Untimely Reviews: "Jonesy"

Several months ago, I mentioned to the wife that I wanted a copy of John Buccigross’ book Jonesy. She’s a frequent Amazon orderer, and when she completed her next purchase, she got me one. And I was thrilled. If you don’t know who Keith Jones is, you’re probably not a hockey fan; he spent roughly a decade scoring goals for the Washington Capitals, Colorado Avalanche, and Philadelphia Flyers. Over the years, I’ve acquired a few hockey books, but seldom do they interest me as the topics usually pre-date my fandom. Jonesy, however, was a different story. Even better was the fact that it was penned by Buccigross, who’s always been my favorite ESPN personality, mostly because he used to host NHL 2Night with Barry Melrose.

I don’t remember Jones as a Capital, and only knew he was a member of the Avalanche when I saw Kris Oyler’s mouse pad in the basement office of Steamworks Brewing Company over a decade ago. The pad was a team photo of the Avalanche, and one day I saw it and said out loud, “Keith Jones was an Av’?”

I remember him as a Flyer though, because from 1996-2000 I lived with Steve Rathje, lifetime Flyers fan, and in that five-year period, we logged hundreds of hours playing NHL fill-in-the-blank on PlayStation. Occasionally we’d mix it up, but most of the time, it was a never-ending series between his team –- Philadelphia –- and mine, the St. Louis Blues. In fact, if we were both home, the only time we weren’t playing video-game hockey, we were watching hockey on television. Seeing as how we lived in southwest Colorado, not many Blues or Flyers games were televised, but lucky for us, our clubs were both perennial playoff contenders in those days, so there was plenty of post-season action for us to catch on ESPN and ESPN2.

Since Philly’s in the eastern conference, it was easy for me to become a fan of the Flyers, and I continue to root for them each year they’re in contention, especially since the Blues, until this year, have been pretty miserable for a while.

Those late ‘90s Flyers squads were pretty entertaining, and Jones, for some time was on a line with John LeClair and Eric Lindros. In his book, Jones lets readers know that he doesn’t think Lindros ever willfully did anything negative toward the Philadelphia Flyers, and I accept that as (mostly) accurate and truthful, but at the time, I thought he was a freaking ninny. On Steve’s end, he was a pretty big LeClair guy, so I somewhat quietly developed a short-lived affinity for Jones. He seemed like the perfect everyman for whom to root.

After I left Durango, I only followed the Flyers from a distance, and to be honest, I kind of forgot all about Jonesy. Then the lockout happened, and ESPN opted to not renew their television contract with the NHL, and so, for a minute, games were on the Outdoor Life Network. After one season, the network was revamped and became known as Versus. Somewhere in that fold, Jonesy reappeared as a desk guy, and all told, he was pretty darn good at what he did.

Versus grew, and after last season, became part of the NBC Sports Network and Jones’ role has expanded. Or at least it appears to have; he’s at the studio desk almost every night.

So I was pretty excited to read this book about a guy I used to root for then forgot about, written by one of my favorite television-hockey personalities.

Unlike my other installments of Untimely Reviews, though, I don’t have a lot to say about this book. As a hockey fan, I found it a great read. As a guy who roots for the everyman, I found it a great story about someone that appears to be a pretty great human being. I identified with the early mention of the loss of his brother, who was killed, at a young age, in a train accident.

As someone who has occasionally been lazy in life, I chuckled at Jones’ bold admittance of having a non-existent workout regimen for most of his entire hockey career. In sum, he preferred chicken wings and beer to being in the gym, and frankly, who wouldn’t?

I found it some mix of shocking and not surprising that he blew every dollar of his first contract in next to no time, the bulk of which went toward a fancy sports car. And I found it phenomenal how crisply he remembered his stats at nearly every junction of his career. It could be that that’s just how Buccigross presents it, but sheesh. Great memory.

There are some other cool aspects to the book, like Jones’ concussion. Obviously, it’s not cool that he got one, but it was fascinating to learn about how it affected him, especially now that head injuries are such a major, major topic in sports, particularly in hockey, particularly right now in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, and particularly with Jones having to report on the hits, fights, and suspensions associated with them.

There was one other human aspect to the book, and that’s the story told in the final chapter. I won’t hash out the specifics of it here because it’s better read directly than regurgitated second-hand.

Now, it’s true that I read this book as a hockey fan and a Jones fan, as well as a regular-guy fan. Above all, though, I read books as a writer and an editor. Of course, I’ve not published anything and the only things I’ve edited (recently, anyway) have been my own work. My brain is trained to read that way, though, and so it’s unfortunate that (perhaps) my biggest take away from the book was a negative: It’s not edited.

I did about six minutes of research on the book, so I obviously don’t know a thing about the process or the budget. I do know that Jones’ proceeds go to a charity, and that I doubt Buccigross was able or willing to fund any of the book’s expenses himself. I do know that it was published in 2007, though, and that the Internet was alive and working well. Social media was not quite the giant that it is now, but having said that I have to believe that it wouldn’t have taken much more than a small grassroots effort to find someone willing to edit the thing for free.


I know I would’ve done it.

The problems, as I see them, are three-fold:

1) Typos. As far as I’m concerned, one is too many, and I lost count of them.
2) Redundancy. Let the reader fill in the blanks. You can’t say the same thing over and over again, especially within the same paragraph or on the same page.
3) Exclamation points. Huge no-no. The only instance in which they might’ve been appropriate would be direct quotes from Jonesy yelling at someone whom he pestered on the ice, and even then it’d be a stretch.

I’m not the only one that found the lack of editing to be an unfortunate, unnecessary distraction. You can find plenty of complaints here.

I won’t belabor this point any further. It’s been made, and I still enjoyed reading the book, but if there was any desire to capture members of a non-hockey audience, I have to imagine the effort was unsuccessful.

For all you hockey people: Don’t let that distract you; you’ll probably still enjoy it. And for Buccigross himself, tweet a brother up for your next project. My offer stands.
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An Evening at the Sprint Center: NHL Exhibition: Los Angeles Kings vs. Pittsburgh Penguins

Enough with the gripes and complaints, already, people. The National Hockey League is not coming to Kansas City anytime soon, and that has nothing to do with Tim Leiweke or AEG. Really, it doesn't.

I tweeted Randy Covitz earlier, and in doing so, I was mistaken. Apparently, last night's NHL exhibition contest featuring the Los Angeles Kings and Pittsburgh Penguins was a record crowd for Kansas City hockey. By 494 people. I sent that tweet, because I swear that announced attendance at that Blues/Blackhawks game was 18,000+, but I've been wrong before, and I'll certainly be wrong again.

What I'm not wrong about is that the dose of professional hockey Kansas City is currently getting -- in the form of the Central Hockey League's Missouri Mavericks, just down the road in Independence -- is all the metro area will be getting for years to come.

Eleven years ago, Paul McGannon formed the grassroots NHL 21, whose primary initiative was to bring an NHL club to Kansas City. At that time, it was a brilliant plan, and the organization continues to work hard to, as they say, "cultivate Kansas City for the NHL." But, at that time, the league landscape was much different.

The Dallas Stars had just won their first Stanley Cup, seven years after moving from Minnesota. The Colorado Avalanche, a mere five years relocated from Quebec, would win their second championship a season later. The following season, it was the one-time Hartford Whalers coming in as runner up, followed by the not-that-young-of-a-franchise Anaheim competing in the Finals, the expansion Tampa Bay Lightning winning it all, and then of course, the lockout.

In each of the previous four seasons, clubs with long-time tenures in their initial cities have been in the finals on both winning and losing ends. Thus, the days of significant franchise shifts are likely behind us. Sure, the Atlanta Thrashers just moved to Winnipeg, but Winnipeg had an interested buyer, and Atlanta -- a city mind you, that already failed once in its NHL endeavors -- was not supporting the club.

So, it's easy to get riled up about Leiweke's quotes, and even easier to point the finger at the Sprint Center's "failures" regarding event management. These, my friends, are not even small bones. They're microscopic.

A few people were caught outside while the game began? Big deal. The venue fixes that first with an anchor tenant. Long lines at concession stands? Didn't we hear those now-stifled gripes after Kauffman Stadium was remodeled?

What matters is what the people in and around Kansas City think about the sport (and thought about the contest) in a global sense. And for the most part, people are far from centered enough to comprehend the two-tiered concept that would make an NHL franchise successful in Kansas City for the second time: single-game and season tickets.

With the September the Kansas City Royals have produced, and with the start to the season the Kansas City Chiefs have not, folks on Twitter and on the radio are rolling out the old this-is-a-baseball-town carpet for the first time in a while. That's fine. It very well may be. Folks continue to purchase mildly significant numbers of season tickets, and, by and large, single-game tickets are something that many, many Kansas City families have always invested in and will continue to do so because this is a game on which our country was raised.

In the '90s, Kansas City was mad-scientist crazy for the Chiefs. The team was good, and fans had not had that experience in over two decades, if ever. Throughout most of the Herman Edwards regime, attendance at Arrowhead fell to talks-of-blacked-out-games for the first time since the '80s. And that's an American sport with a franchise with over four decades rooted in Kansas City. What, then, would make anyone think that, in the event the NHL grants Kansas City a franchise (Editor's Note: They're not going to, plain and simple.), this town would support it?

I'm embedded in the Kansas City hockey community. I know guys that run the youth programs, I know rink managers, I volunteer for the Mavericks, and I've played with the majority of adult rec-league skaters for over a decade. Even in that community, even in the form of a company owner who was a significant sponsor for last night's game, are people that think Kansas City has to continue to turn out large numbers, if not sell them out, for these exhibition contests because that translates to league awareness.

In the end, they don't matter. Not one bit. Mostly they don't matter because the league is not going to award the city a franchise, or even promote it as a locale for a club that's interested in relocation. There's simply not enough confidence to suggest that the city could support it.

So attendance last night broke the record by 500 heads. How many of those people were given free tickets? How many of those people were bombarded by package deals presented by NHL 21 and companies like QuikTrip who had the $99 four-pack (tickets, sandwiches, etc.)? How many people had die-hard NHL-in-KC fans buy tickets and take their friends free of charge in hopes of hooking them on the in-game experience?

The answer: a lot.

What's more, of the families in attendance, most of them, by both sight and sound, were cheering for the Penguins. These kids had signs and cheers and no, you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting a Sidney Crosby jersey. How many of these fans were aware (of the slim chance) that Crosby might not play again? How many of these kids are aware that team owner Mario Lemieux used this very venue as leverage for his own new building in Pittsburgh? And how many kids are aware of the surprise run that the Kings just displayed this past post-season? That club was the bigger (of the two) story in the playoffs.

The answer: not many.

Regarding the Crosby thing, it's of course good for the game that in Kansas City people know who he is, but what they don't know is that the clubs they saw on the ice last night were two and three tiers removed from those that the Pittsburgh and L.A. franchises will put out on the ice each night this season. For Dennis Dodd to call that a "thoroughly entertaining preseason game" is silly.

That game was mostly flat, full of turnovers, and bereft of true NHL talent. What's more is that there was zero appeal or investment to actually root for a team you come out and support 41 times a year. And the fans in attendance were representative of said lack of appeal.

They were there for novelty. They chatted with their kids and their friends, fiddled around with their phones, asked questions about the game to those around them, and blindly cheered on the Penguins. Since when do Kansas Citians cheer for eastern-conference teams?

While folks remain enamored with the new Kansas City-hockey-attendance record, the one truth that's been written is that many seats were empty. Folks were strolling around, perhaps waiting in lines for concessions -- an easy fix if a franchise actually did come to town -- perhaps trying to entertain their uninterested children, and leaving early in packs of significant numbers.

