I should write, “but here are the variables in play.” Actually though, the more I think about it, the more I feel certain that I do know how one should act as an away team. When you are a fan of an away team, you are basically a guest in someone’s house. You should act accordingly. Here are five rules for being a fan of the away team:

By all means, wear your team colors, but do it with restraint. A hat or scarf is great. A jersey is fine. A full team warmup suit accompanied with team pom-poms and face paint? That’s a little too much. Save that for when you are going to a home game.
The same holds for your behavior. Don’t get belligerently drunk and scream. That type of behavior is permissible (some might say ideal) when you are rooting for the home team, but as an away team fan, you should be more demure. Applaud your team. Cheer when they score. But you know what? Stand and applaud when the other team scores too. You’re watching with thousands of people for whom that is a good thing. If you want them to welcome you, show that you appreciate their hospitality.
Don’t try to affect the game. Home teams deserve to have the advantage of being supported by their fans. In most sports, this advantage simply consists of the emotional boost players get from hearing the support of their fans. In a few sports though, fans have more direct ways to try to affect the game — by making it impossible for offenses to communicate in football or by distracting a free throw shooter in basketball. It’s not your right to do this as an away fan. You’re already limiting the impact of home court by taking a loyal supporters’ seat and you don’t have to apologize for that but you don’t get to try to impact the game as if you were at home.
Being an away fan does not make you a legitimate target. Good natured ribbing is fine and can be enjoyable, but you should not put up with intimidation or abuse. If you do find yourself the target of anything from a crude or mean-spirited home fan, be firm but do not escalate. Either ignore them or remind them that you’re simply a visitor who want to watch the game and support her or his team. Ask them how they would like to be treated if they traveled to an away game with their team. If things get bad, don’t be afraid to move away from them or appeal to a stadium worker for support. There are almost always other seats that you can move to.
Be knowledgeable. This goes back to acting like a good guest. It wouldn’t be nice to show up at someone’s house for dinner and not know their children’s names, what they do for work, or why they walk with a limp. That’s what you’re doing if you show up as an away fan and you don’t know the home team’s record, players, coach, history, and traditions. You don’t need to go overboard and memorize everything, but take a quick glance at the standings, a team depth chart or roster, and the team’s wikipedia page before you go. It gives you something to talk about with the people who will be sitting around you.

Sports allegiances always come down to coincidences: where you were born, who your parents were and who they rooted for, or what teams were winning championships when you were around nine years old. The relationships you create with people, even if they are only for a few hours while you watch a sports game, are more important than your devotion to a team. Being a fan of an away team can be a tricky balancing act, but it is worth it. Have fun!

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

The benefit of learning toughness from sports

You have to be tough to play sports. That’s a central message of most sports cultures that gets hammered into athletes brains from a very young age. Sports culture is fairly unyielding on this principal. “Walk it off.” “There’s a difference between being hurt and being injured.” “Rub some dirt on it.” These common phrases are just some of the ways that parents, coaches, and peers all reinforce that core tenant of sports, playing through pain. We also honor professional athletes who play through pain. Michael Jordan’s flu game, where he scored 38 points despite being visibly ill is legendary. Willis Reed coming out to play in game seven of the 1970 NBA finals despite having a torn thigh muscle is equally famous. In baseball, Kirk Gibson’s hobbled home run in the 1988 World Series remains one of the most famous plays ever. Football players make playing through injury so routine that you needn’t look farther back than a few weeks ago when quarterback Tony Romo broke two bones in his lower back and came back to finish the game. No sport lives its injury ethos more diligently than hockey. In the 2013 playoffs, Gregory Campbell broke his leg during a penalty kill and played on it for more than a minute before getting to the bench. In that same playoffs, Campbell’s teammate Patrice Bergeron played through broken ribs, torn cartilage around the ribs, a punctured lung, and a separated shoulder. Just this season, Olli Maata, played with a cancerous throat tumor. He played until his scheduled surgery, which doctors think was successful, and is now back skating, ahead of schedule to return for his team. Not only does hockey culture demand this of its players, but it demands that they play through injury immediately (thus the phrase, “player A [suffered this injury] and didn’t miss a shift”) but without complaint.

