Dear Sports Fan - Page 125 of 133 - An advice column for people who live with people who live for sports

What Does "And One" Mean in Basketball?

Dear Sports Fan,

What does the phrase “and one” mean? I hear it a lot during basketball games but I don’t know what it means.

Thanks,
Susan

Dear Susan,

“And one” is a phrase that’s used when someone is fouled while taking a shot in basketball – either a jump-shot (farther away from the basket) or a layup or dunk (right at the basket). If the player makes the basket and the ref calls a foul on the defender who’s guarding them as the shot is being taken, the basket counts AND the player gets to take a single free throw. Hence the and one.Frequently you hear players yell out “and one” when they make a shot and feel that they did so despite being fouled, even if the ref didn’t call the foul – this is the player’s not-so-subtle way of chastising the ref for missing the call. Sometimes a the shooter will even shout “and one” before they know that their shot has gone in. Regardless of whether the foul is called, there won’t be an “and one” foul shot if they don’t make the basket. So shouting “and one” before a shot goes in is a complex emotional feat — being cocky and aggrieved at the same time!Everyone should be able to understand that aggrieved “and one” feeling – just think about being at work and being given a difficult task, and then accomplishing that task even in the face of someone or something unfairly inhibiting you. Say, for example, you’ve been teamed with the office dud – a real nothing burger of a co-worker – and tasked with pitching a prospective client. And say you get the account despite your colleague’s general uselessness – and your boss comes in and congratulates you both on a job well done without mentioning that you succeeded in spite of your dead weight colleague, not because of them – well, then, you too know what it is to shout “AND ONE” plaintively and futilely at the gods.

Word to the wise though — do not actually shout “and one” in a board meeting. That won’t go over well.

Thanks for reading,
Dean Russell Bell

How Long is an NBA Basketball Game?

Dear Sports Fan,

How long is an NBA basketball game? I thought it was an hour long — made up of four fifteen minute quarters — and that I just kept missing the start of the quarter. Now someone tells me it’s four twelve minute quarters. Is that true? Why would a game be forty eight minutes. Seems arbitrary!

Thanks,
Sandra

Dear Sandra,

Rest easy, you were not missing the game! An NBA basketball game is forty eight minutes long and made up of four twelve minute quarters. I suppose you’re right that this seems a little arbitrary because the duration of most of the other big sporting events in the country do seem to end on a “ten.” Football is sixty minutes, made up of four fifteen minute quarters. Hockey is also sixty minutes, although it is divided into three twenty minute periods. Soccer is ninety minutes long, divided into two forty five minute halves. Baseball is essentially timeless — no clock is used to determine when the game ends. NBA basketball seems to be an outlier. Basketball is also the only main sport that differs in how long it is between college and professional games. A college basketball game is forty minutes, divided not into quarters but into two twenty minute halves.

So what gives? According to the original rules of basketball written by James Naismuth, “The time shall be two fifteen-minute halves, with five minutes rest between.” Not to get too far off topic, but the invention of basketball is pretty funny. Naismuth became a phys-ed teacher at a YMCA in Springfield Mass in 1891 and soon after invented basketball. Here is the Wikipedia explanation of why:

At Springfield YMCA, Naismith struggled with a rowdy class which was confined to indoor games throughout the harsh New England winter and thus was perpetually short-tempered. Under orders from Dr. Luther Gulick, head of Springfield YMCA Physical Education, Naismith was given 14 days to create an indoor game that would provide an “athletic distraction”: Gulick demanded that it would not take up much room, could help its track athletes to keep in shapeand explicitly emphasized to “make it fair for all players and not too rough.”

By the time the NBA (then the Basketball Association of America) came into being, the college game with its twenty minute halves was well established. The first franchise owners decided to lengthen the game for their league from forty minutes “so as to bring an evening’s entertainment up to the two-hour period owners felt the ticket buyers expected.” Today, the average “real-time” length of an NBA game has crept up to right under two hours and twenty minutes according to the blog Weak Side Awareness.

As for whether or not all this is arbitrary, I can’t say, but in thinking about this, I did notice that the NBA shot clock — a team must shoot the ball and at least hit the rim before this time expires or else the ball is given to the other team — is 24 seconds; another product of twelve!

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

What Does it Mean to Have a Foul to Give?

