Hockey Archives - Page 6 of 9

Goal horns and hockey highlights

The 2005 comic book film noir, Sin City, has a line in it that is equally true of the internet as it is of the eponymous city in the film:

“Walk down the right back alley in Sin City and you can find anything.”

Today, I’m sharing a couple of the best hockey related things I’ve seen in a long time in the back alleys of the internet.

Don’t Tell Me The Score

Live sports are one of the few reasons to keep getting cable television. It’s just not the same to watch sports after the fact and it’s very difficult to see many games without cable unless you live in a bar. I have a friend without TV who is a die-hard Pittsburgh Penguins fan and he listens to the games on the radio. I don’t know how he does it. Hockey is so chaotic when you’re watching it in perfect conditions, I can’t imagine trying to visualize the movements of ten whirling dervishes plus two goalies and a puck. Don’t Tell Me The Score is a brilliant alternative. If you miss a game but manage to make it through the social and social media mine-field without finding out what happens, (probably by loudly proclaiming everywhere you go, “don’t tell me the score!”) you can use this website to watch 5-10 minute highlight packages. The site has a crisp, clean, authoritative look. It’s design says, “we’re here to show you highlights and we know how NOT to spoil the game.” It’s a great resource.

We Just Scored and FF Goal Horns

Every sport has its own sounds. Basketball has the squeak of shoes on wood, and the swish of the ball traveling through the net. Football has quarterbacks barking commands and players hitting and grunting. The game of hockey has the “tsk tsk” sound of skates cutting into the ice and the thunk of the puck hitting the boards. From sport to sport, team to team, there are special sounds created when teams score. My college’s football team, the Rutgers Scarlet Knights, are among the set of teams that fire cannons off when they score. Soccer goals, if you’re at home watching on TV and Andrés Cantor or one of his many imitators is announcing, will be accompanied with a “Goooooooooooooooooooooal!!!!” Goals in the National Hockey League are celebrated with the blast of a horn. Each team has a slightly different horn and over time, hockey fans learn to dread the sound of their rivals’ horns and love the sound of their team’s horn. Pavlov would be so happy.

FF Goal Horns is a section of the hockey site Frozen Faceoffs that has information about the history of each team’s horn, photos, and sound clips. We Just Scored is a simpler but potentially more satisfying site. It presents visitors with an array of teams. Choose a team and you get a screen in that team’s primary color with a big, easy-button looking image in the middle. Click the button and it depresses visually while playing the horn and accompanying arena noise of that team scoring.

Many of the horns, including my favorite team’s horn, sound like fog hornsI don’t know if there’s any real parallel between ships in fog and hockey but I know that if I’m ever out at sea and fog descends, I’m going to be celebrating like crazy.

What is a Conference in Sports?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a conference in sports? What makes a conference a conference? And why is it called a conference?

Thanks,
Erik

— — —

Dear Erik,

Thanks for your question. A conference is a collection of teams that play more against each other than they do against the other teams in their sport. As you’ll see, conferences have various histories and meanings in different sports. In some sports conferences are defined geographically. In some they are the remnants of history. In some sports the conferences are actually pseudo competitive bodies themselves and in other sports they are cooperating divisions within a single organization. Conferences vary in importance and independence from sport to sport. Before we get into the differences, let’s start with some general truths about conferences that apply across (almost) all sports.

Teams within a conference play more games against each other than against the other teams in their sport. It varies by league and by sport. In the NHL, for example, teams play at least three times per season against every other team in their conference but only twice against teams from the other conference. In Major League Baseball teams only play 20 of 162 games against teams from the other conference.

Conferences crown conference champions in all sports. In many leagues like the NFL, NBA, and MLB, playoff brackets are organized by conference. Teams in the AFC (one of the NFL conferences) only play teams from the AFC in the playoffs until the Super Bowl. So, the conference champion is basically the winner of the semi-final game. In other sports, mostly college sports, the conferences only really have meaning during the regular season, so conferences have different ways of deciding a champion. Depending on the sport and conference, there may be a conference tournament at the end of the regular season or a single championship game between the two teams with the best records in the conference. In some conferences, like Ivy League basketball, the champion is just the team with the best record in games against other teams in the Ivy League.