Playing through pain isn’t always a good thing. We now know that ignoring the effects of brain injuries is a very, very bad thing to do. The culture is slowly shifting to be more permissive of players who voluntarily report injuries or who choose to sit out a game or two to get healthy. This is almost definitely for the best but it’s easy, when in the midst of a cultural shift, to forget the benefits of the element of the culture that is changing. There are real benefits to the principals of toughness that sports instills in its participants. Most of us who play sports don’t become professional athletes. We’ll never need to play basketball while unable to properly walk or hockey while in intense pain but all of us are people who, at some point in our lives, will face intense challenges. Whether it’s fighting through a flu to watch your child perform in something important to them or suffering from a disease or handling the anguish of a loved one’s death or giving birth, no one makes it through life without being faced with a painful situation. The benefit of learning toughness from sports is that it’s there when you need it.

Nowhere is the benefit of having learned toughness from sports more clear than in the amazing story of Mikey Nichols. Brought to us by Steve Politi of NJ.com, this is a truly inspiring story. Nichols was playing hockey for his high school team from Monroe, NJ, when he suffered an injury to his spine which left him paralyzed:

He was chasing a puck in the corner when he was checked from behind. “I remember sliding into the boards and thinking, ‘Oh (shoot), I’m going to get a concussion. I don’t want to miss a shift.’ And then I hit the boards.”

He knew something was very wrong.

“Mikey, you good?” his best friend asked.

“I’m fine, bro. I just can’t move anything.”

Hockey culture informs its players that they should respond to all injuries with casual indifference. Yes, he’s fine. He just can’t feel his body. But he’s fine. Viewed from afar, the fact that the sport Nichols loves might have informed how he responded to a catastrophic injury he suffered while playing the sport may seem like not nearly enough to balance the scales in favor of hockey and sports culture. But when you read Politi’s article, you get a sense for how amazing Nichols is and how having grown up a hockey fan and player doesn’t just inform the moments after the injury, that it’s going to be a part of who he is forever, no matter what challenges he faces, then you start to think about things differently.

“To play in the NHL, of course,” is what Mikey will say when you ask him his goals. But then he’ll get serious. He’ll talk about his parents and the sacrifices they’ve made. “I want to be able to do everything I used to take for granted, and now I wished I had back.”

Maybe it’s The Big Idea that’ll give him that. Maybe it’ll be some other promising research. But, after spending the past 10 months meeting other people with spinal-cord injuries and benefitting from their help, he hasn’t lost hope.

“I want everyone who’s ever had to be in a wheelchair to walk again,” he said. “And to get a second chance.”

Getting paralyzed during a sporting event is horrible and I wish it never happened. There are some common-sense things hockey could change to avoid more of these injuries and they should absolutely do them. They are rare though. Nichols is one of the small percentage of people who suffer a life-changing injury playing sports but his attitude is an inspiring reminder that the lessons taught in sports can help all of us overcome (the hopefully smaller) the challenges that life presents to us. Just remember, if Nichols can figuratively say of himself, “hockey player becomes a paraplegic, doesn’t miss a shift” we can do it too.

Stadium prints for sports fans

City Prints is an online fine-art print shop founded and operated by Tony and Katie Rodono that specializes in prints of places. The idea for City Prints came to them years after Tony started a traffic counting company. That business didn’t take off but Tony took away an enjoyment of drawing intersections. When the couple had a child, Tony writes on the about page of the City Prints website, he “realized the importance of place” and the idea of making fine-art prints out of locations was born. City Prints sells a wide variety of map-art. I’ve personally purchased one of the few non-map prints, an Apple II computer schematic, so I can vouch for the quality of their work. Most of what they produce are maps of areas as large as the earth and as small as a sports stadium or race track.

All of the prints are available as 12 x 12 prints alone, matted, or matted and framed. You can also get them in 30 x 30 Gallery-Wrapped canvases. Here are some of my favorites with links to the specific product and category so that you can hunt for the print that’s most meaningful to you or the sports fan in your life.

Race Tracks

Churchill Downs — the legendary site of the Kentucky Derby. Put this print up in your living room and mix some refreshing mint juleps.

Talladega Track — for the NASCAR/Will Farrell fan in you(r life.)

College Football

Michigan Stadium — called the Big House, this is one of the original and ultimate bowls in sports.

College Basketball

Cameron Indoor Stadium — the home of the Duke Blue Devils, where Coach Krzyzewski roams the floor and the students stand the entire game.

Dean E. Smith Center — home of Duke’s main Rivals, the North Carolina Tarheels. This is a fair and balanced blog.

