Hockey - a diatribe

I have been a hockey fan for as long as I can remember knowing about hockey. Needless to say, I have several (thousand) gripes with the sport, despite maintaining it is the best sport in the history of sport.

First off, icing. What the hell is it? I have watched many hockey matches live, a few on television, and listened to none on the radio but nobody has ever explained this to me. Like any good researcher, I looked on Wikipedia first. According to the article on the subject, icing is “when a player shoots the puck across two red lines, the opposing team's goal line being the last, and the puck remains untouched”. Now I certainly can see why this dangerous act is worthy of penalty. Oh wait, no I don't. Yes, certainly it's boring, and not something players should do as a habit, but is it worthy of completely stopping play and having a referee arm signal? Besides, I thought that was “dumping the puck”; icing just gives the idea that we're penalising people for stopping suddenly in front of each other and causing ice to spray all over each other, and this is a sport where if they don't do that, there will be a lot more injuries than just from fights.

On the subject of fights, the NHL is utter crap. My first NHL game was a St Louis Blues matchup against the New York Islanders. This was back in 1994, when the Blues had Brett Hull, and were sort of somewhat good as opposed to just nearby. Anyway, there was real excitement in the air. There were hard body checks, there were fights, there was shouting and swearing – all a beautiful experience for a nine-year-old boy who is still afraid to say “damn.” Of late though, I have been hard-pressed to see much (if any) fighting on an NHL match. If I want to watch a beautiful game, I would watch football (real football, not American football. I know it can get confusing but I refuse to call it “soccer”). I want to see some action in my hockey, not skating back and forth. Throw a punch or change the name of your sport.

Of course, I have no idea when players stopped fighting in NHL hockey, because for several years now hockey has been almost impossible to find on television. I know in 2006 there was a player lockout which probably didn't help convince any networks to air hockey, and that decision carried over a couple years, but the thing with lockouts and strikes is they don't happen every year, or even every other year. If they did, they'd just declare it a holiday week and write it into the calendar. NBC/Universal must have grown some yarbles of late by starting up NHL Sunday, airing daytime games even during NFL season. Unfortunately I can't commend them too much because NHL Sunday airs just this side of not at all. The last time I saw it was in February, and there are still games to play, therefore games to air! NBC, as well as every other network with a sport division: air some hockey already. We fans south of the snowline are starved for a real sport, and this is the only one that happens in this country between January and April.