What Sports Have Geographically Defined Conferences?

A geographic division of teams is perhaps the most sensible way of defining a conference. Since teams within a conference play more games against each other than against teams outside of their conference, organizing geographically saves money, time, and wear and tear on the players by reducing the overall travel time during a season. The NBA and NHL are organized in this way. Both leagues have an Eastern and a Western Conference and both stay reasonably true to geographic accuracy. The NBA has a couple borderline assignments with Memphis and New Orleans in the West and Chicago and Milwaukee in the East. The NHL recently realigned its conferences, in part to fix some long-standing issues with geography like Detroit being in the West. Geographic conferences seem logical because they simplify operations for the teams within them. Many college conferences began geographically but as we’ll see later, that’s no longer their defining characteristic or driving force.

What Sports Have Historically Defined Conferences?

It’s easy to think about the sporting landscape as a set of neat monopolies. The NFL rules football, the NBA, basketball, the MLB, baseball, and the NHL, hockey. It wasn’t always that simple. Most of these professional leagues are the product of intense competition between leagues and only became supreme after either beating or joining their rival. The NFL was formed by the merger between two competitive leagues, the traditional NFC and the upstart AFC. The NBA beat out its biggest rival, the ABA, in 1976 but took many ideas from it, like the three-point line but alas not the famous ABA multi-colored ball. Believe it or not, Major League Baseball was not a single entity until 2000! Before then its two conferences (still called “leagues” because of their history as separate entities but pretty much, they are conferences,) the National League and the American League were independent entities.

Two leagues, Major League Baseball and the National Football League continue to have conferences defined by their competitive history. In baseball, the American League and National League each have teams across the entire country, often even in the same city like the New York Yankees (AL) and Mets (NL), Chicago with its White Sox (AL) and Cubs (NL) and Los Angeles/Anaheim with the Angels (AL) and Dodgers (NL). The NFL has similarly kept its historic leagues, the AFC or American Football Conference and NFC or National Football Conference. Each NFL Conference is broken up into three geographic divisions, East, Central, and West, but they all play more against the teams in their conference, even far away, than the teams close by but in the other conference. In the NFL the two conferences play under exactly the same rules but in baseball there are still some major historic differences in how the game is played, most significantly that pitchers have to also bat in the National League but are allowed to be replaced by a designated hitter in the American League.

What Sports Have Conferences that are Competitive?

So far we’ve looked at geographic and historically defined conferences. It’s clear that geographic conferences don’t compete against each other — they are part of the same entity. You can imagine that because of their history, the conferences in the NFL and MLB may be a little competitive with each other, like brothers or sisters. There are still some conferences though where competition against other conferences is their key driving force. These conferences are largely found in college sports.

Most college conferences have geographic names — the Big East, the South-Eastern Conference (SEC), the Pacific Athletic Conference (PAC 12), the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), the Sun Belt, and the Mountain West. When they formed, they formed for all the reasons we discussed above in the geographic section but also to take advantage of financial arrangements that could only be made together, most importantly television contracts. As the money has gotten bigger, especially in college football, the competition between conferences for the best teams and the most lucrative contracts has become incredibly intense. In recent years, you’ve seen conferences poach teams from one another in a race to provide television viewers with the most competitive leagues to follow and therefore generate gobs of profit. This scattered the geographic nature of these conferences so that a map showing which teams are in which conferences now looks like a patchwork quilt.

Like it did with the ABA and NBA, the NFC and AFC, and the NL and AL, my guess is that this competition between conferences in college sports will resolve itself into some more stable league form. No one knows when this will happen but my guess is that it will be in the next ten or fifteen years. I guess we’ll have to stay tuned.