NFL Football

Lambeau Field — home to the only collectively owned major professional sports franchise, the Green Bay Packers, Lambeau field is a national treasure.

NBA Basketball

Madison Square Garden — called basketball’s Mecca, Madison Square Garden in Manhattan is home to the New York Knicks but has also been an important location for the history of college basketball. It hosted the Big East championships for decades.

NHL Hockey

Bell Centre — What the New York Yankees are to baseball, the Montreal Canadiens are to hockey. The legendary franchise has won almost exactly one quarter of all the Stanley Cups in history.

Soccer

White Hart Lane — City Prints has a wide selection of international and domestic soccer stadiums but if you’re looking for a typically British design, the map of Tottenham Hotspur’s stadium is unmatched.

What is pulling the goalie in hockey?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is pulling the goalie in hockey? When and why would a team pull their goalie? Pull him where?

Thanks,
Wayne

Dear Wayne,

A hockey team is said to be pulling their goalie when they substitute their goalie for a regular player. It’s the ultimate move of desperation. It’s a last gasp attempt to win a game. It’s a high-stakes maneuver that can end in disaster or triumph. It takes advantage of what feels like a loophole in the rules of hockey. Here’s what it means and how it works.

How does pulling a goalie work?

Here’s the thing about hockey. Teams aren’t ever actually required to have a goalie on the ice. They could, if they choose to do it, have six regular players on the ice and no goalie the whole time. They’d probably lose 600 to four but they wouldn’t be doing anything illegal. Tradition and sense suggest that teams should have five regular skaters on the ice and one extra player who specializes in preventing the opposing team’s shots from reaching the net. That player is called the goalie and he or she is allowed to wear specialized equipment including a face-mask and super-sized pads. In hockey, substitutions can and do happen any time during the game. Teams don’t have to wait for stoppages in the game to make substitutions like they do in other sports. When a hockey player is tired, he signals to his bench and skates over to it. He climbs onto the bench as another player leaps over the boards and onto the ice to replace him. When a team decides to substitute a regular player for a goalie, it works the same way. The goalie skates to the bench and a regular player replaces him. As with all substitutions, but even more so, the team making the substitution tries to do it at a safe time — when they have possession of the puck and are either in the other team’s end of the rink or headed that way.

Why do teams pull their goalies? And when?

Removing your goalie from the rink seems like a completely crazy thing to do. Good goalies save around 90% of shots on goal, so playing without a goalie makes the opposing team’s shots something like ten times more likely to go into your goal. Offsetting that advantage you’re giving to the other team voluntarily is the advantage you get from having one extra attacking player on the ice. How can we quantify that advantage? Well, playing six vs. five is not so different from playing five vs. four which happens a handful of times each game when a team has a power play. (A power play happens when a player on one team is assessed a penalty and has to sit out for two minutes while her team plays with only four players.) The very best power plays score around 20% of the time. Six vs. five is slightly less effective than five vs. four, so let’s say that teams that pull their goalies increase their likelihood of scoring by 15% per every two minutes they play that way.

Teams usually pull their goalie only if they are down by one or two goals. There’s no reason to pull a goalie if the game is tied or your team is winning and a deficit larger than two goals is too big to make it worthwhile. (One exception to this would be in the playoffs if a team is going to be eliminated by losing the game. In that case, they might pull their goalie down by more than two because… why the heck not?) The exact timing is dependent on where the puck is and who has it but is also up to the coach and may vary quite a bit depending on his or her strategy. Most frequently teams down one goal like to pull their goalies with about a minute and fifteen seconds left while teams down two goals might do it ten or fifteen seconds earlier. On rare occasions, a team might pull their goalie even when it’s not close to the end of the game. There’s an interesting but fairly unusual idea that if you have a five on three power play (the opponent had two players take penalties within a couple of minutes of each other,) pulling the goalie to make it a six on three power play increases the team’s chance of scoring without a significant risk of giving up a goal because the three defenders are so outnumbered.

Does it ever work?

Yes! It does! It’s hard to find statistics about these situations but a 2013 Boston Globe article by John Powers claims that 30% of the goals scored when a net is empty are scored by the team with the empty net. That may not seem like a lot but if the alternative is almost sure defeat, it’s worth a chance. If you scratch a hockey fan, you’ll probably find a triumphant goalie pulling memory not too far below the surface. Mine is Max Talbot scoring in game five of the 2008 Stanley Cup Finals. The Penguins were facing elimination and down a goal, so they pulled their goalie. I was alone, in my living room, fidgeting uncontrollably and quietly freaking out. Here’s what happened:

The Penguins went on to lose the cup that year but I’ll never forget the unlikely triumph of that moment.