Dear Sports Fan,

I’ve been watching some basketball and towards the end of games the announcer will sometimes say that a team has a “foul to give.” What does that mean?

Thanks,
Doug

Dear Doug,

In the NBA each player can commit five fouls before getting kicked out of the game for good on the sixth. A team cannot get kicked out of a gave for fouling too many times (although Chuck Klosterman wrote a great story about a team winning with only three players left at the end of the game) but there are consequences for fouling a lot. We’ll get to what these consequences are in a second, but first we have to quickly define a few different types of fouls.

An offensive foul is when someone whose team has the ball does something against the rules to a player whose team does not have the ball.
A defensive foul is when someone whose team doesn’t have the ball does something illegal to someone whose team does have the ball.
A shooting foul is a type of defensive foul that happens when someone does something illegal to a player who is in the act of shooting the basketball.
A non-shooting foul is… well, you know, all the other defensive fouls that aren’t shooting ones.

Only defensive fouls count towards the team total. The count of team fouls resets to zero at the start of each quarter. On fouls one through five the player who is fouled will shoot two free-throws only if the foul was a shooting foul. After the fifth foul, from foul six until the end of the quarter, the player who is fouled shoots two free-throws for any defensive foul — no matter if they were shooting or not when fouled. This state of being for a team is called “the bonus.”

Okay — we finally have enough background to answer your question. Having a foul to give means that a team has not yet reached the fifth foul of the quarter. In other words — they can still foul the other team at least once before the other team is in the bonus and will shoot free throws when fouled. At the end of a game or quarter, having a foul to give is particularly useful because a defensive team can use it to disrupt the other team’s plans. If the offensive team has fifteen seconds left, they can set up a nice play to run but the team with a foul to give can wait until there are about three or four seconds left and then give that foul (i.e. foul the player with the ball.) Because the other team is not in the bonus, they will not shoot free-throws, they will just get the ball back and have to pass it in from out of bounds and try to run another play but this time with only a few seconds.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

What is a Sweep?

Dear Sports Fan,

I’ve been following the NBA playoffs and have heard announcers talking about one team sweeping another. What does that mean?

Thanks,
Don

Dear Don,

When one team wins all of its games against another team in a particular set of games, it is said to have swept the other team. The reason you’re hearing it so much now is that the NBA playoffs are organized into best four out of seven series. For a team to move on to the next round of the playoffs, it must beat its opponent four times within those seven games. If it were a set of three games instead of seven, a team would have to win a majority of two out of the three to win the series. If a team gets to having won a majority of the games in a series by winning consecutive games, they have swept the series.

You’ll hear talk about sweeps most often in sports that organize their games like basketball does. The NHL and MLB playoffs also are organized around seven game series. In the NFL, where the playoffs are single elimination, you may still hear someone talk about a team sweeping a “season series ” against another team. This means the team won all (usually it is just two) games against a particular opponent even if the games were not consecutive.

Being swept is seen as humiliating in professional sports and players are determined not to let it happen to them. It’s actually fairly common though — as of 2009, 18% of NHL playoff series ended in a sweep. In this NBA playoffs so far, there are four teams at risk for being swept: the Celtics by the Knicks,^[1] the Bucks by the Heat, the Lakers by the Spurs, and the Rockets by the Thunder.

If you’re having trouble remembering what a sweep is, here are two possible derivations that might help. One possibility is that the usage comes from the image of using a broom to sweep your opponent out of the way — that opponent put up so little fight that you could use the broom instead of having to pull a mop out or get on your hands and knees to scrub. Another possibility is that this usage shares a derivation with the word sweepstakes — a contest where one party sweeps all of the possible winnings into their lap — the image of one of those miniature shuffleboard sticks that roulette dealers use comes to mind.

Enjoy the playoffs!
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

Not anymore, since I started writing this, the Celtics won in overtime to avoid being swept 4-0.↵

What Makes College Basketball Different?

Dear Sports Fan,

I’ve been watching March Madness and College Basketball looks really different from the NBA Basketball that my sister usually watches. Can you tell me what some of the differences are?