Thanks for asking about conferences,
Ezra Fischer

Paralympic Sled Hockey Finals

2014 Paralympic Winter Games - Day 4 — Nikko Landeros shields the puck from a Russian opponent

The Paralympic Sled Hockey Finals will be televised at 1 pm on NBC! The United States will play host country Russia in what’s is invariably going to be an exciting rematch of their preliminary round game from earlier in the tournament. For the Russian fans, it will likely also have some revenge-factor for their team’s Olympic defeat to the U.S. in the Olympics last month.

In case you’ve never seen sled hockey, here’s a highlight reel of hits to get you pumped up. The action is fast and inspiring. Nikko Landeros, pictured here, is one of two Coloradans who lost their legs seven years ago when they were high school classmates. They were changing a tire on the side of the road when a passing car hit them. Now they are both representing the United States in the Paralympics.

The Denver Post has a wonderful profile of Landeros and Tyler Carron which I highly recommend reading. NBC always markets the Olympics by focusing on stories of athletes overcoming obstacles but the Paralympic stories trump them by a mile. I can’t wait to watch today. Go USA!

How Tough is Too Tough in Sports?

There’s a great scene in the Marx Brothers movie, Monkey Business, where a mobster mistakenly hires Chico and Harpo as henchmen. He asks Chico how tough the two of them are and Chico responds:

You pay little bit, we’re little bit tough.
You pay very much, very much tough.
You pay too much, we’re too much tough.
How much you pay?
I pay plenty.
Then we’re plenty tough.

We all know that people who play sports are tough — it’s one of the things most sports fans admire about the players — but how tough is too tough? And what is the right way to respond as fans to that toughness?

Boston Bruins v Vancouver Canucks - Game Seven — If Rich Peverley does have to hang them up for good, hopefully having won the cup a few years ago with Boston will soften the blow of early retirement.

This question came to the forefront this week when Rich Peverley, an ice hockey player on the Dallas Stars, collapsed during a game. His heart had stopped but thanks to the quick action of team doctors and his teammates who immediately piled onto the ice en masse in a successful effort to stop the game and signal the seriousness of the situation as quickly as possible, Peverley’s heart was restarted and he is in stable condition. Peverley had been diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat in a pre-season physical and had a procedure designed to fix it. The game was (rightly, in my mind) postponed by the NHL following the incident.

Soon after it was reported that Peverley was in stable condition, a story started floating around, sourced from the Dallas Stars twitter account:

Per Dr. Salazar, Peverley was aware of where he was when became conscious and wanted to get back in to the game.

— Dallas Stars (@DallasStars) March 11, 2014

As Deadspin commented, “The most Hockey dude ever is in stable condition at a Dallas hospital.”

And indeed, there is something admirable about Peverley’s determination to get back into the game at all costs. It’s similar to the admiration we have for hockey players like Patrice Bergeron who played the final game of last year’s playoffs for the Boston Bruins with broken ribs, torn rib cartilage, torn rib muscles, and a separated shoulder. It’s the admiration we have for basketball players who “walk-off” ankles that we’ve just seen bend in ways that shouldn’t allow their owners to be upright, much less playing a sport. It’s not limited to men either, who can forget gymnast Kerri Strug landing a vault on a broken ankle for the U.S. Women’s gymnastics team or U.S. Women’s National Team player Abby Wambach going up for headers while blood streamed down her head from an earlier injury. A big part of a fans enjoyment of sports comes from admiration for people willing and able to do things that you, the viewer, could not do. Playing through injuries is part of that.

There’s a flip-side to this toughness though. There are some injuries that shouldn’t be played through: head injuries and heart injuries or conditions seem like obvious candidates to us but they are routinely ignored and even hidden by players. Bruce Arthur of the National Post wrote an article about this (as well as the strange need of some hockey fans to denigrate other sports as less tough) yesterday. He writes of Peverley, “Asking to go back in wasn’t so much about toughness as a form of insanity.” He also reminds the reader that two basketball players, Hank Gathers and Reggie Lewis both died of heart problems on the court. When Peverley went down, many people thought of Jiri Fischer, a hockey player who was similarly brought back to life after a heart issue during a game, but there are other examples: Corey Stringer was a prominent football player who died of complications from heat stroke but there have been many others, Kris Letang, a player on the Pittsburgh Penguins, had a stroke this year resulting from a small hole in his heart. He is recovering now but managed to get to the training facility and fly with the team to an away game before the trainers found out and hospitalized him. The concussion story is well documented but it’s worth repeating that a big problem with preventing concussions, particularly the far more damaging second and third concussions in a short period, is that players at every level actively hide them from their coaches and trainers.