Pulling the goalie in non-sports contexts

As with many sports terms, pulling the goalie has been appropriated in popular culture and used in non-sports contexts. In one non-sports context in particular. As confirmed by Urban Dictionary, people use the phrase “pulling the goalie” to refer to the decision to stop using contraception. This is a light-hearted, funny analogy to use when the decision is taken by a couple with consent on both sides, but it has a darker meaning too. Some people use the phrase to refer to one partner making the decision to stop using contraceptives without telling the other person involved, particularly if getting pregnant is part of a strategy to keep a relationship alive. This is obviously despicable in all ways but it is a remarkably well build analogy to hockey.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Why are sports teams from locations?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why are sports teams from locations? I mean, it sounds like a silly question, but it’s not like the players or the coaches are from there. What’s the point of having a team from New York or Tennessee if you let people from all over play on it?

Thanks,
Jesse

Dear Jesse,

This is one of those questions that makes complete logical sense but, because it challenges a foundational aspect of the sports world in our country, is difficult for a fan to understand and answer. The fact that teams are tied to locations and that they represent the city, state, or region they’re from seems like an unassailable truth of sports. It’s not though. After doing some research on the topic, I’ve found an interesting example of one league that works completely differently. Let’s start with a little history, move on to the way things work now, and then look at an interesting exception that may be a harbinger of things to come.

From the very beginning of organized athletic competitions, sports have been a way for competing political groups to safely play out conflict. The ancient Olympics were dominated by individual events like running, boxing, wrestling, and chariot racing. Nonetheless, the competitors were there to represent the city-states they came from. Wikipedia’s article on the ancient Olympics states that the “Olympic Games were established in [a] political context and served as a venue for representatives of the city-states to peacefully compete against each other.” In the United Kingdom, some medieval soccer-like traditions survive and are still played. The Ashbourne game is a two-day epic played over 16 hours and two days each year that pits the Up’Ards against the Down’Ards. Instead of being the instantiation of a international or inter-city conflict, this game is a (at this point) relatively friendly version of a rivalry between city neighborhoods. There’s a natural human tendency to define oneself by splitting the world into “us” and “other” and where you live or where you come from is the obvious way to do this. Sports has always provided an outlet for group identity and simulated conflict.

Much of the early history of sport in the Americas is a history of college athletics. College sports, by their nature, are tied to a location and (however inappropriately) to an institution. The identification of teams with cities has also been present in American professional sports from the beginning. In baseball, the first professional team was the Cincinatti Red Stockings in 1869. The first professional hockey team was the Canadian Soo from Sault Ste. Marie in Ontario, Canada. Confusingly enough, the Canadian Soo played its first game in 1904 against the American Soo Indians from Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan, United States of America. Wha?? Football has an interesting professional history in the United States. For over forty years, there were professional players but no professional teams. Individual players were being paid to play on teams that were nominally amateur teams. It wasn’t until 1920 that the first professional football league came into being. The American Professional Football Association had teams from Akron, Buffalo, Muncie, Rochester, and Dayton. Basketball is a much newer professional sport. Its first game was played between teams representing Toronto and New York in 1946.

Even early on, teams were not made up of players from the team’s location. One reason is that some areas simply produce more top-level talent in some sports than others. It’s not financially smart for a league to only have teams in the core player producing areas, so instead, the players themselves travel and become ambassadors for spreading the game. For example, every single player on the 1940 Stanley Cup hockey champion New York Rangers team was from Canada. The 1949 Minneapolis Lakers may have had a slight over-representation of players who went to college in Minnesota with three, but the rest of their players went to schools around the country in California and Utah and Indiana. The famous 1972 Miami Dolphins, the only National Football League team to go undefeated throughout the regular season and playoffs, only had two Floridians in a roster of 50+ players. Aside from some areas just growing better athletes in some sports, the implementation of player drafts to balance the selection of players by professional teams and eventually free-agency to allow players some say in where they play serve to scatter players throughout the country.

As the big four American sports have spread throughout the world and our professional leagues have simultaneously gotten better at finding talented international players, the division of players from team location has become even more obvious. The NHL and NBA wouldn’t be half as good without players mostly from Europe, nor would Major League Baseball be as compelling without its (mostly) Central American and Japanese imports. While some teams have specialized in finding players from a particular region — think the 1990s Detroit Red Wings and Russia or the current Red Wings and Sweeden — international players have played anywhere and everywhere.