Last night and this morning, people were posting things of the following nature on Facebook: this pointless story, this dumb picture

I call dumb only because I'm sure thousands cheered the Pittsburgh victory, and my favorite photo caption of all, "Don't have a clue what I'm watching, but it's fun!!!"

As for ourselves, we left at the conclusion of the second period solely because of our nine-month-old in tow (Note: Yes, that'd be her pictured above the jump.), and the fact that it was over an hour past her bedtime. We went, though, because we wanted to see how good the Sprint Center ice-hockey experience looked. For the record, it looked great. The ice appeared to be in good shape, the event had plenty of intermission entertainment, and all the perks of a pro-sports event. They were each a touch rough around the edges, but like the entry lines and the concessions, easy fixes. In sum, though, The Sprint Center didn't blow it.

What's not an easy fix is the current state of possible NHL franchise relocation, let alone expansion. By and large, clubs are staying put, and none will soon call Kansas City home.

You may, if you choose, continue to direct your negative energy toward Leiweke and AEG, or you could look at the positive: Kansas City did not build a tax-payer-funded venue that sits empty and aging, and its downtown revitalization has not been a failure, both of which were distinct possibilities voters feared five and six years ago.

If you're going to crease your forehead over hockey in Kansas City, however, your energy is better spent being compassionate with the unchangeable facts about the National Hockey League, and even more so, recognizing that Kansas City might be a baseball town. It might be a football town. Heck, for all we know, it's a soccer town. One thing is for sure, though, and that's that a hockey town it is not.

If it wants to become one, there's a ton of growth that needs to happen first, and it's the kind of growth that has zero to do with chances and promises.
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Week-Old Rants: You, You, You...Ought ta' Kno-ow!

The Kansas City ice hockey scene wets its fingers like a pre-snap quarterback. It looks around, observes complexity, and maybe feels a twinge of nervousness when scanning the opposition. One more look in the mirror, another wet, and an effort to smooth some of the untamed hairs on the side of its head, it sighs.

For most of the last 10 years, the scene has expanded, embraced growth. It has not been without hiccups, but it no doubt sprouted, if only in waves. This, historically, has been the sport's trend, though. The National Hockey League granted the city an expansion franchise in the early 1970s. They lasted two seasons, netting 27 total wins. Sixteen years later, an International Hockey League team moved to town. They saw some success, appeared in two championships, and won one. After 11 seasons in operation the league folded.

Right on its heels came the United Hockey League. It turned out that it wasn’t really that united of a league; the UHL ceased operations after one season in Kansas City. The most recent venture, the Central Hockey League, has perhaps had a different approach, at least with the Kansas City metro franchise. Instead of trying to operate out of a dilapidated 18,000-seat venue, this latest hockey endeavor saw its own building constructed. It also saw two major differences in place, at least in terms of a comparison to its direct predecessor: consistent, heavy marketing and treatment of the operation as if it were the real deal, the big time.

It’s important to note the successes and failures of the sport in this market because in the end, the growth of the game is what’s important. And that always starts with youth programs. In 2000, the metro area saw the one facility, the one that guys and girls of my generation grew up skating in, crawl to its grave. Or rather, saw its corpse kinda half gutted and turned into a laser-tag facility. While a touch sad, those bundles of lone tears were dabbed by the erection of a massive two-sheet facility, a building that was bum-rushed by youth, high school, and recreational-league teams needing a home.

As the oughts passed, this facility -- at one point it was one of four facilities in the metro -- remained the hub of youth hockey, but in the end poor management sent it too to an early grave, leaving dozens of ice-hockey squads homeless. It should be noted that several prominent travel youth clubs played there, as did most of the area high-school clubs, spanning, in some directions, more than an hour’s drive from the building. There were also junior teams named for, and at one point affiliated with, the now-defunct IHL/UHL franchises that knew this building as its hockey home.

The point of it all is that what happens on the professional-team end, and even on the adult-rec-league end, matters. It has an impact on the youth programs, and that impact is an ever-fluctuating creature. Whatever the measure, it matters. If a kid attends the CHL team’s playoff game, and sees his favorite winger score, maybe he skates harder for a loose puck in his next game. Or maybe a squirt –- they rank kids by age group, and it goes something like: atom, peewee, bantam, midget, squirt -– sees a goon check his dad in his dad’s no-check rec-league game, and maybe he cleans some other kid’s clock in his next contest. It matters, and it double-dog-dare matters in a sport that forever runs in the American-sports-spectrum shadows of football, baseball, and basketball.

If we want this game to grow, we have to set examples, and not leave chunks of people questioning why hockey players sometimes come off as knuckleheads.

This is why every hockey market comparable in size to Kansas City’s must keep their Dave K.s in check. For those of you outside the KC metro hockey circle, you might’ve just raised a brow and cricked your neck a bit, but you know the precise type to whom I refer. And to most everyone inside the KC hockey community, you know the precise person to whom I refer. Before I get into details of a recent encounter, allow me to say the following:

In a cobbled-together 11 years of playing rec-league hockey in Kansas City, I have had almost every hockey-related experience possible with Dave K. This is kind of a bizarre notion, considering that he could select any single element from his skill composite and outplay me and my arsenal of non-skill in every sense of the word. The irony in that is that most facilities have some form of a rec-league ranking system that includes leagues: elite, a, b, c, and sometimes d. My skill level, even after playing for more than a decade falls into the c-ish echelon, and sometimes d. Dave K.’s skill level is closer to the elite end of things, and here’s a good point to mention that most facilities insist -– and by “insist,” I mean aggressively frown upon you not following their insistence -– that you not play more than two tiers below your ability. This means that teams that find themselves playing against opponents in violation of aforementioned insistence, must self-police, and by “self-police,” I mean tender a complaint/protest to the league manager, who will, if you’re lucky, look up from his phone and give you a sure-kid nod.

Dave, K., though, has been playing down for as long as I can remember, and we’ll get to that in a minute.

In the early part of the decade, back when not falling down for three periods was my biggest game-by-game aspiration, Dave K. was there. And I thought he was a dick. He played on a team called the Blue River Bears, which was, in essence, a roster full of assholes. Now, I didn’t know everyone on the team, and I’m certain that not everyone was an asshole, but it seemed as though the asshole spectrum on that squad resembled an active volcano. It’s possible, that everyone on the team was really nice, and I was just really frustrated with my own ineptitude -— actually, wait. Nevermind. That’s not possible at all.

Dave K., though, wore these 30-year old leather-toned gloves, torn pants, and not much else in the way of gear. And he was never that much of a dick on the ice, but he would always just kind of hover on the ice, seeming never to participate in a change, running his foul New Jersey -– yeah, he’s from Jersey –- mouth and, when need be, turning on the skill burner, and making a play. I faced him in games like this for some time, and would also see him in the hallway, donning jerseys for teams several leagues higher than mine. The thing was, though, was that he always seemed to play down to the ability of the league in which he appeared. I mean, he would never let you beat him to a loose puck -– he plays defense, by the way -– and you could almost never intercept a breakout pass of his, or prevent him from clearing the puck from his own end, but he almost never carried the puck into the offensive zone to try and generate scoring chances, which is a key factor, because he could, in some of these lower-league games, almost score at will.

It was an odd thing, I thought, for someone to be in the habit of doing, but maybe you just have to take your roster spots where you can get 'em.

Then, one spring, Dave K. wound up on my three-on-three squad. That primary facility would host three-on-three tournaments between
spring/summer and summer/fall breaks, as a way to keep people skating/keep cash flow coming in. This revelation yielded heavy eye-glaze material on my end. I figured he would hog ice time, holler at people for making mistakes, and probably –- dick that he appeared to be –- spend a lot of time in the penalty box. Actually, I don’t remember if they assessed in those tournaments or not, but if they didn’t, I envisioned he’d be guilty of lots of penaltyesque activity.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that, on the same bench as you, Dave K. offered tons of legitimately helpful, constructive criticism, that a percentage of his hollering –- now more audible from the same side of the ice –- had value to it, that he wasn’t just running his damn mouth to be running it. Well, he did do quite a bit of that still, but by this point, my ear had received a Master’s degree in tuning him out, awarded by my brain. It was a positive experience, though, one that left me scratching my chin. I mean, there's also the criticism aspect to his hollering, the part wherein mistakes can lead to him telling his teammates they're "playing like a bunch of shitdicks" and "fuckstains," but take that for what it's worth.

Then the facility started what was known as The Over-30 League. You signed up, paid, and each week, were assigned to either the dark squad or the white squad. You had to be, duh, 30 or older, and you had to abide by the rule that this was a game for fun, not for competition. It was a cool league. You got to know dudes from other teams. You hung out and drank beer after. Eventually, it grew to where there were two games each week, and you wound up skating and drinking beer with an even larger number of people. At one point, there were weekly awards and nicknames announced (usually the next morning on the Web site) and they were always pretty funny.

Dave K. was in this league, and I wound up playing with him quite a bit. I also wound up drinking quite a few pitchers of beer with him afterwards. Turns out, he’s kind of a funny guy. Once he introduced us to this dorky word-switch game. I can’t remember what it’s called, or how to describe it other than this (and this is precisely how he introduced it to us):

“You know what my dog’s favorite movie is? Ben-Fur.”

Yeah. Awkward silence is right. Get it, though? Ben-Hur’s a movie; dogs have fur. Anyway, one or two examples later, and the whole bar –- granted, it’s a one-room bar –- was rolling until all of our cheeks and guts were sore. There was another time when my then-girlfriend came out to watch this semi-unorganized, non-competitive skate (Editor’s Note: I’m sure the number of chapters she read heavily outweighed the number of on-ice minutes she watched.). On this night, I had the early skate, as did Dave K. Afterwards, she joined some of us outside the bar to watch the late skate and have a few beers, and somehow, late into the evening, we got into a conversation about the flexibility of hockey sticks. Prior to this conversation, I knew that they flexed. End of story.

I did not know that some of the numbers on sticks are actual ratings for that particular stick’s level of flexibility until that evening. I also did not know, until that evening that, when taking a slap shot, you are supposed to strike the ice –- just behind the puck -- with the blade of your stick just before you make contact with the puck. This, I learned, generates torque and can do things like increase the trajectory speed of the shot, or elevate the puck from the ice surface. This, I learned, was why my slap shot was always a bit lacking in slap, not quite worthy of being deemed a shot. The same theory applies to a wrist shot, only instead of striking the ice, the torque is generated from the weight of your body leaning on the shaft of your stick and flexing it with your outer-most hand, prior to your swing.

Now, I don’t know if Dave K. stuck around and shot the breeze with me for as long as he did that night because he would do that with anyone over beers after hockey, or because it was an engaging topic, or if it was solely because there was a lady present, and he wanted to appear mighty and knowledgeable. He does, for the record, have an eyeroll-worthy history of strolling the hallways in a rather shirtless fashion, which, in case you didn’t know, Dave, comes off as one way to both guy and girl: creepy. It bears mentioning, though, because, at roughly this point in time, Dave K. was going through a divorce, which I only mention because he was not shy about mentioning it. Otherwise, you keep that stuff in the locker room and in the bar.

But he was going through this deal, and it was no secret that he was, for lack of better phraseology, on the lookout. That’s enough about that, though. And in case you’ve been wondering, the last-name initial isn’t done in a secrecy type way. Rather, it’s because he has this huge Hawaiian last name that’s tough to both spell and say, so that’s what everybody calls him. Well, that and Jersey Dave, and Crazy Dave, and Asshole Dave, and Super Dave (I’m told that that last one was coined not for talent, but rather for how he appears to think of himself). But mostly people call him Dave K.