So, how tough is too tough in sports? I guess the answer is: when it comes to heads and hearts, don’t be tough; when it comes to anything else, be as tough as you want. That’s a pretty hard psychological change to ask athletes to make though: put the team before your knees, your legs, your arms, but not your head or your heart. It would be better to put structures in place in all sports that, without increasing the incentive of players to hide head and heart injuries, identified them and treated the players medically as people first and players a far distant second. I think it’s okay to enjoy a player whose heart tells him to get back into the game even after it’s just been shocked back to life as long as, as Barry Petchesky of Deadspin wrote, his coach, teammates, team doctors, and the league itself were all determined that it was “never, ever going to happen.”

Australian Hockey Team Refuses to Disband

I rarely center a post around a single story but this one from Yahoo’s Puck Daddy blog is too good to resist. John Raut, owner of the Canberra Knights, a hockey team in the Australian Ice Hockey League, announced at the end of last season that he was disbanding the team due to financial losses and poor competitive prospects. He didn’t bother telling the players before he told the media and when they found out they reacted in an unusual way. The players said to owner John Raut, “you can’t fire us, we refuse to quit” and began a quest to keep the team alive.

Once the players, led by team captain Mark Rummukainen, decided to try to keep the team alive, they had three challenges: they had to find $100,000 of operating funds, they needed to negotiate a new deal with their arena, and they had to prove that their team (which had won only 2 of 28 games the previous season) could be competitive. Owner (now former owner) Raut owned the arena and was willing to work out a deal to let the player-led team stay providing it did not use the name and brand Canberra Knights, which he owns. The money, as you might expect in 2014, came pouring in from fans through a crowd-sourcing campaign still open for donation and about 60% to their goal. In terms of competitive balance, the league helped out by modifying the rules to allow the new Canberra Brave team to sign more imported (European or North American) players. Additionally, some former Canberra players decided to come out of retirement for at least a season to help their old club. Of course, the irony here is that some of the players leading the charger to save the team may find themselves out of a job because of their own success.

It’s a great story and Harrison Mooney does a wonderful job of reporting it. As he writes:

Everything’s backwards in Australia. The toilet water swirls the other way, and the players run the hockey teams.

Read the rest of the story here.

Winter Olympics: Ice Hockey, Cross-Country, and Reflections

The Olympics are over. I’m so glad I was able to go in person although, as you’ll read in a bit, the last couple days were frustrating. On my second to last day at the Olympics I went to both the Men’s Ice Hockey semifinals. On my last day there, I went to the Women’s Mass Start 30k Cross-Country Skiing race. Then I took an overnight train to Rostov-on-Don, a city in Russia about ten hours North of Sochi. After a day or rest, recuperation, and a little Olympics TV watching, I’m flying to Istanbul tonight.

The Men’s Ice Hockey Semis were the events I was most excited about seeing. When I first thought of going to the Olympics, they were the big investment I made in terms of money and emotion. Seeing the best four countries in the world was going to be great! After Russia lost to Finland, I was disappointed both because I felt bad for the host team and country (the Russians took this event so seriously that Putin apparently said that if the men’s hockey team won gold, no one would care what else the Russians won in the Olympics and if they didn’t, no one would care what medals the Russians did win) and I also felt robbed of what would have been an amazing experience to be in the stadium for an important Olympic home game. Nonetheless, I was excited to see Finland play Sweden and VERY excited to cheer on the U.S. against Canada.

It wasn’t until the U.S. lost that I realized how much I had invested emotionally in that game. I felt like crying. It felt like I had come thousands of miles to see this game and then we had lost. Not just lost, but lost 1-0 which means I never got to celebrate; there was never a moment of joy to look back on fondly. The team looked like it was moving in molasses from the first minute of play while the Canadians danced around on the ice. Ugh.