Thanks,
Patricia

Dear Patricia,

One of the reasons why people love college basketball is exactly what you’ve identified — that it is very different from the NBA. The NBA for the most part, is dominated by a single strategy, the pick-and-roll. Critics of the professional game will say that teams just run eighteen variations on the pick and roll from different spots on the floor. I love the college offensive schemes:

Dribble drive – a really quick guy beats his guy off the dribble, but he’s not talented enough to finish, so he kicks it out to someone whose defender is collapsing to contain the drive, except HE’S a 17 percent three point shooter, so he drives, draws more defense, kicks out, etc etc – until the whole offensive side of the court collapses in on itself like a dying star and it’s a mad scrum around the offensive glass (Memphis, Kentucky, kind of Syracuse and Michigan)
Motion – pass around the perimeter, set half-ass, off-ball screens and hope that a defender gets confused, goes the wrong way and leaves someone open for a three-pointer or a back-cut; if the defense is disciplined enough not to make a mistake, wait til 5 seconds are left and pass to your one on one offensive threat and let him take a bad shot (Pitt)
“I have an athletic big guy” – a team lucks into a really really tall/wide guy who’s athletic and can therefore dominate since that’s so rare in college ball, so they just give him the fucking ball (Kind of Miami/Indiana)
Tom Izzo – run, throw the ball up on the glass, go get it and mug anyone who gets in your way (Michigan State)
Wisconsin – motion + tall white coaches sons who can shoot with improbable range (Wisconsin)
Flex – the only offense where success is measured not by the number of points scored but by the number of picks set in a given possession (Gonzaga)
Coach K – one of the few offenses based solely on moral superiority/smugness (Duke)
Zone attack – when facing the 2-3 zone, pass the ball around the perimeter repeatedly and have one player flash into the the “soft spot” (essentially at the foul line, behind the 2 and in front of the 3) – get him the ball, then watch him panic as the entire zone collapses on him and hope he makes the right pass (anyone playing Syracuse)
Transition – RUN!!!!!!! (VCU)
Three point – Whatever happens, shoot three pointers. Miss them, get long rebounds, shoot more three pointers. Pull up in transition, shoot them contested, shoot on the move…just keep shooting. Defender in your face? No worries – step back as far as you need to.

Enjoy the Final Four games tonight,
Dean Russell Bell

Super Bowl Prep Talk, Part Three: A Beginner's Guide to Football Betting

In this series, Dear Sports Fan will try to prepare non-sports fans and sports fans alike to converse knowledgeably during this Sunday’s Super Bowl parties. Super Bowl Sunday is probably the day when the most non-sports fans gather in front of televisions and mingle with their sport loving friends and family. In Part One-A and One-B of this series, we covered some of the key story-lines and plot points around the game. We also had a special post on Super Bowl party behavior written by one non-fan for others. This post will cover a few of the most common ways people gamble on the Super Bowl.

As Lisa wrote in her post on Super Bowl party behavior, Super Bowl Sunday is the day when the most people who don’t normally watch football watch a football game. Likewise it is a day when many, many people who don’t normally gamble on football have at least a few dollars riding on the game. Even if you don’t choose to gamble today, many of your friends and family will. There is likely to be almost 100 million dollars bet on the game legally in Vegas, and that’s just if you want to be legal about it. Here’s a quick explanation of the four most common types of bets that they’ll be making.

Betting the Line

This is the most common form of football betting. You’ve probably heard someone say that a football team is “favored by three points” or is a “ten point underdog.” This is where those phrases and figures come from. A sports book in Vegas will “set a line” for a game and then bettors will gamble on either side of that line. The easiest way to think of a line is to remember that for an actual sports game, the line is ALWAYS at zero. Whichever team wins by even as little as one point wins the game. In the world of the bet, that’s not the case. The betting line is adjusted in favor of one team or the other so that in order to win the bet, you need a team to win by more than a certain number of points. We’ll get to why the line is set where it is in a few paragraphs.

In today’s game, San Fransisco is favored by four points (somewhat confusingly expressed as “San Fransisco -4.”) This means that people who bet on San Fransisco need them to win by more than four points to win (also called “cover”) their bet. People who bet on Baltimore can cover even if Baltimore loses by up to three points. Knowing this may help you make sense of why people will sometimes seem incredibly engaged in the game at odd times.

Betting the Over/Under

This is a very common form of football line betting. When someone bets the over/under they are making a prediction about what the combined scores of the two teams will be. Basically, you need to predict whether the game will be high or low scoring. The over/under for today’s game is 48 points. If you bet on the over, you’re predicting that the combined score of the two teams will add up to more than 48; the under, less.