Playing Over-30 hockey with Dave K., though, was pretty cool. One time, I got invited to go out for beers with him and this other guy who played defense on both my team, and up on Dave K.’s b team. The idea came up one night at the bar after an Over-30 game, and Dave K. was telling us about this new bar called Fuel, where hot server and bartender females dance on the bar and pour booze down your throat. Or maybe I imagined that last part, but apparently they invited/encouraged attractive female customers to do the same.

“Dude,” Dave K. said. “The numbers are incredible there. It’s like three-one, girls to guys.”

I didn’t really buy that, but I also didn’t need to hear anymore to be sold on going. I also didn’t think I’d actually get invited, but one night I got a call from my teammate who said, “Let’s do this. We’re going to Fuel. Dave’s already there.”

I hustled to get out of the house, and this was a shitty night to be going. It was a week night. I had about 8000 pages still to read for this boring grad-school class, and the driver-side window of my car had come off track and was stuck down. So yes, it was pouring out. Halfway there, I got a call from Jason, who told me that Dave K. had apparently been waiting for a while, and when we got to Fuel, he’d already left based on the fact that the as-advertised numbers were not accurately represented on this particular evening. Having learned that we’d arrived, though, he was on his way back, and when he joined us, he said, “Fuckin’ sucks in here tonight. Total sausage fest’. Gotta come on a weekend night.”

We had a beer, though. Maybe two. We might’ve even gone to another bar, but it was odd. I was significantly underdressed in comparison to my company, and significantly excluded from conversation, a detail I associated with the difference in level of play between myself and the other two. The point though is that Dave K. was not an asshole on this evening, nor was he rude. He was almost, a time or two, friendly.

On another level, I had the privilege of renting a sheet of ice the morning of my wedding. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life, and when it came down to the details arranging, we were missing a key piece: a goalie. Now every facility I've ever played at, as I said, has a Web site, and on their sites is a goaltender call list. Guys miss games all the time. You can typically find subs, and you, if need be, can skate short-handed. Coming up with a substitute goalie is a bit trickier. I ran through the list, though, and after most of a dozen phone calls, I’d gotten one half of a commitment. I was, however, given a few more phone numbers of guys to call, and in the end, zero were interested in coming out for an 8 a.m. skate on a Saturday morning.

One night after an Over-30 skate, though, one goaltender, having heard of my conundrum, mentioned that he kept a set of goalie gear in the closet at the rink, and that, were I still in a pinch, I should ask Dave K., who’d apparently filled in in the crease a time or two. I managed to wrangle up his number, get him on the horn, and with minimal persuasion, he agreed. A few minutes before eight that morning, here came Dave K. He suited up, and manned the net -– we played half-ice with half-court-basketball rules (gotta take it back past the blue line) for the entire hour, and probably witnessed the worst hour of pickup hockey anyone has ever seen.

It was an incredible gesture for him to agree to, and, strangely, he wouldn’t take the $20 or the growler of beer I brought him as compensation. For that, I’m forever grateful to Dave K. A wedding-day skate without a netminder would’ve been lame.

In getting to know Dave K. over the years, I learned a few things about him: He’s been playing hockey for a long time. He plays two, maybe sometimes three nights a week, and for a while, he was coaching an area youth team. Or maybe assistant coaching. I’m not sure. I also have heard him say, on more than one occasion, something I have come to associate as a mantra of his, and perhaps to a lesser degree, my own: “If you don’t have an organ hanging out, you’d better finish the game.”

Naturally, this is a bit excessive for no-check, incidental-contact-only, recreational-league hockey, but I dig it. It’s a belief to strive for in playing this game, at any level. In the pros, dudes get their skulls jarred, be it from a clean hit, a dirty hit, or somewhere in the middle. In the rec’ leagues, injuries happen because of accidents and collisions, and oftentimes, those things result from a lack of ability on one or more person’s end.

To adapt that mantra, then, to our level, could look like: Walk it off, or, Stretch it out, or, more specifically, Dude, you can’t come out of the game because you took a puck off of the skate.

Anyway, that facility was managed into the ground. Mismanaged rather. And now, they’re gonna put indoor soccer in it, which to me is kind of liking lining the place with cots and pillows: makes for some big-time nap material. So that left three facilities. Until one of them shut down for a nearly-complete overhaul, which left two facilities, one of which is north of the river, and doesn’t –- if I understand correctly -– have a regulation-sized sheet of ice.

This means one thing: Almost all of the metro hockey is, once again, happening at one place. It’s where the CHL squad plays. It’s where the rec’ leagues are playing. It’s where the kids are playing, from the youthiest of youths on up to high school. You, then, are, if you’re so inclined, to be aware of the fact that there is, potentially, always an audience on hand. That audience includes kids, kids who are hockey fans, kids who are potential hockey players, kids who are already playing, or some combination of all three. Some rec-league games are late, and so there’s not always an audience, but many times there is, even if it’s less than a half dozen folks.

This, then, is why last Wednesday night’s game against Dave K.’s C-level team, was punctuated with frustration. I say frustration, but that’s a feeling that presents itself in the form of comic relief. It’s underscored though, with a bigger message:

We took an early lead, which we are not prone to do. A puck was dumped into our defensive zone, and it careened around the boards behind our net. Dave K., playing down to the level of his competition, pinched in from the blue line to position himself in the slot in case a puck squirted out. I entered the zone in a hurry from my left-wing position. A clearing attempt happened; Dave K. turned around, eyes on the puck, and began to retreat. My eyes, also following the play, located Dave K.’s skating path at the last minute, and likewise, his did mine, and we collided.

I’m less sure-footed on my skates, and he outweighs me by a bit. I hit the ice, and he was called for cross-checking. He, as one is wont to do when issued an unfair infraction, complained. The scale with which one complains upon receiving a penalty varies to a degree of immeasurability. Some guys gripe. Some guys shake their heads and head to the box. Some guys engage in hollering matches, and some guys fluctuate with how they respond. Dave K. engages. Always.

This, in my estimation, is always foolish. You are never -– and I do mean never -– going to change a ref’s mind. What’s more: You might piss off a ref who will then have it out for you, look for the next opportunity to send you back to the box. If you’re vocal enough, he might even toss you. I don’t have pristine hearing, so I can seldom hear the gripes, and this situation was no different. I do know, though, that he was making his case for incidental contact, which was justified.

One of my teammates, in skating past him, said, “Dave, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

And he exploded.

Now he had bones to pick with the officiating crew, and my entire team, and these were bones with which he was not going to waste any seconds picking.

He had many a choice phrase for our bench, only the last of which I could make out: “And fuck all y’all for thinking I hit him on purpose.”
His profanity-laden phrases continued to echo throughout the ice, even after he was in the box.

Then, on his first opportunity after serving the penalty, he channeled his frustration in one play. We dumped the puck into their zone, and he retrieved it in the corner. A play quickly developed, and his team scored. I’m not sure if Dave K. himself got the tally, but he skated right past our bench and hollered, “That’s hockey fuckin’ karma right there!”

Several minutes later, he was in the box again, and we returned the favor.

Late in the third, the game had become audibly shrouded with his continued hollering, and we were up 4-3. Again retrieving a dump of ours in the corner, Dave K. amped up his game, and this time took the puck coast to coast, beating our goalie with a wrister fired from close range. He stopped behind the net, and skated right up to our goalie with two offerings: a lone fist pump in our netminder’s mask, and one of these:



It was more like a, “Wooo!,” but that’s the best the Internets could offer on short notice.

His next move classed up the joint even more.

Again being certain to skate by our bench, Dave K. placed his stick, backwards, between his legs, and “rode” it while hopping, whooping, hollering, and cursing, and slapping its imaginary ass as he made his way back to center ice.

In the end, we scored two unanswered goals, and Dave K.’s ridiculous, continued yells of the profane variety resulted in his ejection. This was our second victory of the season, one that didn’t do a ton of favors for our then negative-30-plus goal differential.

His behavior was all we could talk about in the locker room, and, as his acts tend to do, it triggered story swapping of previous skates with Dave K., which included: a recent tournament at this same facility wherein he was ejected for firing a puck, post-whistle, at another player’s head. Allegedly, he’d just been penalized for an act against this player, and this was his retaliation. It also included the oft-shared tale of how he was banned for one year from the previously mentioned mismanaged facility for firing a puck, post-whistle, at an official’s head, a supposed statement of his disagreement with that ref’s call.

Also in the department of puck-firing, it should be noted that Dave K. has a wicked slap shot. He can blast them, as if out of a cannon, from the blue line, and when they’re high and off the glass, it sounds like ignited dynamite. It should also be mentioned that he, in the vein of playing down to the level of abilities of his teammates and opponents, seldom lets them rip full-steam in this league. It would seem that, most of the time, he will refrain from shooting at all, perhaps aware of his superior skill, perhaps trying to help better the play of the "shitdicks" and "fuckstains" that wear his same jersey. When the time is of the essence, though, he will let one go. On no fewer than two occasions last week, he fired pucks from the blue line that can only be defined as of the head-hunting variety. These were shots taken with more traffic in front of the net than a Los Angeles rush hour, so, suffice to say, they weren't finding twine, save for some sort of miracle deflection.

Now, the argument can be made –- and it often is -– that when you put pucks on the net, good things happen. This, to me, means: Try to get the goalie to cough up a huge rebound, and maybe one of your teammates is in position to put the second effort in the net. Actually, it can mean a number of things, but in these instances, it didn’t seem like there was much opportunity for anything at all, and both pucks hit a teammate in the chest.

Hockey players take pucks off of various parts of the body several times in every single game played in every rink in the world. Usually, and especially at this level, that occurs when someone at the point takes too long to shoot, and an opponent has positioned themselves in front of that player, a rebound off the shin happens, and a breakaway in the other direction results. If that’s not the case, it’s something similar. People almost never, in C-league rec-hockey, take pucks off the chest, let alone twice in one game. These “shots” were not high-caliber Dave K. slappers. They were probably not even 50 percent the trajectory of which he’s capable, but they were still moving pretty well.

Nobody dropped to the ice, and nobody left the game, but those occasions were post-collision, and it was obvious that his irritability was high, so it’s hard to imagine that these chest shots weren’t deliberate. Having said that, though, I will give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they were not.

Having offered said benefit, however, here is the point, best summed via cliché: Your reputation precedes you.

I’ve only played at three of the four mentioned facilities, so I have no idea if he’s played at the fourth. What I do know is this: Kansas City, as we are often reminded, is a small market. Or a tight-knit community. Or, big town/small city. Whichever you want to call it. Ice hockey communities, then, are even smaller, considering that, compared to the three other major sports, its numbers are dwarfed. So, if you’re in a smaller community, and you’re playing a sport over a long period of time, and that sports community is also small, people are going to get to know you, in one way or another.

Therefore, when you have a history of exhibiting goon-like behavior, getting tossed from games, ejected from tournaments, and banned from facilities, the people against whom you play, and the referees who officiate your games are going to know who you are. And you’d better believe they’re going to have their eye out for the smallest hint of shady play, even if it’s not, especially if it’s not, shady play. They’re expecting your play, along with the way you carry yourself on the ice, to be disrespectful and trashy, even if that’s not how it was intended.

In the end, few people have notoriety in Kansas City hockey like Dave K. Rec-league guys know him, officials know him, and you can bet that some kids and spectators recognize him, or at least his voice. And in a community –- heck, a country –- where we’re trying to grow the game at the youth level, it’s important to set good examples, to make kids love the game, and want to play it the right way.

Dave K. has an admirable level of skill and hunger for competition within him.

Sometimes, though, the view of him through the looking glass distorts that, and what we see is negative. Last Wednesday night’s game, a rare win for our squad, was prime example of that. Believe me: The last thing we want to feel, post-victory, is frustration. We get that enough in the form of losing. Don’t get me wrong: Our locker room was cheery, void of gloom, but like I said: At the core of what went down, courtesy of the reactions and play of one guy, was nothing shy of frustration.