Here’s the thing: the Olympics are about so much more than sports. They are a travel experience of a lifetime for many. I talked to a woman whose son had competed for the U.S. in Snowboard Cross and she had never left the country before! For her and her son, the Olympics are an achievement to be proud of for the rest of their lives. The Olympics are a great way for cultures to mix and people to meet one another. The Olympics are an opportunity for the host nation and people to welcome the world to their shores proudly and show themselves to be a fine people — which the thousands of Russian volunteers and people of that region certainly showed me. The Olympics are also a commercial enterprise for its sponsors and broadcasters. But for sports fans… the Olympics are about sports and for me at that moment, the event that meant the most to me had just gone wrong. Ugh.

Now, a few days later, I’m beginning to get over it. Before I left Olympic park that night, I made sure to put everything aside and take a few minutes to just enjoy being there. I grew up watching the Olympics with my Mom on television and playing my Dad and Brother in an Apple IIe game called the Olympic Decathlon whenever I could wrangle a game out of them. I never really thought about going — I don’t like big masses of people, it’s expensive, etc. — but being there connected me with myself and my own history in a wonderful way. I’m glad I went.

Over time, my memories of the event and my memories altered by my photos of the event will take precedence in my head but I’ll also never forget the impotent feeling of watching the U.S. lose to Canada without ever scoring a goal. At the same time, I’ll never forget walking out of the bar in Manhattan where my boss and I had snuck off to watch U.S. vs. Algeria in the 2008 World Cup and reeling with disbelief at how amazing Landon Donovan’s extra time goal had been or riding in a taxi to Brooklyn with my friend James to a party at his house which he had skipped to watch Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals the year the Penguins won the championship. I guess that’s part of being a sports fan.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra

P.S. Oh — right, I promised to write about going to see Cross Country Skiing in person. Don’t do it unless you’re with a group and have a big supply of booze, flags, and ideally cowbell. You stand there for fifteen minutes and then some people ski by really fast for about ten seconds. Then you wait again.

Winter Olympics Day 2: A Women's Ice Hockey Double Header

Today I saw my first Olympic events in person! I went to two women’s ice hockey games: Germany vs. Japan at noon Olympic Time and Russia vs. Finland at 430 OT. Germany beat Japan 3-2 and Finland beat Russia 4-0. But I know you don’t come here for the scores, so let me give you some of my impressions.

Women’s Ice Hockey is not the same as men’s and it took a little while to get used to. The biggest difference in the rules is that body checking is not allowed in the women’s game. You’d think that by disallowing body checking, you’d get a game that looks the same, just without the body checking. Totally untrue! The biggest difference is that by disallowing body checking, you give the hockey players all sorts of freedom unavailable to men. The women today were doing all sorts of things like skating towards the boards to retrieve a puck with an opponent barreling down on them or looking down to gather a bouncing puck while skating through the middle of the ice that are totally impossible in the men’s game because anyone who tries it will be flatter on the ice than a pancake within thirty seconds. It took almost the first whole game for me to stop having the cringing “oh my god, don’t do that, you’re going to get crushed” instinct. Tactically what this means is that puck possession is an even bigger imperative in the women’s game because it’s so much harder to get the puck from an opponent if you can’t hit her.

The other major difference is that the puck looks heavy. This is something you don’t often think in the men’s game because everyone who plays it at a high level is so darn strong that the puck looks weightless. In the men’s game, the puck moves in straight lines whether being passed or shot. In the women’s game, except for one or two of the most impressive players, the puck moves in curves. Shots have arc and passes noticeably dip as they run out of steam.