A quick note on lines (because the over/under is another form of line betting) and the logic of how they are set. The underlying principle of any type of gambling, is that the “house” (the entity that people bet against,) because they take a small fee on every transaction will always make money if they can balance the amount bet on both sides of a line (half on the under, half on the over; half on San Fransisco -4, half on Baltimore +4.) The house effectively pays the winners of a bet with the money they get from the losers. The only time the house can lose is if they take more winning bets than losing bets.

As you might expect, Vegas is freakishly good at balancing the bets. So, you would think that the combined score of the game is most likely to be what the line says it is, 48, but there are two things that qualify this. First — some bets are more “fun” than others — the public tends to enjoy betting an over more than an under, so the over/under will often be a little bit higher than Vegas thinks the combined scores will be. Second, well, the people who set the lines have chosen to work in Vegas. Sometimes they like to gamble a bit too.

Buying a Super Bowl Box

The Super Bowl Box is the most casual form of Super Bowl betting. You’ve probably taken part in one yourself! You make a ten by ten grid, put your name in a box, and pay someone a few bucks. After all hundred boxes are filled out someone randomly assigns a number from 0 to 9 to each row and column on the chart. Each box therefore represents a pair of one digit numbers like 4 and 7. These numbers correspond to the ones digit of the score of the teams at particular moments of the game — usually at the end of each quarter. If your numbers come up, say San Fransisco 14, Baltimore 7 (or 27) at halftime, you win a bunch of money.

This is gambling at it’s most pure. Unlike the previous two forms of betting, you don’t get to make any decisions at all. When you scribble your name on a box and put in your money, you are spending 1/100 of all the money involved for a 1/100 chance to win. As soon as they assign numbers to boxes, your chances have either gone up or down as you can see from this awesome “sucky box-o-meter.”

Making a Prop Bet

Prop bets are another form of betting that thrives during the Super Bowl. Prop is short for proposition (as you probably know from The Wire) and these bets are all about answering questions that ask “will something happen today?” These are incredibly fun to bet on, and as you might imagine because of that, are usually difficult to win. Most of these are about the game, but a good number of them are about the spectacle surrounding the game. There are two good articles on Grantland.com about this, one by a football analyst and one by a gambling comedy writer. Here are just a few of the bets they cover:

Will there be overtime?
Will the largest lead of the game be more or less than 14 points?
Will Vonta Leach (a guy on the Ravens who almost never gets to touch the ball) score the first touchdown?
Will the opening coin toss be heads?
Will Alicia Keys’ rendition of the national anthem be longer than 2:15?

That last one is ridiculous but I’d be willing to bet that someone at your Super Bowl party has their eyes on their watch while she’s singing. Look around and let me know.

Enjoy the party and the game,
Ezra Fischer

How Not to Behave at a Super Bowl Party: From One Non-Fan to Another

If you are anything like me, the only thing worse than the football season is the one night a year when everyone gets together to celebrate the football season: Super Bowl Sunday. And while I try to avoid it every year, I somehow always manage to get sucked into attending a party. Attending a party in which you have zero interest in the main event can be rather tricky. To help you on your path to being the perfect Super Bowl party guest, I have compiled a list of behaviors to avoid at your party this year.

DON’T stand around repeatedly announcing to any and everyone how much you hate football. There are so many great reasons to hate football. It is needlessly violent and leads to serious life injuries for the players. They only play for about seven seconds before stopping for five minutes. One minute of football time is the equivalent of fifteen minutes of real life time. I could go on, but I won’t. As you can see, it gets pretty annoying pretty quickly.

DON’T stand (or sit) in the room with the TV and talk loudly through the whole entire game. Believe it or not, some people actually want to watch the football game. More than that, some people actually want to hear the inane announcers talk about the football game. If you are not one of them, there are so many better places for you to be than in the room with the TV. There is a perfectly good table full of food and booze somewhere else where you will find like-minded people which whom you can pass the evening discussing hockey.

DON’T ask 1,000 annoying questions to the person in the room who is the most interested in watching the game. Maybe you’ve decided that this year you are going to try to pay attention to the game, only to realize that you have absolutely no idea what is going on. It is ok to ask questions now and then, and there will definitely be people excited to familiarize you with their favorite sport. Just be conscientious about how many questions you ask and who you ask them to. There are people who are going to want to watch the game more than they want to educate you on what is going on.