The idea of having teams made up of only players from the city or region they represent is a fun one and there are many counter-factual thought experiments around the internet in this vein. Yahoo recently posted a ranking of NBA teams if made up of only players from the team’s area. Max Preps published a map showing current NFL players by home state. It’s clear from the map that California, Florida, and Texas rule supreme, but I’d like to see the stats controlled by population to see which state is most efficient at producing NFL players. Quant Hockey has two interesting visuals about where NHL players come from. The first is a history of NHL players by home country, showing the increasing internationalization of the game and league. The second is an interactive map where you can look up the home towns of all your favorite (and least favorite for that matter) NHL players. The official NBA site has a similar map for NBA players. That the league itself bothered to put this together is an example of how important it feels the international nature of its sport is.

Sports teams aren’t all tied to locations. If we take a brief detour to the basketball crazy country of the Philippines, we find one of the most unique sports leagues out there, the Philippine Basketball Association. This league is made up of twelve teams. Team names are made up of three parts — a “company name, then [a] product, then a nickname – usually connected to the business of the company.” My favorite example is the six time champion Rain or Shine Elasto Painters owned by Asian Coatings Philippines, Inc. Teams are completely divorced from regional affiliation and play in whatever region the league rents for them to play in. This may seem like it’s completely crazy to those of us who are used to leagues in the United States, but it could be the future. Consider the increasing visibility of corporate sponsorships. In all leagues here, we have stadiums that are named after companies. The Los Angeles Lakers share the Staples Center with the Los Angeles Clippers and hockey’s Kings. The Carolina Panthers in the NFL play in the Bank of America Stadium. This isn’t a new fangled thing, remember that baseball’s historic stadium in Chicago, Wrigley field bears the name of the chewing gum its owner in the 1920s sold. The next likely step in the process is having corporate sponsorships show up on the jerseys of sports teams. This has already happened for most soccer leagues. Scott Allen wrote a nice history of this process for Mental Floss. The process has taken a long time, from the first corporate jersey in Uruguay in the 1950s to the final capitulation of the famous Barcelona football club in 2006. Allen provides several funny sponsorship stories, including my favorite, about the soccer team West Bromwich Albion:

From 1984 to 1986, the West Midlands Health Authority paid to have the universal No Smoking sign placed on the front of West Bromwich Albion’s jerseys. The campaign featured the slogan, “Be like Albion – kick the smoking habit.”

While the NBA, NFL, NHL, and MLB have resisted giving up their jerseys to their sponsors, speculation is out there that they soon will. Total Pro Sports has even designed a series of NBA jerseys with each team’s corporate sponsor on the front in anticipation.

Will the future be a complete takeover of teams from their old regional identities to new corporate ones? Or will we remain in an uneasy compromise between location and corporation?

We’ll find out together,
Ezra Fischer

Hockey goalie masks: individuality in sports

Jerry Seinfeld famously joked that “loyalty to any one sports team” is a curious thing because, if you accept that the players move from one team to another and eventually retire, rooting for one team must be nothing more than “rooting for laundry.” It’s a clever joke, mostly because it creates such an amusing scenario. What if we did root for literal laundry? “GO TUMBLE-DRY ONLY SHIRTS!!” As with all good observational humor, there’s a deeper truth lurking beneath. Team sports, particularly professional team sports, demand a subordination of the individual to the team that goes far beyond what most of us experience in our professions. The darkest aspect of this subordination is played out in the eagerness of athletes to play through injuries that would sideline most people and should sideline them for the sake of their future health. Professional athletes have few opportunities to express their individuality, which is why the ones they do have — touchdown dances in football and walk-up music in baseball being two clear examples — are so important to them and noticeable to fans. In all of sports there may be no cooler way (except maybe these skeleton helmets) for athletes to express their individuality than hockey goalie masks.

It seems completely crazy now but hockey goalies didn’t wear masks or helmets until 1959. It took only another decade or so for the first goalie to decorate with his mask. According to a fairly comprehensive history of hockey goalie mask designs on NHL.com, Gerry Cheevers drew a simple stitch onto his otherwise undecorated mask in protest against his coach who ordered him back on the ice after taking a shot to the face. That the beginning of what has become an amazingly diverse artistic endeavor was the action of an athlete asserting his individuality is fitting. Since then the battle between subordination to the team and assertion of the individual has played itself out in the aesthetic of goalie masks.