The atmosphere was great. Shayba arena seats around 5,000 so it’s very intimate. There are only around 20 rows of seats in two tiers surrounding the rink. The Japan vs. Germany game had around 2,000 people attending; the later game, because it involved Russia, was almost full with over 4,000 fans. During the first game, the crowd shouted “Shaybu! Shaybu!’ I asked some fans what it meant and they said it meant “let’s see a goal!” I wondered if it was a little bit of a sarcastic comment shouted when a fan feels the game is lagging. Later on, when the whole crowd was shouting it fifteen seconds into the Russia game, I understood it was just an exhortation. The crowd seemed to be tilting towards rooting for Japan. Not sure if there are socio-political reasons for that or if the Russian crowd just preferred the team that was loosing for most of the game.

I was really thrilled to get to see a Russian team play in person but unfortunately they never really had a shot in that game. Finland’s goalie (just like the men’s team) was rock solid and their top line of forwards, #77 Susana Tapani in particular was head and shoulders better than everyone else on the ice.

Women’s hockey was lots of fun to watch in person and it gave me a few ideas about rule changes. It drives me a little crazy that the rules prohibit women from body checking but I also understand that the men’s game is prohibitively violent, particularly as we understand more and more about the long term effects of brain injuries. So, if you think about it this way, that it’s not because the players are women that the rules are stricter, it’s because the game is more recently established and it’s certainly easier to establish strict rules than to change established ones to be stricter. Here’s my proposal — it seemed from watching that women could make contact with an opponent to shield the puck from her, just not in an effort to take the puck from her. Men are allowed to hit each other as long as the puck is nearby. Why don’t we meet in the middle — outlaw any body check that is not clearly intended to either keep the puck or get the puck?

Speed skating tomorrow!! Thanks for reading,
Ezra

Winter Olympics: All About Ice Hockey

To prepare for the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia which begin on February 6, 2014, Dear Sports Fan is running a series of previews of Winter Olympics events. So far we’ve profiled the Luge, Skeleton, and Bobsled.

All About Ice Hockey

ovechkin olympics — The hopes of Mother Russia rest on Alexander Ovechkin and his teammates.

How Does Ice Hockey Work?

In Ice Hockey there are twelve players on the ice at a time: three forwards, two defencemen, and a goalie on each team. The goal is to shoot a small, vulcanized rubber disc into a six foot by four foot net. It’s harder than it sounds. For one thing, the goalies, who are enthusiastically padded, helmeted, and armed with a thick stick, a rectangular blocker, and a glove which resembles an oversized baseball mitt, are preternaturally quick and able to block over ninety percent of the shots that get through to them. Defenders are adept at taking the puck away from attackers or often removing the attacker from the puck by hitting them with a shoulder or a hip.

Although there are some real differences between NHL hockey and Olympic, they’re not as big as people will make them out to be. The biggest difference is the size of the rink — NHL rinks are 85 by 200 feet, Olympic rinks are 98 by 210 feet. This has the effect of favoring speed over strength and discipline over risk-taking. It makes crisp passing a better strategy than skating with the puck. Hockey in the NHL is notorious for permitting players to fight with virtually no penalty to their teams. Olympic hockey has none of this — but with rare exceptions, neither do the playoffs in the NHL.


As much as it pains me to include these, here are the highlights from the 2010 Gold medal game between Canada (victors) and the USA (losers):

Why Do People Like Watching Ice Hockey?

So Many Reasons: About a year ago, I wrote a post all about why people like hockey. Among my favorite are “45 seconds,” and “you can see the puck.” Check it out!
Toughness: I also answered the question, “how tough are hockey players?” The answer? Plenty tough but you knew that already.
The Host Wants It: Of all the events at the Olympics, the one that means the most to Russians by far is the men’s ice hockey gold medal. In an interesting ESPN the Magazine article, Brett Forrest quotes a manager at the state-owned contracting company which built the olympic stadiums. This manager says, “Why do you think we built all this? If we lose, they should shoot everyone.” It’s not clear if he’s joking.

What Are the Different Ice Hockey Events?