Don't misunderstand. This isn't the kind of frustration wherein the play of one guy gets in your head, messes with your game. This is much more global.

Hockey in Kansas City needs better displays of sportsmanship.

As a matter of fact, it demands it.


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The 2011 Stanley Cup Playoffs: Tim Thomas the Train, Cup-Champion Boston, and Historical Stats

For as much energy as I try to put into promoting the game of hockey, it stings to say that I have spent the day after the conclusion of the National Hockey League’s Stanley Cup Final shrouded in disappointment. For starters, it’s not been able to decide all day if it’s going to keep raining or not, which means the entire day has been gray, chilly, and wet since before I got out of bed. Small beans, I know, but it sets a tone, like it or not.

Actually, you know what sets a tone? Roberto Luongo, for one, but we’ll get to him.

What sets a tone, though, is absorbing every possible ounce of post-season hockey, then missing well over half of the final round due to other commitments. The details to that end aren’t important, but suffice to say that the scheduling -- i.e. adult-league games of my own for games four and seven –- of the round just wasn’t in my favor. No, I don’t DVR, and no, I wouldn’t have wanted to watch any of these games after the fact. In the moment is in the moment. Anything else falls short.

But, my teammates and I hustled to get out of our locker room as fast as possible to maybe, fingers-crossed, catch the last bit of the third period, and if luck was on our side, we’d have overtime. I knew the Canucks were down 1-0 when I got to the rink, which left me pessimistic about the odds, given Vancouver’s lack of resiliency when they get down early.

When the round began, though, I was pulling for 1) a great round, 2) seven games, 3) good television ratings, and a 4) Vancouver victory, in that order. Batting .500 is supposed to feel good, right? Today, it doesn’t. Today feels real Mendoza Line-y. This was far from a great round. Through six games the visiting team was winless, and across the board, it was quite the dud of a series. Trust me, I know the value of tough, grind-it-out, old-school hockey, and I’m never going to say that one-nothing wins are always lame. But what do we like best about our sports?

Scoring. You can see significant differences if you compare one-goal games. For example, the Boston/Tampa Bay game seven in the Eastern Conference Finals was magical. Games one and five –- both Canuck victories -– in this round, though, were relative snoozers. Game two had the makings for an epic clash, coming off of the biting incident, the dogfight to score first in the first contest. It wound up being the only overtime contest of the series, though, and it was over in 11 seconds. Games three and four in Boston were ridiculous blowouts, and game six only had fleeting moments wherein one thought Vancouver might participate in the competition. So, while there were a significant number of pucks finding twine in this final round, it was not near as even keel between the teams as one would’ve liked.

Anyway, great for Boston fans to finally see their team hoist another Cup, and shame on the Vancouver fans for rioting and destroying their city after the loss. There were a number of other angles that disappointed me about this series, and those came from a handful of writers that offered their post-series thoughts. Two in particular were:

Chris Jones, who offered this bit from the new Grantland project. I get that Canadians don’t have a laundry list – beyond hockey – about which to be proud, but – again -- for someone who invests a significant amount of pride into trying to grow the game at the U.S. level, I felt that his angle of you’ll-never-know-hurt-like-we-know-it was a bit of a mail-in, especially considering that many Canadian fan bases pretend, or actually believe, that Vancouver is the country’s red-headed stepchild when it comes to unity, and of course, hockey. Second was a guy by the name of Ryan Lambert, who writes for a couple of sites, and does so in a sense that would appear –- I’ve only read two pieces and seen a slew of tweets -– so sophomoric that Andrew “Dice” Clay thinks his gig is a silly one. His angle anchors on the notion that anyone that disagrees with his takes is an imbecile, and in this round, in specific the decision –- or lack of necessity of one –- that hung around Alaine Vigneault’s neck heading into game seven: whether or not to start Roberto Luongo.

Nobody knows better than the head coach whether or not Schneider had recovered from standpoints mental and physical regarding his round-one injury. I, however, am of the opinion that Schneider was the go-to-guy for game seven. Far too many times in this post-season and in the previous two, did the fragile psyche of Luongo cost his club a W. Take the game-seven gamble and start Schneider. If it works you’re a hero; if it doesn’t, you take your lumps, maybe learn from your mistake. Vancouver going out and dropping a four-goal shutout loss, though, in game seven, in a series in which the home team was undefeated, redefined pathetic.

Yes. It was a team loss, and yes, the quick-fire Canuck offense could have and should have generated at least one tally, but existent is still the argument that, with Schneider in net, perhaps Vancouver takes a scoreless tie into overtime, a situation in which the home team could have had an edge. As the league says, though, history has been made, and congratulations are in order to the Bruins for their sixth National Hockey League championship. To the numbers…

If you’re new to this series, we’ve been compiling some post-season numbers. What follows is a collection of the previous 10 Stanley Cup Finals, and a look at this past one:

PREVIOUS TEN FINALS:

1999-2000, Cup champion, New Jersey Devils
Goals: 24
Shots: 349
(major) Penalites in Minutes: 0
Overtime Periods: 5
Home vs. Visitor: H
Games Per Series: 6

2000-2001, Cup champion, Colorado Avalanche
G: 30
S: 324
PIMs: 40
OTs: 0
H vs. V: H
GpS: 7

2001-2002, Cup champion, Detroit Redwings
G: 21
S: 281
PIMs: 0
OTs: 4
H vs. V: H
GpS: 5

2002-2003, Cup champion, New Jersey Devils
G: 31
S: 363
PIMs: 0
OTs: 2
H vs. V: H
GpS: 7

2003-2004, Cup champion, Tampa Bay Lightning
G: 27
S: 341
PIMs: 130
OTs: 3
H vs. V: H
GpS: 7

2005-2006, Cup champion, Carolina Hurricanes
G: 35
S: 359
PIMs: 15
OTs: 1
H vs. V: H
GpS: 7

2006-2007, Cup champion, Anaheim Ducks
G: 27
S: 226
PIMs: 0
OTs: 0
H vs. V: H
GpS: 5

2007-2008, Cup champion, Pittsburgh Penguins
G: 27
S: 374
PIMs: 20
OTs: 3
H vs. V: H
GpS: 6

2008-2009, Cup champion, Detroit Redwings
G: 31
S: 389
PIMs: 60
OTs: 0
H vs. V: V
GpS: 7

2009-2010, Cup champion Chicago Blackhawks
G: 47
S: 363
PIMs: 20
OTs: 2
H vs. V: H
GpS: 6

How this year's Finals stacked up against the previous 10:

Previous 10 Finals (by average)
Goals: 30
Shots: 336.9
Major PIMs: 28.5
OTs: 2
H vs. V: 9/1, in favor of the home team
Games per Series: 6.3

2010-2011 Finals
Goals: 31
Shots: 465
Major PIMs: 190
OTs: 1
H vs. V: H
Games per Series: 7

As evident, a tiny increase on the average in goals, coupled with a moderate increase in shots on goal, a huge spike in PIMs, a slight drop in overtime periods, a continued trend in home-ice advantage, and a bump in games per series.

How this post-season compared with the previous 10:

Previous 10 Playoffs (by average)
Goals: 441
Shots: 4972
PIMs: 414
OTs: 24
H vs. V: 120/82 (59 percent), in favor of the home team
GpS: 5.8

2010-2011 Playoffs
Goals: 505
Shots: 5640
PIMs: 745
OTs: 28
H vs. V: 11/4 (73 percent), in favor of the home team
GpS: 6.1

Looking at those stats, we see this post-season generating a huge spike in average number of playoff goals scored, and shots registered. Major-penalty minutes nearly doubled, and noteworthy increases in overtime periods, home-ice advantage trends, and games per series, which all in all, is a great thing for the game. Unless of course you subscribe to the less-is-more philosophy, in which case, you should probably be watching golf.

Until October, the hockey books have been closed.
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FJMing Bill "SportsGuy" Simmons' Grantland NHL Piece

Bill Simmons launched grantland.com this week, and it looks to be a promising source of great writing. The cast of authors he has recruited for this project is spectacular, and I, for one, will be checking in in search of new content as often as the Twitters tell me that such content has been added. I have never been a frequenter of the sports guy’s ESPN Page2 column, but on the occasions in which it was suggested to me that I read a specific piece, I have always enjoyed those selections, and have been thankful for the recommendations. For my tastes, however, there is always a little too much baseball, a little too much basketball, and a lot too much Boston-area sports. I don’t have a beef with Boston-area sports, and I admire his upfront admission of fandom, but I want my Kansas City Chiefs to beat his New England Patriots and my Kansas City Royals to beat his Boston Red Sox every time they play one another, not because I dislike those franchises, but because that means my clubs are doing something right and, in those moments, possess the ability to beat good teams.

In my youth, when the NBA was a different animal, I always pulled for the Celtics (pronounced with a hard ‘C’) over the Lakers, and in my years as a hockey fan, I’ve been of the opinion that it would be great for the Boston Bruins to return to excellence, because I imagine that a super-strong market for that particular club would be good for Boston sports, and more importantly, facilitate the growth of the game in the States, which has almost always been hard to do, and become even harder to do given that a lot of the more-popular sports blogs ridicule the game with headlines like, “Hockey Happened,” or they do nothing but post YouTube clips of fights. Therefore, I was already anticipating the launch of Grantland, but when it did, and I discovered that SportsGuy had crafted a hockey post, I was salivating. I didn’t get very far into the piece before feeling like the Geico caveman, a Disservice Done stamp, if you will, blotted across my forehead, and the forehead of the National Hockey League seasons of 1994-2007 (ish). If I stick closely to his post, that end date should be 2011, but somewhere in there, he’s got a link to a post he wrote in 2008 that centered on the idea that he’d been flipping to Versus during the post-season, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

Anyway, I read his post, and I was a little ticked off by it. No, really. Just a little. He makes some salient points, but he also pretends that the NHL product during the aforementioned years was less than good, and that’s a kite I just can’t let him fly. In the end, it doesn’t matter, because the growth of the game today and tomorrow and the day after that is what’s at stake. But my reaction was to put together a little Fire Joe Morgan action on his debut piece. That is, a breakdown of his breakdown, only one that scales back the harsh, and tries to refrain from too much cliff-pushing. Said breakdown, is just past the jump, and I won’t make any promises about redundancy, congruency, or brevity. It simply is.

My father had three things left on his Sports Bucket List: seeing a Stanley Cup finals game in Boston, going to the Masters, and going to the Kentucky Derby. After last night, we're two away from him creating a new list or me putting a pillow over his face. I flew home so we could attend Game 4 of the Bruins-Canucks series together. It was the least I could do after he brought me to about 4,500 Celtics games over the years.

The Canucks were favored in the finals because of stars such as Ryan Kesler (who broke out for Team USA in the 2010 Olympics), Alex Burrows (we'll get to him), and the creepy Sedin twins (created in a lab by some evil Swedish scientist who loved hockey). They also have snazzy blue uniforms that look like the old Whalers duds once upon a time (to their credit, they didn't steal "Brass Bonanza"), and their fans are so devoted enough that after Game 2's game-winning overtime goal by Burrows, they were still standing and cheering in their seats a full 10 minutes later. Their Achilles' heel: They nearly choked away a 3-0 lead to Chicago in Round 1 because goalie Roberto Luongo briefly unhinged midway through the series, which means he could do it again.