DON’T loudly root for the team that no one else is rooting for, while maintaining that football is dumb. People take football very seriously. Drunk people take football even more seriously. Try not to piss off a bunch of drunk football fans, unless your date for the party happens to be large enough to defend your honor. If this is the case, by all means, instigate. Fights are the best part of sports.

DON’T end the evening with a loud exasperated sigh of “Thank Goodness Football is over!” When the game ends, try to keep your glee to a minimum, especially if the home team (i.e. the team that everyone at the party is rooting for) just lost. No one will appreciate your joy in the midst of their mourning.

DON’T show up empty handed. For all of my bad behavior at Super Bowl parties, even I know better than to show up at someone’s house empty handed. Super Bowl parties are as much about the food and beverages as anything else. If they weren’t, why would any of us non-fans even bother to show up? If you are going to be a football-naysayer, then make up for it by bringing a really amazing dish or a whole lot of beer. People will forgive just about anything given the right culinary incentive. But show up with nothing, consume all of the food and drinks, and complain through the whole game, and I promise you won’t be invited next year.

So now you know all the ways not to behave at a Super Bowl party. If you are interested in knowing how you should behave instead, well, you’ll have to ask someone else. I fully intend to break all of my own rules and maybe even discover some new ones come Sunday night.

So who’s having the party??
Lisa Filipek

Super Bowl Prep Talk, Part One-B: Harbaugh Brothers and New Orleans

In this series, Dear Sports Fan will try to prepare non-sports fans and sports fans alike to converse knowledgeably during this Sunday’s Super Bowl parties. Super Bowl Sunday is probably the day when the most non-sports fans gather in front of televisions and mingle with their sport loving friends and family. In Part One-A of this series, we covered the many, many plot lines centered around Ray Lewis. In this post, we’ll cover two more story lines, the Harbaugh brothers and New Orleans, the host city.

The Harbaugh Brothers

Unlike the normal one-game-a-Sunday cadence of the football season over the past few months, there are two weeks between the semi-finals and the Super Bowl. This gives everyone time to take any interesting story and drive it into the ground. By the time the game comes around for those of us who watch and listen and read a lot about sports, the narrative of many stories will have shifted from this-is-an-interesting-story to this-story-is-going-to-kill-me-if-I-hear-it-one-more-time. Then, of course, that becomes the story!

The story of the Harbaugh brothers is one of those stories. It goes like this: the head coach of the Baltimore Ravens, John Harbaugh, is the older brother of the head coach of the San Fransisco Forty-Niners, Jim Harbaugh. That’s pretty much the whole story. But what the hell… their father Jack was a football player and coach himself. There’s a pretty sweet story about the sons going out of their way to help him when he was struggling as the head coach of Western Kentucky University. Sweet, however, is not the emotion this family is most known for. The sons are intense — even for football coaches. Jim, the younger one, is particularly demonstrative.

Says the New York Times:

His San Francisco 49ers players love to imitate the cartoonish nature of their coach: the clenched teeth, the dropped jaw, the wide eyes, the narrowed brow. Each has their favorite Harbaugh face.

John had is own blog-ready moment. When he was asked about coaching against his brother, he responded by saying it was a “great moment for our country.” I don’t know if I’d go that far, but you know… even if it’s not an incredibly interesting story… it is kinda cool to think about two kids playing super bowl in their back yards years ago and then growing up to face each other in that exact situation.

New Orleans

The host of the Super Bowl this year is New Orleans.Usually it’s not interesting who’s hosting the Super Bowl. But this year, there’s some drama. If the NFL and New Orleans were Facebook friends, their relationship status would be, “It’s Complicated.” Here’s the timeline.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the Superdome became an emergency shelter for 20,000 plus people. The stadium, which had hosted football and basketball games, the pope and the Rolling Stones, quickly became a symbol of the desperate, tragic situation.

Then, a little more than a year later, the Superdome became a symbol for the rebirth of the city when the city’s beloved Saints returned, like so many New Orleans residents did, from San Antonio. Roger Goodell, now the commissioner of the NFL, then the assistant commissioner, played a big role in this, remembers NOLA.com:

Goodell worked with local leaders to rebuild the Superdome. He cleared bureaucratic hurdles in Washington D.C. to accelerate the construction process. And he was a constant motivator, sending local officials late-night emails for inspiration: “We’re winning! Don’t stop! We’re in this to win!”