There’s a gold medal to be won by the men and the women. That’s it. No fancy events, just ice hockey. The tournament is a little complicated though. Both genders start in groups of four — three groups for men, two for women. There is a round-robin tournament and in the men’s bracket, the group winners plus the second place team with the best record advances to the quarter-finals. The other eight teams are paired off and play a single elimination game to determine the other four teams to advance to the quarter-finals. From there, it’s a single elimination tournament. On the women’s side, the four highest ranking teams start out in one group and the four lowest in the other. All four of the top ranked teams advance to the quarter-final round but the top two teams get a bye while the bottom two teams in the top group have to play the top two teams in the bottom group to qualify for the semi-finals.

It’s frankly just about the most complicated way you could possibly design a tournament for twelve or eight teams.

How Dangerous is Ice Hockey?

Surprisingly not that dangerous. Yeah, the puck is going to knock out a few people’s teeth and maybe break a jaw. Sticks can cut faces or break wrists, but compared to the catastrophic knee injuries of downhill skiing or the spectacular crashes in the sledding sports, ice hockey is relatively low risk. The fluidity of the game keeps the contact to a minimum. Concussions are the boogyman of the sport but in a short tournament like the Olympics, there aren’t likely to be too many concussion stories (partially because players and teams are likely to hide any concussions from view) unless a major player is injured.

What’s the State of Gender Equality in Olympic Ice Hockey?

This is a hard one. It’s obviously not equal — there are four more male teams than female teams — but it’s hard to blame the Olympics here. The outside ice hockey world is dominated by the all-male NHL where the most talented male players in the world can make millions of dollars honing their skills. There are a few women’s professional ice hockey leagues but not at nearly the same scale. Women’s rules differ in a couple obvious ways: they must wear full face-masks and they are not allowed to body-check their opponents. This last rule must be enforced with something of a blind-eye though. I’ve watched women’s ice hockey and it’s still pretty rough.

What are Some Fun Olympic Ice Hockey Stories?

Old to Young, Selänne to Määttä, the Olympics is a time to meet budding stars like 19 year old Finnish defenseman Olli Määttä and bid a fond farewell to legends like fellow Finn Teemu Selänne who will be playing in his sixth Olympic Games. It’s a time to re-visit players like Czech Republic forward Petr Nedved who retired from the NHL in 2007 but who, seven years later could still, according to teammate Jaromir Jagr, be the “best player on the team.”

It’s fun to see long-time NHL teammates like Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin play against each other and long-time rivals like Blackhawk Patrick Kane and St. Louis Blues David Backes play with each other.

Important Links:

The official ice hockey schedule.

NBC home-page for US TV information.

Women’s ice hockey begins on Feb. 8 and ends with the gold medal game on Feb. 20. Men’s ice hockey begins on Feb. 12 and ends with the gold medal game on Feb. 23.

What is the Winter Classic Hockey Game?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is the Winter Classic hockey game? Should I watch it?

Thanks,
Sam

— — —

Dear Sam,

The Winter Classic is the name given to an NHL regular season game scheduled on New Year’s Day with a special twist: it’s played outdoors. This year’s game between the Detroit Red Wings and the Toronto Maple Leafs will be televised on NBC at 1 pm ET. The game will be played on a rink constructed in the center of the University of Michigan’s football stadium, nicknamed “the big house.” The USA Today writes that 107,000 people are expected to attend, which would break the record for attendance at a hockey game. There’s lots of reasons to watch, even if you’re not a hockey fan. Here are a few of them:

The Winter Classic Makes Professional Sports into a Game

An argument I hear from some of my friends who prefer college sports over professional ones is that making a business out of a game ruins the fun of the game. Well, for one day, at least, the Winter Classic transforms hockey back into a game. NHL players are from all over the world but most of them grew up in Canada, Scandanavia, or Russia, and many of them grew up playing outside on frozen ponds as well as inside on rinks devoted to youth hockey leagues. Listen to what some of the players have to say about playing outside:

“As soon as everyone walked in it was like a bunch of 13 and 14 year olds in here” — Red Wings Goalie, Jimmy Howard

“I got chills coming into the building. You grow up playing on outdoor rinks as a kid… it’s going to be a special game to be a part of… it’s going to be an experience I’ll never forget.” — Maple Leafs defenseman, Dion Phaneuf

It’s a regular season game that counts for the standings, but it’s also a throwback to childhood for many of the players and a ton of fun. Like that NFL game between the Eagles and the Lions a few weeks back, when the players are having fun, their joy actually comes across through the television and augments your viewing experience.