First and foremost, let’s assume that SportsGuy is calling the Sedin twins creepy because they don’t collect paychecks signed by one Jeremy M. Jacobs. There is almost no other impossible-not-to-love story in sports than that of Daniel and Henrik Sedin. They have, until this year’s NHL All-Star Game, played on the same line together their entire lives. The Canucks spent the second and third overall picks of the ’99 draft to acquire their services, and have kept them on the roster ever since. Their play together demonstrates a chemistry unmatched in professional-sports history. They skate hard every second of every shift and they produce a tremendous number of points for the Vancouver offense. Second of all, I appreciate as much as the next guy a reference to the old Hartford Whalers theme song, but the Whalers came into existence nearly a decade after the Canucks made their NHL debut. It’s not all about New England, yo. The color scheme used today resembles the most-familiar Hartford sweater, but waffling hockey fans aren’t going to “love” the 2010-11 Canucks for fashion reasons. To SportsGuy’s credit, the Canucks do have a passionate fan base, and Luongo does have the consistency of Seattle weather. Also, those early Canuck sweaters...yeesh.

If you haven't been following the series, it took exactly one game for Bruins fans to work up a Canadiens-level hatred for the Canucks. This was surprising because Vancouver isn't Tampa Bay, Columbus, or any of those other microwavable insta-Bettman hockey cities that any Original Six fan base instinctively hates.

Well-played, sir. Three paragraphs in and we have a Bettman slam. Andrew “Dice” Clay thinks you need some new material. Also, way to speak on behalf of six fan bases that date back 86 years. I’m certain the newest generation of those hockey families learn to eat, walk, talk, and hate NHL expansion in that order.

For four decades, Canucks fans suffered and suffered and suffered. Only twice did they make the finals, the last time in 1994, when they became anonymous foils for Messier's Rangers. Everyone remembers that series because the Rangers shed 54 years of baggage and won the Cup, and also because that may have been the last time anyone other than hockey fans liked hockey. It's easy to forget that the Canucks staved off elimination in Game 5, flew cross-country to stay alive in Game 6, and then —- right after their fans had let their guard down and decided to believe — -fell short in Game 7. They never came that close again.

Actually, that’s not why everyone remembers that series. Everyone remembers that series because of two reasons: the Vancouver solidarity displayed from both its personnel and its puckhead-adorned fans, and Mark Messier himself. But please, continue to make the world’s equator and Prime Meridian the Atlantic and Northeast Divisions of the National Hockey League. Also, please refrain from associating that Cup with “the last time anyone other than hockey fans liked hockey.” There have been plenty of situations since then in which non-hockey fans liked hockey, even if it was only during the post-season.

I assumed Bruins fans and Canucks fans would be bonded by their histories of heartbreak (a little like the Cardinals and Red Sox in 2004, actually). That hasn't happened. And it hasn't happened because the Canucks revealed themselves to be flopping wusses who (a) bite the fingers of opposing players, (b) use a 15th-string defenseman to knock the other team's best forward unconscious when he's not looking, then dedicate the next game to that defenseman as if nothing ever happened, and (c) don't back any of this crap up. If this were a movie, the Bruins would be Will Hunting and the Canucks would be the condescending ponytailed guy from Harvard who won't go outside(1).

Operation: Wheels Come Off: Commence. I can think of no other word besides audacity in making an effort to tie the alleged heartbreak of these two fan bases together. The reasons for which such a suggestion embraces absurdity should be obvious, but in case they are not:

a) Boston has five rings.
b) In the 15 seasons since Vancouver lost to those Rangers, Boston has not qualified for post-season play five times. Of the 10 in which they did, they did not make it out of the first round seven times. The other three times, they were ousted in the second.
c) Boston, hoisters of five Stanley Cups, ranks as the fifth-winningest team in NHL history.
d) I could, and should, talk about the abundance of other professional sports championships that have occurred in the Boston area since the Cup-less Vancouver Canucks came into existence. Thankfully, I don’t have to, as Jonah Keri just did.
e) The Bruins, who, by the way, have won five pro-hockey championships, have made the finals a total of 17 times.

One might wish that such an error would be the largest disgrace of that paragraph, and one would be right in wishing so. One, however, would probably also note that calling the Canucks “flopping wusses” challenges the notion of bonded-by-heartbreak for worst suggestion in that sentence cluster. At this point, it becomes obvious that SportsGuy paid little to no attention to Vancouver prior to the Finals, and has made the focus of such a claim based on one late-game incident that occurred in the third contest between the two clubs this round. And, painful as it is to admit it, we’re not out of that paragraph’s woods even there:

a) “bite the fingers of opposing players” is, one would hope, an attempt at humor.
b) Unfortunately for the author, it is the antithesis of comedic.
c) Making a singular incident plural is something we’ve all been guilty of when attacking our foes with words. In this situation, I would guess that the now-redeemed hockey aficionado supposes that players like Alexandre Burrows are inherently dirty, and engage in such tactics with high frequency.
d) I’d also suppose that the SportsGuy has never been the victim of a single face wash, let alone multiple, simultaneous face washes.
e) The use of hyperbole is a dangerous tactic, and, like fabricating multiplicity, it can be funny, but to suggest Aaron Rome was a 15th-string defenseman is nothing shy of preposterous, and again, an attempt at funny shrinking in the rear-view mirror. You could take Rome’s 52 games played, his 53 Penalties in Minutes, or his just-shy-of-1000-minutes log of ice time this season.
f) Unfortunately, we haven’t broken camp with that sentence yet. The author, you see, implies that the Canucks “used” this team member as a guided weapon, that they premeditated the vicious hit Rome laid on Nathan Horton.
g) It gets worse. SportsGuy adds the disclaimer “when he’s not looking,” as if it was Rome’s responsibility to make sure Horton saw the hit coming. Had SportsGuy not checked out on the game so many years ago, he would perhaps be familiar with coaching strategies such as “finish your checks,” “or keep your head up.”
h) Since it is clear that he is not familiar with such phrases, I would then imagine that the author feels that the lateness of the hit was also a major portion of the infraction, which is not the case. The largest two aspects involve the direct contact with Horton’s head, and the fact that Rome left his feet to deliver the blow. End of discussion. At least that part.
i) If SportsGuy wants to put some stock into the Canucks allegedly dedicating game four to Rome, so be it. He’s the only one outside of the Vancouver locker room that paid it any mind. If it happened, it’s a morale booster of a move, not an indictment on the Canuck personnel and coaching staff.
j) “don’t back any of this crap up” is, as they say in the newspaper business, a waste of column inches. It doesn’t even mean anything. The most it could suggest is that Grantland’s copy editor had an oversight.
k) Good Will Hunting? Really. The most recent film analogy we could get was only three years after non-hockey fans stopped caring about hockey? I’m disappointed. In fairness, though, I've been guilty of the same practice, and hey -- it's not like quoting new movies is going to resonate with many.

For a city weaned on the Big Bad Bruins of the 1970s, Vancouver's flopping/biting routine went over about as well as a Roger Clemens statue(2). A few hours before Game 3 on Monday, my father was sitting in a Beacon Hill Starbucks when five couples walked in, all wearing Canucks jerseys, and ordered some drinks. A Boston local stood up, walked over to one of the guys and calmly stuck his fingers in the man's face. With the implication being, "Why don't you bite my fingers, isn't that what you guys do?" Only he didn't actually say anything. He just stood there waving his fingers in the guy's face. And by the way, he was outnumbered five-to-one.

I will take a quick moment to offer the author some kudos here: Attending a professional hockey game with one’s father has to be an iconic moment. Attending a professional playoff hockey –- let alone Stanley Cup Finals –- registers higher than any other father/son sporting event I could imagine. Yes, even going to a clinching World Series game. The praise, however, is flanked by poor imagery in that it is flanked by a subject -– a weak one at that –- that has already been covered: flopping and biting.

Nothing ended up happening —- the Canucks fan laughed it off —- but that gives you an idea of the bitterness spawned by Games 1 and 2, thanks to Vancouver's two soul-crushing game-winners (18 seconds left in regulation, then 11 seconds into OT), and also because Alexandre Burrows bit Patrice Bergeron's finger in Game 1, didn't get suspended, then became Game 2's hero. At gunpoint, I don't know what makes Boston fans hate Burrows more: that he bit Bergeron, that he didn't get suspended, or that his name is "Alexandre." What pushed it over the top: Burrows is good. Usually playoff villains take the form of Carolina's Scott Walker (who sucker-punched a Bruin two years ago) or Pittsburgh's Ulf Samuelsson (who crippled Cam Neely in the '91 playoffs), role players who overstep their boundaries and make you say, "Who the hell does that guy think he is?" But Burrows' biting Bergeron, then scoring a ridiculously creative goal to win Game 2? That deserved a waterboarding.

If you root through the tack box for the brass ones, this paragraph doesn’t even deserve any attention. I will, however, call attention to the fact that, here we are, once again, talking about the biting incident. For the unaware, that incident happened in game one, also known as 10 days ago. The game-winner was a week ago, and it hinged upon three Boston mistakes: 1) A careless neutral-zone turnover, 2) Tim Thomas channeling his inner Patrick Roy and becoming too aggressive leaving the crease to try to break up the scoring chance, and 3) Bruin defenseman -– you may have heard of him –- Zdeno Chara, who wears a ‘C’ on his sweater (that stands for Captain) failed to hone his awareness of what Burrows was attempting to do. In case you were unaware, Burrows was attempting a wraparound goal, which is, like, one of four things you can do behind a goalie’s net. In the event that you do not understand the game, the probability of a player attempting a wraparound while skating behind the net in an overtime period of the Stanley Cup Finals is 100 percent, especially considering that Burrows broke into the zone as the lone Canuck and ostensibly had no teammate to whom he could pass the puck. If you are unfamiliar with Chara, he stands 6’9’’, which registers in as the tallest guy to ever play in the league. He’s big. He’s good. He knows what to do in that situation, even if it means taking Burrows down and risking a penalty-kill situation, or even a penalty shot. But sure, SportsGuy. Make the Canuck the villain, and throw out a few player-reference stretches, even if one of them occurred when you weren’t paying attention to hockey.

Those first two games played out like a generic version of every traumatic Bruins playoff series from the past 35 years: The Canucks were faster and slightly more talented, and both games ended abruptly in the most brutal way possible. (Welcome to my childhood.) Momentum shifted in Game 3 when Aaron Rome coldcocked Nathan Horton in the open ice —- exactly the type of blindside hit that hockey has been trying to eliminate in the Concussions Are Bad era —- then Horton spent the next few minutes lying on his back, motionless, as the crowd stared in horror(3). After they carried him off, three things happened: the Bruins were fired up, the Canucks became tentative, and the fans ratcheted up the intensity to Boston Tea Party levels. The highlight of the ensuing 8-1 shellacking: Looch (a.k.a, Milan Lucic) making a belated run at Burrows, belting him around a little, then shoving his fingers in Burrows' face as they were being separated. You're not going to believe this, but the crowd thoroughly enjoyed it.

Here again we revisit biting, toss out ancient history analogies, and speak to what the league wants to do, even though the author cast the game out like a broken toy so many years ago. I take special issue with the opening sentence to that paragraph, though. What I remember about the Boston Bruins in the playoffs while SportsGuy ditched them at the bar for a decade and-a-half, are either a) regular-season overachievers, b) groups of personnel still learning to gel, and, more often than not, c) a club lucky to play in the Northeast Division. Either way you slice it, they’ve been post-season chokers. I don’t say this because I dislike the franchise. Far from the truth, in fact. My tendency is to get on their bandwagon and hope that a great Irish sports city can get behind their hockey team and hint to non-fans that hockey always has and still does matter. The Bruins, however, completely collapse after establishing the stranglehold on Philly last year, and as I already stated, either bow out in the first or second round. How going down 0-2 in the Finals is “a generic version of every traumatic Bruins playoff series from the past 35 years” does not add up. Scattered in those 35 years of Boston post-season contention are every possible version of falling short. It’s what they’ve done. How that’s a generic version of traumatic is beyond me. When you hit the 20-years-since-your-last-Finals mark, I think trauma kind of becomes an afterthought.