Three years after the team returned to New Orleans, they won the Super Bowl. So, it’s a positive, feel good story, right? Well… not so fast.

This past summer, a scandal broke out (predictably Clintonized to “Bountygate”) when it was revealed that the New Orleans Saints had a bounty system set up to provide financial rewards for injuring opposing players, including targeting the heads of players with histories of concussions. Goodell, now commissioner, suspended several team coaches and players for the season. Goodell has widely been accused of everything from tyranny to hypocrisy to ineptitude. He was sued by a suspended player. He eventually had to ask his predecessor to step in and try to clean up some of the mess. Paul Tagliabue cleaned up the mess by essentially repealing as many of Goodell’s decisions as possible.

So, where do we stand today? My guess is that Goodell is more hated than he is loved but that the hate is mostly a good-natured, whaddayagonnado type of hate. My favorite story about this is the signs that have started appearing in the windows of New Orleans restaurants and bars: “Do Not Serve This Man,” they say.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

Super Bowl Prep Talk, Part One-A

As is often the case with big sporting events, many fans will be following the Super Bowl for its dramatic, soap opera-esque stories. Although the game this year does not have any story half as inspiring as an athlete over-coming the twin deaths of his grandmother and girlfriend or half as bizarre as the revelation that that girlfriend never existed, this game has plenty of juicy stories orbiting it.

Ray Lewis is Everything

Ray Lewis is the starting middle linebacker of the Baltimore Ravens. He’s a very controversial figure. Some people love him, some people hate him, and some people will represent both sides of the issue while attacking the seven layer dip like a fiend. This playoff season has brought out the best, the worst, and the most dramatic elements of Lewis — let me tell you about some of it.

First, Lewis is undeniably great at his job. He’s been playing for the Baltimore Ravens since their inaugural season 17 years ago. He has been to 13 Pro Bowls, been the NFL Defensive Player of the Year twice, and was the Super Bowl Most Valuable Player in 2001 when the Ravens won last. Also… maybe he’s overrated.

We’re now done with the football side of Lewis. Before this year’s playoffs, he announced that he would be retiring at the end of the season. Boston area NESN wondered in early January (before the Ravens knocked the New England Patriots out of contention) whether or not this would inspire the Ravens to win the Super Bowl.

Lewis missed the final ten games of the regular season this year after he tore his triceps muscle. Now he’s back playing. Some say (and probably some at your super bowl party will say) that this has to be thanks to some serious performance enhancing drugs. Or even some kind of silly ones.

Lewis’ response to being asked about using deer antler spray shows another side of him — the religious crazy person side. He commented that the allegations were “the trick of the devil.” There is no question that if Lewis were not a football player, he might have been a charismatic preacher. He fires up his team before the game, cries dramatically during the national anthem, and answers post-game questions with mildly incoherent scripture.

Back in 2000, the year before Baltimore was last in the Super Bowl, Lewis was embroiled in a less goofy controversy. He was arrested for murder and aggravated assault in the stabbing death of two men outside a night club. Lewis cut a plea bargain where his charge was reduced to virtually nothing in return for testifying against his two friends. They were eventually acquitted.

Oh, and did I mention that he has a signature dance? It’s brilliant. Teach yourself it and impress your friends with an imitation. Like the mayor of Denver. Or Keenan Williams of SNL.

Good luck learning the dance! In the next two installments of this series, we’ll cover the two opposing head coaches being brothers and the complicated relationship of the host city, New Orleans, with the NFL.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra

Why do People Like Hockey?

Dear Sports Fan,

So, the NHL is back from it’s most recent labor issues. My housemate is very excited. I’m not. Hockey leaves me uninterested in a way other sports don’t. What am I missing? Why do people like hockey?

Thanks,
Mitch

— — —

Dear Mitch,

Thanks for your question. I happen to love hockey more than any sport I never played seriously. Here are seven reasons why I love hockey, why I think most hockey fans like hockey, and why you might like it too if you want to and you stick with it for a few weeks.

