Tag: hockey

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.

Tuesday, October 14

  1. Niners win, Rams lose — There were two things that stood out in last night’s football game which ended as a 31 – 17 victory for the San Francisco 49ers over the St. Louis Rams: The first was a phantom penalty call against the Rams at the end of the first half which stopped them from increasing their lead from 14-3 to 21-3. After that bad call, the 49ers scored 28 of the next 31 points in the game. The other notable thing was the Rams wearing their bright, beautiful (to my eyes) yellow and blue uniforms from the 1990s. Fun!
    Line: If it hadn’t been for that phantom offensive pass interference call at the end of the second quarter, things might have turned out a little differently.
  2. Baseball playoffs quaintly rained out — It seems like a remnant of a nicer, kinder past for sports, but the baseball playoff game last night between the Baltimore Orioles and the Kansas City Royals actually got rained out! It’s kind of cool that some things, even if they are elemental, are more important than sports and television schedules.
    What’s Next: The game has been rescheduled for tonight at 8 p.m. ET and will be televised on TBS.
  3. Topsy turvy start for some hockey teams — The Boston Bruins played a rare Monday matinee hockey game yesterday against the Colorado Avalanche and lost 2-1. This brings their record to 1-3 and means that after a win on opening night, the Bruins have lost three games in a row. This is a rare bad patch for the Bruins. It’s been 145 games since they last lost three in a row. That said, it’s probably a little bit too early to worry. Just like no one really expects the Tampa Bay Lightning or Nashville Predators to remain undefeated.
    Line: It’s a long season, let’s all just take a deep breath.

Thursday, October 9

  1. Finally a good Thursday Night NFL Football Game — Thursday Night National Football League games have been taking heat in the media lately. It’s one thing that we all sort of know they’re cruel and unusual for players who get only three days to heal their bodies between a Sunday game and having to play again Thursday. It’s another thing that they’re not fun to watch. Every Thursday game this year had been a blow-out. That’s when the complaints really heated up. The game last night between the Indianapolis Colts and the Houston Texans looked like it was going to follow suit after the Colts went up 24-0 in the first half. “Here we go again, another blow out” people were saying all over the world. The Texans came back to make it interesting though and had the ball, down only five points, with two minutes to go. After their quarterback fumbled, the game was over and the comeback attempt had come up short.
    Line: At least it wasn’t another boring Thursday Night game like it looked like it was going to be.
  2. Hockey’s back again — Last night was the second night in the National Hockey League season but the first for many teams. There were twelve games played last night and if you were a fan of one of the teams playing their first game, you were excited about the start of the season.
    Line: I know it sounds wimpy but I just want my team to get through the first week with no major injuries. Seems like players are falling like leaves this year.
  3. International soccer? — It’s not the world cup but the countries of Europe are playing each other in games to qualify for the next European Championships. Some games, like England’s 5-0 win over San Marino are mismatches in size and power, but others like Russia and Sweden playing to a 1-1 draw are exciting and even rivalries. The most interesting game was Slovakia’s 2-1 win over Spain, whose World Cup swoon now looks more like the end of an era than a glitch in the matrix.
    Line: Every “golden generation” of soccer players comes to an end. Looks like Spain’s generation is at its end now.

Cue Cards 10-9-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

clapperboard
Yesterday —  Wednesday, October 8

  1. Hockey opens with four games — The NHL season started yesterday with four carefully chosen games. Two games were in Canada between Canadian teams and two were in the United States between American teams. Two were in the East, two were in the West. All the teams involved were good teams from markets that support them well.
    1. The Boston Bruins beat the Philadelphia Flyers 2-1.
      Line: The Bruins are definitely the best team in the East and it’s probably not that close.
    2. The Montreal Canadiens beat the Toronto Maple Leafs 4-3.
      Line: Not that one game matters that much, but this result matches the tradition of these two teams that goes back at least fifty years. Canadiens win, Leafs lose.
    3. The San Jose Sharks beat the L.A. Kings 4-0.
      Line: After a humiliating loss to the Kings in last year’s playoffs, the Sharks show some pride in winning this game.
    4. The Vancouver Canucks beat the Calgary Flames 2-0.
      Line: Hard to find a second good team in Western Canada for the Canucks to play. The only other choices, Calgary and Winnipeg, are likely to be among the worst teams in the league.
  2. Everyone else breathed — No games for the NFL or MLB yesterday. The stretched-out football weekend starts tonight with a game between the Indianapolis Colts and the Houston Texans. The two Championship Series’ in the baseball playoffs start on Friday and Saturday.

Why is the start of a season in sports so exciting?