How about the St. Louis Blues? Part of NHL expansion in 1967, three Stanley Cup Finals appearances in their first three seasons of existence -– including a loss to the Bruins –- and only two Conference Finals appearances since? That, while establishing a professional-sports-consecutive-playoff-appearance record (25 seasons), having perennial divisional competency amongst better competition. That, while choosing to fire the coach who took you to those early Finals, only to watch him go on to become the winningest coach in NHL history, is traumatic.

By all accounts, Canucks fans weren't treated well as they left the arena. Sauced-up Boston fans were shoving them, throwing things at them and challenging them to fights. A friend of mine who roots for Vancouver wore his jersey to Game 3, despite my warnings, and saw his life flash before his eyes about 20 times as he looked for a cab. Things were so ugly that it prompted a Boston Globe editorial urging Boston fans to act with more class, an impossibility after we learned Horton would miss the rest of the playoffs. In the stands during Game 4, the hostility toward the Canucks and their fans was fairly suffocating. One fan behind me was swearing like a sailor at every Canuck, even using an obscenity that I hadn't heard at a sporting event in years. Because there was a little boy sitting behind us, I braced for the boy's dad to say something to the guy … then I realized that the boy's dad was the guy. And he wanted the blood of the Vancouver Canucks.

I take zero issue with the sentiments in this paragraph, save that it prompts me to point in the general direction of the above-linked Jonah Keri piece.

Quick tangent: It's a weird time for sports right now because, once upon a time, going into an opposing arena or stadium while wearing your team's colors was the ultimate sign of fan support. It meant you "risked" your life to support your guys … although, really, you just ended up getting heckled and that's it(4). That's the way it should work. You go into the lion's den, support your team, take the ensuing heat (mostly good-natured) … and that's where it ends. But once the secondary ticket market (StubHub, eBay, etc.) made it easier for out-of-towners to get tickets, the odds increased for something truly terrible to happen: like that poor Giants fan getting beaten into a coma outside Dodger Stadium recently. I don't know what to make of the "let's make miserable the rogue outsider who dared to wear opposing colors in our house" dynamic now, or know why an opposing fan would take that chance (especially in hockey), or know what the boundaries are for making that fan miserable. It's all in flux.

As a fan who has repped his (NFL) team on the road for 10 years, I’m glad that the author composed this tangent. It’s crucial that hometown fans take a bit of responsibility, if and when it’s possible, and put the safety of all in attendance as first priority, not just those rocking the home-team’s jersey.

Anyway, we managed to avoid anything spectacularly inappropriate on Monday and Wednesday. Barely. Game 4 turned into a Bruins romp by the end of the second period. My father and I were lucky enough to have seats on the glass; we noticed quickly that the Bruins were skating around with their proverbial chests puffed out, convinced they had gained control of the series, physically. (Which they had.) The best moment happened near the end, when Burrows kept tipping the stick of popular Bruins goalie Tim Thomas and Thomas went medieval on his ass, then smiled afterward to the enduring delight of the crowd. That's my favorite thing about hockey, and one of many reasons why it's made a sneaky comeback since its devastating lockout: Unlike basketball (where the refs carry too much sway), hockey players police one another(5).

Specific to this series, I must admit that the chances that I’d be rooting for Boston –- were they not competing against a Cup-less franchise -– are high. I dig their style of play. I like their personnel. I admire Claude Julien, and I love Tim Thomas. I don’t like what he did with his goalie stick because he did it against a Vancouver Canuck, or against Alexandre Burrows. I like how he wielded his lumber because it was a feat of badassery, Ben Thompson style. But way to quote an even older movie, SportsGuy. Geez. I’m considering hiring a team of IT nerds to program an auto-play of some Hall and Oates every time someone opens a column of yours.

I am fit to be tied by the terminology “devastating lockout” used by so many media. Before I say more, here is my bias: I’m a hockey fan. I couldn’t wait for the lockout to end, just so that I could watch hockey games on television and attend them in person once more. That’s where the story starts and stops. I am a simple, semi-educated dude with limited time and access, so if data that highlights why the lockout was devastating exists, please point me in its general direction. I don’t have the time or the interest in scouring television ratings numbers. We know that the deal with ESPN expired, and that that particular network was likely never again going to seriously pursue a deal with the league.

My first hunch is to assume that SportsGuy deemed it devastating because its timing was tied to his employer's decision to no longer carry the NHL product.

Regardless, does that mean that people thought that professional hockey would no longer be televised? That can’t be what people thought. On my end, it meant that a portion -– be it small, insignificant, or whathaveyou -– of sports fans, at that moment, no longer had a need for ESPN as a television network. For me, I’ll tune in if I’m looking for a specific bottom line news bit, and that only happens when I’m too lazy to look up a stat or score or development on the Internet. It doesn’t mean I’m boycotting the network. I just don’t have a use for it, especially if we’re not talking about Monday Night Football. Hockey fans had Outdoor Life Network, which became Versus, which will now become something vaguely resembling the NBC-Versus network, or whatever. The point was that hockey was back on television, and available live in its respective markets. Not once did I hear a hockey fan, a casual hockey fan, or even a non-hockey fan cast disdain into the air for the sport, the league, or its players. In fact, this is the almost uniform response from each said group:

Non-hockey fan: “Ha ha. That game’s dumb anyway. The world is better without it.”

Casual hockey fan: “You know, that’s really too bad about the lockout.”

Hockey fan: “Man, I can’t wait til hockey’s back.”

So, what’s devastating there? Non-hockey fan never cared in the first place. You were never going to get him to sit down and watch a game with you on TV, and if you did –- probably by hosting a party or offering free beer and pizza -– the game would be littered with gripes. The only time non-hockey fan has something positive to say about hockey is when you treat him to a live NHL game with good seats. And even then, the response will be something like, “I’m not going to broadcast this. I’ll deny it if you repeat it, but that was pretty awesome.” He’ll never attend another game (barring another free invite) and he’ll go right back to dissing it, save for the occasional neutral comment about viewing it live, which will probably be made in such a way that suggests he has never done so.

Casual hockey fan wasn’t necessarily seeking out tickets or channel surfing looking for the game anyway. They take it. They leave it. Maybe they tune in for a Stanley Cup Finals game, or maybe they get into a little Winter Olympic hockey action, but they’re never really here nor there.

Hockey fan likely felt compelled to try and will a new Collective Bargaining Agreement into existence, and was happy as a dog in a pet-food store when play resumed. Season-ticket holders bought tickets again. Couch fans turned on the tube for games again, even though they weathered a rough broadcasting debut from the new network(s), and sure: Ticket sales, in general, probably suffered a bit, but in the big picture, the game flourished. Take the first post-lockout season –- 2005-06 –- for example. Do you know who won the Cup that year? They go by the name of the Hurricanes. They play hockey in Raleigh, North Carolina, and they saw an increase in ticket sales that year (compared with the final pre-lockout season) and made a profit for the first time since moving from Hartford.

After that the Ducks won it. Then you have Pittsburgh and Detroit -– two great hockey markets –- competing in consecutive Cups, followed by Philadelphia and Chicago last year, now Boston/Vancouver. So, did general league revenue shrink a bit in the first season back from the lockout? I would guess that it did, and I would also guess that that would happen in any pro sport. You know what else happened, though? The league instilled a salary cap, the players elected a new NHLPA president, and, best I can tell, the game continues to grow.

Hockey fits in better these days in general. I had lost interest in the Bruins in the mid-'90s because of their unlikable skinflint of an owner, Jeremy Jacobs, who lives in Buffalo (I mean, really?) and always spent enough money to compete but never quite enough to win. But looking back, I'm realizing that it wasn't Jacobs as much as me turning on the product itself: I grew up watching potbellied, heavy-footed, toothless bald guys like Wayne Cashman coexisting with occasionally brilliant offensive players like Bobby Orr or Rick Middleton. There was always the right balance: You had your muckers, your fighters, your scorers, your playmakers, your two guys on each team who skated faster than everyone else, your token European … thrown together, everything just worked. Then the Euros and Russians flooded the league, along with the helmets and face shields, and suddenly there were no more potbellied bald guys, and they started cracking down on the chippiness, and the Devils trap ruined the flow of the game, and there were suddenly 10 new teams in cities that never should have had a team, and … wait a second, what the hell was I watching? I just couldn't adjust.

I think that, if this is going to be your stance that this paragraph works well, though I disagree with most of it. What doesn’t work is the opening sentence. Not as a standalone or as part of that sentence cluster’s motif. I mean, I just don’t get it. “(F)its in better” with what? Your attitude? Your television-viewing schedule? Your propensity to ditch teams when they’re not succeeding? If you’re trying to draw a comparison to the game and the adaptations it’s made based on consistent changes in the pro-sports world, then you’re simply stating the obvious. Of course guys wearing your Bs sweaters were toothless and fat when you were a kid. Just like baseball players chewed a ton more, managers fired down heaters in the dugout, football players didn’t train as hard, and the NBA was a little bit whiter. Same reason people used to ingest a dozen hamburgers a day, and the same reason people drove around with their kids on their laps. Kids whose mothers drank and smoked while pregnant with them: They didn't know any different or better.

Back then you didn’t necessarily have to be trim, fit, and speedy to compete at the NHL level. Nobody was too concerned with protecting your dome or your teefs –- I mean, we are talking about a game that didn’t used to have its goalies wear masks. But the game grows, and with that growth, the talent pool expands, and the dumpy guys with the receding hairlines go the way of the BetaMax. “(T)he Euros and Russians” make the game better because they bring their own skating style, their own collection of talents, and increased competition. And as far as the gripe with the Devils trap, it’s called coaching. New Jersey wants to run a trap? Then, the Islanders, say, better figure out a way to coach around it. Or through it. It’s no different than the 1-3-1 that Guy Boucher’s Tampa Bay Lightning –- the club that just took your Bruins to seven in the Conference Finals -– ran all post-season. Claude Julien and his staff figured out a way to beat it, but there’s no arching complaint lob coming from your side of the net on that one. It’s no different than NFL clubs running the Wildcat.

Did coaches and players and sportswriters sit around griping that this wasn’t their old West Coast offense? No. They either prepared their teams to try and beat it, and about half of them wedged their own take on it into their own playbook. You adjust. And you certainly don’t get out your megaphone and begin firing off the proverbial back-in-my-day speech. That’s the kind of tone that will make people wonder if your craft has passed you by, sir. What I want to say, though, is that it’s fine if you couldn’t adjust. I’m not going to criticize you for it, but I suggest your exploration be intrinsic instead of otherwise.

They created a hard salary cap after the 2005 lockout that kept ticket prices down and helped the Bruins (suddenly Jacobs wasn't a factor); so did a few smart rule changes, widescreen HD televisions (the games look splendific, which isn't even a word), and the sport's unannounced return to the days when men were men. In basketball, you can't look at someone cross-eyed without getting a technical. In football, you can't touch the quarterback or the receivers anymore. In baseball, you can't throw at anyone even after they've just taken 20 seconds to complete a home run trot. Hockey swung the other way: It will never endorse something as sleazy as Rome's hit on Horton, but Thomas' getting pissed off because Burrows kept being a dick and hitting Thomas' stick? Absolutely. Do your thing, Tim Thomas. Cross check him in the head, get your two-minute minor, make your point.