Goalies like Ed Belfour and Felix Potvin successfully branded themselves with their masks. Belfour always had an eagle design and Potvin always had a cat. These identities and nicknames followed them from team to team and allowed their fans to root for them regardless of what laundry they were wearing. A contemporary of theirs, Ron Hextall believes that a goalie should choose to align his identity with his team’s:

“If you want to tie yourself in there somehow, fine, but I always preferred the team logo rather than something about you,” said Hextall, citing the masks worn by Dryden and Martin Brodeur as easy-to-recognize and iconic. “I still believe a goalie mask should be tied to the organization, the city or the logo rather than to the goalie himself.”

I wonder what he would think of the New York Rangers backup goalie, Cam Talbot, who recently debuted his latest ode to his favorite movie, Ghostbusters? Talbot calls it the “GoalBuster.” Ha!

If you want to get in on the goalie mask game yourself, you can do it with this NHL Mini Goalie Mask Standings Board. You can use these tiny helmets to involve yourself in the NHL by keeping daily standings of divisional or conference standings. Note though, that the masks here are not the masks of individual goalies, they are simply painted in team colors. Sure, you might say, this is easier and safer to do because you never know when a goalie will get traded or injured and his mask design could become obsolete. The cynics among us would note though, that inevitable obsolescence is often a good plan for products like this because it encourages you to buy it again next season. Is it possible that the makers of these helmets are taking a stance against the individuality of athletes so that we sports fans continue to root for laundry?

Why are game sevens so great?

If you’re a sports fan, there is nothing better than a game seven. If you’re a fan of the team in the game seven, it’s the most dramatic, heart-wrenching, nerve-wracking, squeal inducing sports situation your team can possibly be in. If you’re simply a fan of sports but don’t have a rooting interest one way or another, game seven is a joy. If you’re wondering what I’m talking about and why game sevens are so great, read on.

Sports has developed a wide variety of ways to decide which team or person is the best. The most common ways of doing this are round-robin tournaments, single-elimination tournaments, multiple-elimination tournaments, and three, five, or seven game series. Sometimes a combination of these approaches are used. There is something to be said for each form of playoff but the one we are concerned with today is a seven game series. In a single elimination tournament, like March Madness in college basketball, a team that loses once is eliminated forever. In a double-elimination tournament, a team that loses twice is eliminated forever. This could go on to infinity if you wanted it to. In a quadruple elimination tournament, a team that lost four times would be out. In an undecuple (yes) elimination tournament, a team that loses eleven times would be eliminated from the tournament. The seven game series is a version of a quadruple elimination tournament where two teams play each other in successive games until one team has won (and the other team has lost) four games.

Just reaching game seven in a seven game series tells you so many things about the series. For one thing, both teams have won (and lost) three games. The two teams are close to even in skill and determination, otherwise one would have been eliminated before then. There have been lots of ups and downs during the series. There’s been enough time for the players on the opposing teams to get to know each other and (usually) develop an explosive mixture of begrudging respect and bubbling disdain. This is magnified in sports like hockey where so much physicality is allowed during the game. It’s also magnified the farther you go in the playoffs. A first round game seven is not as dramatic as a second round game seven. Some sports, like baseball, recognize this and save the seven game series for later rounds, using shorter series earlier on. A game seven in the Stanley Cup finals, the NBA finals, or the World Series is the absolute pinnacle of sporting drama. The team that wins these game sevens are achieving life-long dreams and reaching the highest professional success possible.

Even if you put all the other factors aside, game sevens are still really cool because of their emotional resonance for the players. One common complaint about professional sports is that the fans care more about the teams than the players do; that the players are mercenaries who do it just for the money. In a game seven, you know that every player who steps on the pitchers mound or the batting box, every player who vaults over the boards onto the ice, every player who grabs a rebound or makes a layup, somewhere, in the back of their heads is thinking “Game seven, World Series/Stanley Cup final/NBA final…” just like they did when they were nine years-old in their backyards playing with a friend or two. Game sevens have a way of reducing sports back down to their essentials. Box out. Dump the puck. Make contact. Keep your eye on the ball.

Tonight the Kansas City Royals and the San Francisco Giants play in game seven of the World Series. Let’s enjoy it.