You can see the puck — in the old days this was the number one objection for dubious and myopic hockey haters.^[1] “You can’t even see the puck!” they would say. And, to give them some credit, it was hard to see the puck on a small standard def television. In fact, this problem was taken so seriously that for one season Fox put a computer chip into the puck so that they could add a glowing halo and a comet trail to their hockey broadcasts in real time! This was pretty terrible. Now, HD TVs have solved this problem — you can see the puck! At least almost all of the time!
The Stanley Cup — the Stanley Cup is the championship trophy for hockey. It is old and enormous and shiny and it has great traditions that go with it. As a matter of principle, no hockey player will touch the trophy unless their team just won it. When a team wins it, one player, usually the captain, will lift the trophy above their head, (no small feat, it’s three feet long and 35 pounds,) kiss it, skate around a bit, and pass it to one of their teammates who will do the same until all have had a turn. During the summer after they win it, each player gets a day with the cup. They can take it to their home town, take it to their favorite vacation spot, to visit a hospital, or a bar… they drink champagne from it or eat cereal. Some have slept with it in their beds.
The Playoff Beard — I’ve written about the playoff beardbefore but suffice it to say that watching a hockey team you root for get hairier and hairier is an oddly satisfying part of a successful playoff run.
45 seconds — Hockey players generally play between 30 seconds to a minute at a time before they hop over the boards back to their bench and are replaced by a teammate. These short bursts of activity are called shifts and they are the source of many of the elements that make hockey unique and enjoyable. Because players play in such short bursts, they can go all out when they are on the ice. It also contributes to the hockey ethic of playing through injuries. All sports have this to some extent, but hockey players take it to an impressive extreme. I think part of this is that you can grit your way through injuries for 45 second bursts that you wouldn’t even think about trying to play with if you were playing 90 minutes like in soccer or 35 like in basketball. Watching teams change lines (groups of players who usually play together) is the easiest “advanced” thing to watch in hockey because goals are often scored against a team who is unable to change switch their players out and get stuck with tired guys on the ice or who try to sub at a bad time and are stuck with people not in the right position.
It makes you go “aaaahhH!” — I watch a lot of sports and none make me squeal as much as hockey. It’s so fast, so suddenly desperate, so chaotic that it always finds a way to surprise. Whether it’s the power of a long shot that hits the back of the net at 90+ miles per hour, an open ice body check that sends someone flying, or a scramble of six or more guys in front of the net desperately trying to score/prevent the other guy from scoring, hockey will almost always find a way to surprise and delight.
Grace — This absolutely is hockey playing against type, but it’s nonetheless true. Think a little bit about what’s going on when you watch a hockey game: ten guys wearing armor and holding spears are moving around at 20 miles per hour with razor sharp knives on their boots. The goal is to get a tiny little piece of vulcanized rubber into a net and to do this they pass the puck back and forth, do all sorts of fancy footwork and stick-handling, and shoot with surprising accuracy, all while the other team is taking every opportunity to physically knock them off their feet. There’s an amazing amount of skill, strength, and grace involved in every hockey game.
Blood (and Consent) — Okay, yes. There’s also a lot of violence. There’s no way that I can do this subject justice. The New York Times’ three part story about Derek Boogaard is an amazing and disturbing read. What I can say is this — if we are okay as a society with violent sports (football, MMA, boxing, horse racing,) I think hockey does it about as well as it could be done. There are surprisingly few violent hits to the head. Compared to football, it’s no contest — the fluidity of the sport ensures that most contact is body to body. And fighting, always a controversial topic, is done in as controlled and ritualized way as possible. This is not to say that sometimes fists aren’t thrown in anger, but most of the time it happens more like the way Tanner Glass described his fight from a day or two ago in the New York Times.

“I just said ‘hi’ to him at the face-off,” Glass told Pittsburgh reporters. “I squared off against him. He said, ‘Do you want to do this?’ I said, ‘Sure.’

“He said, ‘Good luck,’ ” Glass said. “I like when a guy does that.”

And believe it or not, when these guys are done with a fight (as soon as one of them looses his footing or is otherwise at a clear disadvantage,) they will often congratulate each other on a job well done. It’s bizarre to outsiders like me but because players are sometimes miked for television, I’ve actually heard it before.

So there you have it Mitch, seven reasons why people like hockey. I hope one or a few of these connect with you enough to give it a shot or at least to understand what your housemates are excited about!

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

i.e. my Dad↵