I like this paragraph, save the phrase, “the sport’s unannounced return to the days when men were men.” Somewhere in there is a seed of an idea, but it’s one of those notions you can’t just launch out there without developing it at least a little. As is, I don’t even know what it means. Did men cease to be men at some point? Is this a reference to the men of the world, how they used to be one way, changed, and now the game of hockey resembles the original way, or is that idea particular to the sport. If it’s the latter, that’s foolish. Hockey has always been (pound for pound), the toughest sport with the toughest players in the world. If this naked concept was meant to imply that hockey players were less tough during the period in which Mr. Simmons checked out, then I implore him to dress it up, because that, SportsGuy, is a grotesque body covered with excess hairy flesh and horrific scars.

Of course, real hockey fans stuck with the sport through the toughest times; they don't want someone like me returning as if nothing ever happened, like some adulterous husband who moved out for a few years, waited until his wife dropped 20 pounds and got implants, then suddenly decided he wanted to win her back. Every time I tweet about hockey or mention it in a column, I'll get a few insults about being a bandwagon fan. When some people online noticed me in the background of this picture taken right after Rich Peverley's first goal, I got crushed by a few blogs for being a front-runner.

This is an interesting statement here, and I have zero idea what the insults sound like, and frankly, I’m torn about the fact that he got/gets them. On the one hand -– and this is always the biggest, most-important hand –- anytime a sportswriter with as far-reaching an audience (regardless of medium) as SportsGuy is saying anything about hockey, it’s a positive. For example, launching a project like grantland.com -- which is cool and has an all-star cast -– with a post about hockey is fantastic. I always view the growth of the game as a fragile entity, though, and so with such a far reach comes a certain risk-and-injury factor. I mean, there are probably a portion of Simmons readers that, if told that hockey was dumb and they should never consume it ever, they might listen. Not a slam on the audience; I envision the majority of them to be intelligent. But, on the other hand -– and I’ve already mentioned this more than once and in several ways –- Careful With That Axe, Eugene. I’ve put together a series of playoff posts that have some stats and trends in them, and the purpose of which was to attempt to gather a rudimentary look at whether or not sports and hockey fans are getting a better product than ever before.

Of course, by “ever before,” I mean the last 10 years, because you’ve got to start with a small sample size, and I questioned the value in digging 20 and 25 years back. From a personal standpoint, I knew the answer before I looked up my first stat: Damn skippy, we are. I can tell that by watching the standings develop as the league rolls through games 79, 80, 81, and 82, on into the Conference Quarter-Finals that the product is better than ever before. Heck, I knew that watching last year’s post-season, and the previous two Winter Classics. But before I’m accused of saying the same thing as SportsGuy, understand that I’m not. What I’m saying is that Mr. Simmons left the game because it –- or perhaps his team/its ownership -– grew stale to him. The game didn’t dip in value in the early ‘90s, wallow in darkness leading up to the lockout, and only now, has it skyrocketed to best-ever status, conveniently at a time in which the Bruins have figured out how to take their post-season lumps and not let them cripple their playoff progression. No, sir. The game has been growing all the while. It’s been making a sound in the forest. SportsGuy just hasn’t been around to hear it.

Technically, they're right: I loved hockey until I was 24. From 1995 to 2007, I didn't care about hockey unless the Bruins made the playoffs, and even then, I didn't really care. The 2008 playoffs sucked me back a little, then the 2009 and 2010 playoffs made a little more ground. This year, two young Boston forwards (Tyler Seguin and Brad Marchand(6)) swayed me toward regular-season hockey for the first time in forever. I found myself watching more playoff hockey this spring than just the Bruins; honestly, I found Canucks-Hawks, Red Wings-Sharks, and Canucks-Sharks to be equally entertaining(7). Isn't roping someone like me back in a good thing for hockey? Do you know how rare it is for a product to lose a consumer, then get him or her to come back? Usually with these things, once you're gone, you're gone. And if hockey keeps building its audience, maybe every finals game would appear on network TV, and maybe we wouldn't have any more situations like the three times this spring when I couldn't watch a playoff game because my hotel didn't carry Versus.

I like the column to which the author linked there, because it dabbles in his return to hockey fandom. It also touches on something I had not really noticed until I started doing some hard-core numbers crunching: The Boston Bruins and the Montreal Canadiens have met in the post-season eleventy billion times. It’s unreal. Like a fix, a rig, a scam, a sham, a hoax, a prank, and a joke all rolled into a water-squirting flower on the vest of Pope at his daughter’s wedding. It’s unreal. I’m not going to take the time to look, but I’d wager that they’ve played one another double the amount of times the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox have met in the MLB playoffs. And like those baseball counterparts, they play in the same division, so they already know one another real well, come season’s end. This fascinates me to no end.

Look, I totally get the Cult of the Status Quo, which afflicts MMA fans, hockey fans, and American soccer fans, in particular —- they all have a chip on their shoulder because they're still in that "we're all rooting for a local music band and we don't want it to go mainstream" stage, so they unabashedly drive away anyone late to the party. (It's the reason Springsteen die-hards loathe the "Born in the U.S.A" album —- from that point on, Springsteen belonged to everybody, not just them.) Here's my counter: What was more fun than the 1994 NHL Playoffs? Remember that? The spring after Jordan split to play baseball and before the Devils ruined all momentum with their stupid trap, when Sports Illustrated had that cover wondering if hockey was passing basketball, when the Rangers played two straight epic seven-game series against Jersey and Vancouver that everyone watched? Don't we want to get back to THAT point? How can that happen if you don't have enough fans?

Speaking of fascinating me to no end, this poisonous nugget needs a warning label on it. It’s dangerous to parse through, and if you dare to do so, you could wind up contradicting yourself faster than the Boston/Vancouver game-two overtime period. The part about the shoulder chip is true. I carry a hockey chip on my shoulder, but it doesn’t resemble what’s in quotes there. What it resembles has more to do with a timeline than it does any anti-mainstream local rah-rah. What I mean by that is that dudes like SportsGuy are lucky to have grown up watching hockey, and even luckier that they had a hometown team. Being a Kansas Citian, my town had the Scouts make their NHL debut the year I was born, and before I was three, they were gone. Their stay in Denver lasted six seasons, and off to New Jersey they went. What this meant for me growing up was that there was absolutely zero hockey awareness in my home and in my neighborhood.

I have the darkest memory of the Lake Placid games being on the tube, but that was it. This is the way things were in the Midwest, and if you look at the timeline of NHL expansion, pickins were nothing but slim for the longest time. The biggest, most-successful league expansion happened in 1967. Six new teams were added to the original six. One is now defunct, the other has a new home. Two more teams were added three years later, and they still call Vancouver and Buffalo home. Two years later, two more teams came aboard, one of which still resides in Long Island; the other would become the first of two failed NHL experiments in Atlanta. Kansas City and Washington joined the mix in ’74, and a few other shifts happened throughout the late ‘70s before the Rockies became the Devils.

Here’s the point: Between two years prior to SportsGuy’s birth (1969) and the San Jose Sharks joining the league in 1991, there were never more than four teams east of St. Louis, and for most of that time there were only three. That obviously mirrors the initial development of the United States itself –- everything clustered in and around New England, then spread –- but it didn’t mean that kids of my generation didn’t grow up without baseball, football, basketball, and soccer, the latter of course being the sport many folks start in before moving on to something else. There simply was no room, or interest for that matter, for hockey, and that’s largely based on awareness of it, or rather, a lack thereof.

I played all of those sports as a kid, and some as a young adult, but the thought of hockey really never even occurred to me until high school, and it did only then via a Nintendo game. I discovered it freshman year of college –- the same year of that Canucks/Rangers Finals -- bonded with it, and my passion for it has grown every year since. I believe it’s the greatest game on the planet. I want it to grow. I want people to experience playing it, to experience fandom, for it to be talked about on a level that somewhat resembles the water-cooler chatter associated with the NBA, the NFL, and MLB. I don’t have any desire for it to overtake those sports, nor do I think that will ever happen. I’m just tired of it being foreign to so many. This, however, is changing, and changing exactly where it needs to: in organized youth sports. It’s a slow process, and it will never develop with the speed and popularity that basketball, football, and baseball do/did, largely because it’s so damn expensive. Most any kid can go down to the park and shoot some hoops. Many kids find a way to get onto an organized baseball or football team. Those facilities exist, and their sports have programs in schools and in the community. It’s not as easy to find a sheet of ice and drop the coin necessary to gear up and play on it.

The point is that I don’t care if you’re late to the party. I’m just stoked you came. I know there are tons of Springsteen fans out there, and there are a few that hate him. I like his first three albums now, as an adult, having sought them out for the sake of curiosity, but that doesn’t change the way I felt about Born in the USA when it came out. Great freaking album. Hockey doesn’t have to be that way. It doesn’t have to belong to those who loved it first or earlier. It can be loved by all. I don’t not recognize the toying-with-absurdity aspect of such a statement, but it’s what I believe. Regarding the ’94 playoffs, here’s my answer to what was more fun than it: Almost every season since. Sure, the Devils (and their stupid trap) took home the Cup the year after Messier and Company, but the artists formerly known as the Quebec Nordiques hoisted it the following year, and living in Colorado, I gotta tell you that that was awesome.

I’ll also add that that was the largest exhibition of bandwagonism I’ve ever seen, but I don’t hold it against them. It merely makes for the occasional no-harm-no-foul joke. The next three years were brutal, in that Detroit won consecutive championships (Editor’s Note: Didn’t take long for me to establish a hatred for them.), and one of those came at the expense of the Flyers, and I just so happened to have made a bunch of Philly friends (in southwest CO) by that point. And if there’s a low point in my hockey-fandom career, it was watching the ‘Wings sweep the Capitals. I wanted nothing more than this team I could find zero reason to get behind (other than the fact that I hated Detroit) to win, and they got flat-out embarrassed. After that it was Brett skate-in-the-crease Hull and the Dallas Stars winning in six over Buffalo, which was an amazing Finals, short-changed as it was. Dallas/New Jersey wasn’t terrible either, but it was hard to have a horse in that race.

After that, you get Ray Bourque. Sixteen W. One of the top-three sports memories of my entire life. Another Detroit championship followed, but two things happened for me that year: 1) I really began to appreciate what an amazing hockey club the Detroit Redwings have, and that their fan base is as widespread as it is made me hate them even more, a la the Yankees, Lakers, and Raiders. 2) I got on the Carolina Hurricanes/Ronnie Franchise bandwagon. Great team to pull for. Really wanted the Ducks to knock off the Devils in ’03 since I’d gotten tired of seeing them and hey -– anybody that sweeps the ‘Wings drinks for free at my bar.

I’ll admit with no qualms that having the Tampa Bay Lightning win the Stanley Cup was odd. I found it in me to appreciate the stars of that team, but also felt that their fan base lacked a little enthusiasm. On the other end, it was great for Canada to have a team in the Finals again, and that Calgary Flames squad was really likable, what with Craig Conroy –- one of my all-time favorite Blues -– and the new hype in the form of the dazzling Jarome Iginla. Plus, Roman Turek had been shipped to Calgary and was riding the pine. Win, win. Not to mention that they took Tampa the distance. Great series.

Naturally, the lockout was a drag, but as I mentioned, the league, in my biased eyes, came back strong, and that Hurricane fan base was a savage bunch. Had to respect ‘em. Also, watching Dave Andreychuk get a Cup the year before was great. It was impossible for that to top the Bourque moment, but having the pleasure of watching Rod Brind’Amour heave that trophy in the air was, well…let’s just say it got a little dusty in the living room that evening. With the Ducks championship, you got a) the awesomeness of another veteran getting their first, this time with dual-brother action, b) another Canadian team in the mix –- gotta throw ‘em a bone now and again, and most importantly c) no shortage of Snoop Dogg in attendance and rocking an Anaheim sweater.