Dear Sports Fan,

Sports seasons are so long — how can anyone get excited at the very start? It’s going to be at least six months until the playoffs in most sports.

Thanks,
Jan

— — —

Dear Jan,

The start of a season is exciting for many reasons and only a few of them have to do with making the playoffs. You’re absolutely right about how long sports seasons are. Take the National Hockey League (NHL) which is starting tonight. The NHL regular season is 82 games. It starts in early October and ends in mid-April. That’s a long, long time and a lot of games! The National Basketball Association plays the same number of games. Baseball plays 162 or roughly twice the number. Football is the outlier here with relatively short seasons — 16 games in the National Football League and around 12 for college teams. Setting football aside, the first few games for a baseball, basketball, or hockey team don’t actually mean very much in terms of their eventual record and qualification for the playoffs. A fan’s excitement for and enjoyment of the start of the season can’t be measured in wins and losses but it can be described. Let’s give it a shot.

Saying hello to old friends and meeting new ones

Part of following a team is getting to know the players on the team. The players on your favorite team or even their biggest rivals[1]  become like characters on a long-running sit-com. You learn their quirks. You cheer with them when they celebrate and you share their anger and frustration when the team is down. You track their various injury rehabilitations with bated breath. You might even wear a shirt with their name on the back. Players on your favorite team feel like an extension of your social circle in a weird way. The start of a season in sports is a little like the start of a season of a television show you really like or a new book in a series you love. You can’t wait to drop back in on their lives to see how they’re doing, if they’ve grown a funny beard, lost weight, gained weight, changed in any way. As a Penguins fan, I look forward to dropping back in on Sidney Crosby’s life just as much as I look forward to seeing what’s up with Lady Mary as a Downton Abbey fan.

Teams never stay the same from one season to a next. Players are traded, retire, or become free agents and move to another team. The first games of the season are your first chance to meet the new guys or gals on the team you follow. Some of them are players you know from other teams in the league. This can be great if you’ve always grudgingly respected their play. It can be challenging if you’ve always (sports) hated them and now you have to find a way to root for them. Rookies or players who have moved up from the minor leagues are always exciting to meet because their potential is unknown and therefore theoretically limitless.

Returning to ritual

Watching sports is also an important part of many fan’s social lives. Whether you go to games in person, watch them in a bar, or at home, watch them alone, with a partner, or with friends, watching and rooting can be a big part of a sport’s fans life. The start of the season means a return to social settings that you haven’t had access to during the offseason. It’s like the end of summer when you were a kid and all your friends got home from summer camp or the end of a long sustained period of craziness at work that allows you to rest, relax, and actually meet a friend for a drink instead of just heading home to rest up for the next day.

I have friends that I know I’m going to hear from ten times more during a particular sports season than I would otherwise. It’s great!

Getting a feel for your team

The first few games of a hockey, basketball, or baseball season may not have much of a statistical effect on their outcome for the year but that doesn’t mean fans don’t watch them attentively to get a feel for how their team might do. If you root for a team that just won a championship, you’re looking for evidence of the lethargy that often infects teams after they win. If you’re like most of us and you root for a team that did well but didn’t win the championship last year, you’re looking to see if the team has improved or taken a step back. How has a new coach affected the team’s play? How well are new players integrated into the team? Which players have improved? Which have lost a step? If you root for one of the worst teams in the league last year, the first few games may be your only time of true hope during the year.

Truthfully, the first few games probably can’t shed too much light on what the season will hold for your team, but that won’t stop fans from trying!

Enjoy the start of the season,
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. note the outpouring of sincere love from Red Sox fans for the departing Derek Jeter↵

Cue Cards 9-24-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

clapperboard
Yesterday —  Tuesday, September 23

  1. The Pirates Make the Playoffs — Before last year, the Pirates hadn’t made the playoffs since 1992. Now they’ve made it twice in a row! That’s an impressive turn-around for the long-suffering franchise. They clinched their playoff spot last night by beating the Atlanta Braves 3-2. They don’t get to rest now though, because playoff seeding is a big deal and they still have a chance to catch some of the teams ahead of them, including their division leader, the St. Louis Cardinals. According to Playoff Magic, the Cardinals magic number over the Pirates is four. And if you don’t know what that means, you should read this!
    Line: I’m excited the Pirates are back in the playoffs. I love their throwback caps!
  2. Hockey? Hockey is back? — That’s right! Preseason hockey began this week. Of the big sports, hockey probably has the smallest fan base but their fans tend to be passionate about the sport. With temperatures still in the seventies across the country, it’s hard to believe it’s hockey season again, but it will be soon.
    Line: Did you know hockey preseason games have started?

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:

 

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.