The Winter Classic Isn’t a Classic, But It’s Becoming One

The “classic” in Winter Classic is more aspirational than it is a reflection of reality. The first Winter Classic game was played in 2008, so next to some other elements of the NHL like the 121 year-old Stanley Cup (the NHL Championship trophy,) the game is in its infancy. The NHL has done a wonderful job with it though and I would venture to say it’s on its way to becoming a classic tradition. For starters, there’s the deal the league made with HBO to film a four episode season of their sports documentary series 24/7 about the two teams who will play in the Winter Classic. The show is a great lead-in to the game and has at times created its own miniature stars. There’s also an alumni game the night before the Winter Classic that brings back legendary (or just old) players from both teams who get to skate with each other on the outdoor rink. The 30,000+ fans who watched and the players who participated love the chance to relive the past.

The last clever part of the game is that the NHL reached into the sports schedule in just the right place at the right time. New Year’s Day was traditionally dominated by College Football bowl games. As the college football bowl schedule became more and more crowded (one could say bloated) over the last ten or fifteen years, the schedule started creeping deeper into January. The Rose Bowl and Tostitos Fiesta Bowl are still on New Year’s Day but begin later, at 5 pm and 8 pm ET. The other BCS (most important) bowl games are played on Jan 2, 3, or 6. The NHL cleverly swooped in right as New Year’s Day was starting to open up to other sports programming.

The Winter Classic is a Beautiful Sight

An outdoor hockey game can be stunning to watch. The teams always wear uniforms designed just for the Winter Classic. This is obviously a merchandise selling tactic but they also tend to be bolder in color than the normal jerseys, optimized to look good outside. The organizers of the game pick their locations carefully to create stunning tableaus, and there’s always the chance of falling snow to push the images even farther. Here are some photos from Winter Classics, past and present:

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Enjoy the game,
Ezra Fischer

Sports is for Lovers

I know, I know, Virginia is for lovers is the line, but three articles popped out at me recently that made me think that really Sports is for lovers too! One is the story behind sports blog Deadspin’s “Favorite Sports Photo of 2013.” The other one, found by another sports blog, The Big Lead, is an obscure scientific study investigating the legend (or reality) of a baby boom in Barcelona exactly nine months after a dramatic soccer victory. The last is a bonus collection of great hockey hugs!

San Fran Kissing — This photo by Deanne Fitzmaurice went viral.

The legend of baby booms nine months after events is common story. The study made reference to the 1965 blackout in New York but I can remember other stories following events like the olympics, big blizzards, and even the election of Barack Obama (although that one, at least, seems to not have been true.) The event these scientists studied was the goal Andres Iniesta scored in dramatic fashion to send Barcelona to the Champions League final. The Champions League is a tournament where the best teams from each of the national leagues in Europe play each other for continental bragging rights. Their conclusion?

We may infer that—at least among the target population—the heightened euphoria following a victory can cultivate hedonic sensations that result in intimate celebrations, of which unplanned births may be a consequence.

That’s some great writing, guys! I love scientific studies of lay subjects!

Might lay also have been the operational word in the story behind the wonderful story of two San Francisco 49ers fans kissing to celebrate their team’s victory in last year’s NFL playoff semifinals? A gentleman never tells — and in this case, both of the people captured in the photo were gentlemen! Photographer Deanne Fitzmaurice writes that the wonderful response the photo received in the days after she took it, “made [her] realize we have gained some ground in terms of acceptance and broader thinking.”

When was the last time you were so happy?

To put the cherry on top of our sports-love-fest, enjoy Yahoo’s hockey blog, Puck Daddy’s “Top 10 Hockey Hugs of 2013.” It’s just great! My favorite is this one between Hurricanes Jeff Skinner and Jay Harrison but there are nine more good ones to check out. Enjoy!