I could take or leave Pittsburgh and Detroit being in contention in consecutive years, but they were great series, nonetheless. Mario –- even though he dissed Kansas City a little –- seeing his franchise notch another championship was pretty sweet, and again, ‘Wings foes are my friends. Things really got sizzling with Chicago/Philly last year, and really, the whole post-season was one for the ages, only to be outdone by this year’s. I realize that this sort of jives with what SportsGuy is saying, but the tidbit to remember is that the awesomeness of the game hasn’t gone anywhere, that many a Finals have rivaled the awesomeness of Canucks/Rangers. I find it a bit of a reach to suggest that everyone watched in the spring of 1994. Perhaps a poll on Grantland could prove interesting.

From what I can tell, hockey solved every pressing issue except for one: It still needs more Canadian teams. Winnipeg was a good start; I hope Quebec and a second Toronto team are next. Call me crazy, but I think we want as many teams as possible in the country that cares about hockey the most. Just seems like a logical plan. My dream scenario: two of the WTFDTCHAHT's move to Quebec and Toronto(8), giving us 10 Canadian teams (I'm including Buffalo, our only bisexual North American city —- it can go either way). Throw in Minnesota and Detroit (right on the Canadian border) and a Seattle team (let's build an NBA/NHL arena there already), and suddenly we're looking at an entire conference that I'd tentatively call "The Top Half Of North America Conference" (I know, it needs some work).

The idea that the league needs more Canadian teams is one with which I mildly disagree. Didn’t the league just have to almost rescue Calgary six or seven years ago? Isn’t there the issue of a lack of season-ticket dollars swirling in and out of the provinces? Actually, I don’t like the idea at all. I want this sport to grow in the United States. Whether or not that’s a realistic wish, I’m unsure. My thought, though, is that everybody already knows that Canadians love hockey. Having more Canadian teams seems, to me, to fuel the tired let-the-Canadians-have-their-game mantra that still gets thrown around amongst the hating clans. I was, and still am, concerned that Winnipeg will be able to support, much in the same way I’m certain that Kansas City could not.

When I moved back to K.C. 11 years ago, a fine gentleman by the name of Paul McGannon created an organization called NHL21, the goal of which was to bring professional hockey to the area by 2001. Ten years later, here we still are, hoping that the Calgary Flames will falter, that the Mario Lemieuxs will divorce their cities and come play in our shiny building, that the “Boots” DelBiaggios will Art Modell the city of Nashville, that the Atlanta Thrashers will get the commissioner’s approval to come to Kansas City. None of that has even seemed close to possible, save when Lemieux came to town for a tour of the Sprint Center and took his positive reviews back to Pittsburgh so that the city could hasten the casino-funded construction of the CONSOL Energy Center.

Don’t get me wrong. I love every ounce of energy McGannon has put into the program. He’s facilitated four or five exhibition contests here in town, and the Penguins and Kings will be here for another in September. On Wednesday night, for game four, his group hosted a watch party. I got there late because I had a game of my own, but there were like 10 people watching the Canucks fall apart. When I spoke with Paul, I voiced my displeasure regarding the turnout, to which he said, “No, no. We had a good crowd, but people have to work,” etc. When I tabbed out, the bartender estimated that there were roughly 30 people in attendance at the onset. Thirty.

So I have no idea what it takes to estimate what kind of fan base a city can generate. Carolina, Nashville, Anaheim and San Jose have all been pleasant surprises, while Atlanta has now gone 0-2, and all signs point to Phoenix folding the tent next. I don’t have the answers, but I have the change-the-culture philosophy, which makes me literally hate the gall SportsGuy has to throw around WTFDTCHAHT.

Math has never been my strong suit, but adding Winnipeg, then a second Toronto team and a Quebec team to the mix seems to add up to nine. How the author thinks this will make 10 Canadian teams is a bit of a head-scratcher, but it’s possible I’m overlooking something. I say this because on my maps, Buffalo is in New York, which, last time I checked, is in the United States, and not a go-either-way type of cat. Kidding aside, Quebec will support a franchise this time why? And build a venue in Seattle? Didn’t the Sonics just blaze town? Like I said, I don’t have the answers, but at this point, I don’t think SportsGuy does either.

Regardless, I can't believe Gary Bettman actually pulled off a little momentum here; it's like imagining life if Fredo had beaten the odds and figured out the casino business. I was done with hockey. I was finished. But the sports brought me back for all the right reasons. Sure, I can't (and won't) take nearly as much satisfaction that the Bruins are two wins away from the Stanley Cup as the die-hards who stuck with them through thick and thin —- fans like my father, a true fan for 40 years who never turned his back on them even in the darkest times, unlike his front-running son. The last time the Bruins won the Cup, my father was going to law school and bartending every night. He missed the whole thing. He's been watching ever since. He never gave up on hockey, not even right before and right after the lockout. That's why I flew back to take him to the game. It was 40 years overdue.

And here we are again, trotting the Has-Beens out to the mound. Really with the Bettman business? Give the guy some credit. You are, after all, claiming that the game is better now than ever (as am I), and all of that has happened on his watch. Another poll idea for Grantland: Ask hockey fans if they actually know why the Bettman boos were started, and why they continue today. The whole thing is akin to Hooliganism. You brawl because you see others doing it, and you know that the ManU masses have done it for years. You’re not sure if it’s right or wrong or foolish or fun, but damn it all if you’re gonna do any thinking for yourself.

Now he needs two more Bruins wins. Like always, it's probably coming down to the goalies, a great sign for Boston since Luongo just gave up two more goals while I was typing this paragraph. Before Vancouver pulled him in Game 4, the Boston crowd was derisively singing, "Loooooo-on-goooooooooooo. Loooooo-on-goooooooooooo. Loooooo-on-goooooooooooo." Is that sound still ringing through his head? Are Vancouver fans freaked out that their greatest fear -— Luongo melting down like a volcano —- might actually be happening? Will Ryan Kesler throw the Canucks on his back again like he did against Nashville? Will Milan Lucic keep playing out of his mind like he did in Game 4? Will the Sedin twins introduce a new flop that we've never seen before? Will the Canucks finally bite back instead of letting themselves get pushed around? Er, fight back? And why does it feel like this has to end with a seventh game? I wish it was best of 13.

Speaking of things that occurred in mid-draft, I watched the Canucks take two dives in the first period of game five last night, hours after I’d typed some words lashing Mr. Simmons for supposing that they were floppers. Thanks, guys. Thanks a lot. Anyway, hooray for more bite jokes!

One last thing: I was lucky enough to attend Game 3 and 4 of the NBA Finals, then Game 4 of the NHL finals, within a span of 75 hours. If you remember, Games 3 and 4 in Dallas were pretty freaking compelling. I thoroughly enjoyed them, loved the atmosphere, loved the drama, everything. Even feel like I may have witnessed a little history on Tuesday with LeBrondown II. But you know what? The hockey game was a slightly better live sporting event, and I would have said that whether the Bruins were involved or not. It flowed a little better. It makes you feel like every second matters. Every time someone scored, you felt like the roof was caving in. Even when there's a blowout, you have to keep watching because you never know when one team wants to send a message to the other.

Yes, Mr. Simmons. I do know what. Post-season hockey has had post-season basketball on the ropes for a few years, maybe since the end of David Robinson’s career, possibly since Jordan retired. I’m aware that television ratings and ticket sales don’t support such a claim, but I’ll fight to the death in support of the argument that playoff hockey, in terms of the product, trumps anything that Kobe or LeBron have ever done or will ever do. The trouble is that this country grew up with basketball, and the NBA is the ceiling of the sport, so fans gravitate towards it. And without getting into my gripes about in-game dunk contests and the lack of fundamental defense, hockey does flow better. A lot better. Every second does matter, and the energy of those buildings goes unmatched across the pro-sports spectrum.

And yet, my favorite part happened before the game, when the fans respectfully waited out "O Canada," then belted out the "Star Spangled Banner" at the top of their lungs: partly to prove a patriotic point, partly because we were so happy to be there, and partly because it was the Stanley Cup finals and that's what you do. I had goose bumps on my goose bumps. What a moment. So thank you, hockey. I might be a front-runner who ditched you once upon a time, and I know you probably won't let me move back in. Just know that you've never looked better, and if you'd always looked this way, I never would have left.

Though there are some –- perhaps many that will disagree with me -– I don’t care if you’re a front-runner, and I will most certainly let you back in. It bothers me that you ditched the game, but I’m not trying to be in the business of holding grudges. I’m ecstatic that you think the game never looked better. I think it does, too, but I cannot let you off the hook for suggesting that the look of the game fell into some ugly hole that nobody wanted to rescue. It’s been aided by the salary cap and by the rule changes, but mostly it’s the talent pool, and the growth of the game. Had you not checked out post-Messier hoist, you may have found many other memories to keep you attached to the greatest game on the planet.

SportsGuy’s footnotes:

1. Sorry for the lack of bias —- I couldn't help it.
2. Across from the old Boston Garden, Halftime Pizza used to show tapes of Bruins fights before every game. People would eat slices and just stare at fight after fight for like 20 minutes. I'm sure this is the case in Philly, as well, but in Boston, being tougher than everyone else from year to year mattered nearly as much as winning. That's why Stan Jonathan's beat down of Montreal's Pierre Bouchard became such an iconic moment — maybe the Canadiens were better than us those years, but we'll always have Jonathan-Bouchard.
3. Horton had been Boston's best forward in the playoffs and a potential Conn Smythe candidate. I think that's the single strangest thing about hockey: A third-line defenseman can knock out a first-line forward and, to some degree, it's part of the game. Can you imagine if Brian Cardinal clotheslined Chris Bosh in Game 3 of the Finals, they carried Bosh off on a stretcher, he got scratched for the series … and then the series just kept going as if nothing ever happened? Actually, let's try this and see what it's like.
4. I once watched a Red Sox game in the Yankee Stadium bleachers while wearing a Bruins jersey, Red Sox hat and Celtics shorts. My friends were horrified. Nothing happened other than about 1,500 funny insults getting thrown my way.
5. This is a really important point —- it's just that I devoted a whole column to it in 2009 and didn't want to repeat myself.
6. Marchand gets his own footnote: As my dad says, "We never have guys like him," one of those annoyingly talented pests who gets away with dirty plays when the officials aren't looking, always seems to be in the right place at the right time, plays his ass off, isn't afraid of anyone, and genuinely pisses off other teams. He's like Claude Lemieux —- you hate him when he's on the other team, you love him when he's on yours. In my lifetime, only Ken Linseman was like that for the Bruins, but it was always hard to commit to Linseman because he was the only athlete whose neck had chest hair. It's much more fun to root for Marchand. I love that guy.
7. Ratings for Game 1 were the highest of any Game 1 since 1999 and 14 percent higher than last year's Game 1 (Philly vs. Chicago). To paraphrase Terrence Mann, if the product is good, people will come.
8. WTFDTCHAHT stands for "Why the fuck does that city have a hockey team?" I'm looking at you, Nashville. And you, too, Phoenix.

Bill Simmons is the Editor in Chief of Grantland and the author of the recent New York Times No. 1 best-seller The Book of Basketball, now out in paperback with new material and a revised Hall of Fame Pyramid. For every Simmons column and podcast, log on to Grantland. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/sportsguy33 and check out his new home on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/billsimmons.

bankmeister is the Editor-in-Chief of this site and the author of some stuff published in his high-school and college newspapers. He is neither a best-selling author, nor does the New York Times even know that he exists. His new book is sitting in a disheveled pile on his desk, and will likely never know another home. He has no podcast, and no current plans to launch an awesome Website with some of his best writing peers, but he does frequently log on to Facebook and has a Twitter account, which you can find here.
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