I stopped watching hockey when they made all the players wear helmets, and I couldn’t tell the players apart anymore.
The names on the back didn’t help?
Sorry Spoons, but I’m happy to see Canada win the world cup.
I mean, there’s every reason to be happy for our boys.
Even if you’re not a fan it’s still something to be pleased about.
I mean when we win higj jump in the Olympics I’m still pretty happy, even though I know nothing about high jump. Right?
Sent from my adequate mobile device.
E-CONSULTATION ON ELECTORAL REFORM
Can’t attend one of the many Special Committee on Electoral Reform meetings that are being held across the country? Don’t fret! You can still give your opinions online. The issues are:
[ol]
[li]mandatory voting, [/li][li]online voting, [/li][li]and (here’s the big one) proportional representation.[/li][/ol]
Me? Personally, I’m against mandatory voting (but like voting incentives), fearful of online voting (but understand that not everyone is able/healthy/etc to get out to poll), gung-ho about any level of PR (but I favour STV over MMP). Still need a reason to contribute? I’ll just quote an encouraging section from the committee’s mandate:
Sounds like a worthy cause for a few minutes of your time, no? 
Online voting is an absolutely terrifying idea and should not be considered for a second. It will be hacked. Full stop. There’s way too much at stake, and online security is just too difficult. Voting my paper ballot is clunky, but that’s a feature, not a bug: it makes meaningful voting fraud a preposterously difficult exercise.
Not when they were facing the camera. Couldn’t read them with the camera/screen resolution of the times, either. (Which was black and white.)
Hah! I hadn’t even thought about that, but yes, gardening is pretty much done for the year, and here I am. 
orcenio, I’m going to the website to give my opinions, and my browser is not supported. That’s probably because I’m using some obscure, off-brand browser - the most recent version of Safari. That’s a good start to make me feel like they’ve really put a lot of effort into this. :rolleyes:
Right now, I’m too wrapped up in the Blue Jays to care about hockey. Two out of three wins against Boston in the final series, a wild-card tiebreaker Tuesday against Baltimore; and if the Jays win that, then a series against Texas (who knows what might happen if these two meet again), and then…?
Regardless, this is an exciting time to be an MLB fan. The Cubs have a shot at becoming World Series champs, after over 100 years. The Red Sox (as much as I hate to say it) have a chance at putting that curse in the dumpster for good. The Cleveland Indians–having not won the World Series since 1948–have a shot.
The Jays fans at the local sports bar agreed that we will all meet there at 5:00 pm MDT (7:00 pm EDT) Tuesday. And it definitely won’t be for NHL preseason hockey.
And, Cat, as you live in the same city as me, I am sure you know where I am talking about. You and Jimbo would be most welcome to attend on Tuesday–we need all the fans we can get to support our Jays!
If 53% of teams make the playoffs, after eight months of a regular season, then that’s not a pro sport. It’s Little League.
NHL hockey, grow up, and get serious.
When I was a kid, hockey went from November until April (seven months), and it was only on TV twice a week: one game Saturday and one game Wednesday. Now, it is hyped from September until June, a school year, ten months; and it is on TV every freakin’ night. Well, maybe actually, all-year-round, if you believe Rogers’ “World Cup of Hockey” TV commercials that have been airing through the summer, since last June’s hockey playoffs.
Y’know, I was happily watching the Rose Bowl football game on New Year’s Day about ten or so years ago. Then, the TSN feed inexplicably cut away to show us a regular-season hockey game between two teams nobody in Canada could possibly care about. (Nashville vs. Arizona? Something like that.) TSN pre-empted the Rose Bowl to show a mean-nothing, non-Canadian hockey game? You’ve gotta be freakin’ kidding me.
Leaffan, you want to know why I hate hockey? That’s why. And every other sporting event that gets pre-empted by hockey in Canada is another reason why. Hockey is rammed down our throats under the guise of patriotism; and I’m sick of it.
Hey, I’m a Jays fan too. The two aren’t mutually exclusive!
Glad to see you posting here again Cat.
It’s the playoff system they’ve had for four decades and it works.
The NHL has been stretching at least into May since 1968.
It only works in the sense that it a) results in a declared champion, and b) generates a great deal of revenue for the corporations that own the teams, the networks, and the advertisers. It “works” in the sense that it has not crashed in flames. Not a good definition of “works”.
For what it’s worth, before expansion 66% of the teas in the NHL made the playoffs. So they are working from a bad enough precedent.
Some of the avid hockey fans that I know don’t watch a single game during the regular season, considering them to be “spring training” for the long, long second season that starts with the faceoff for the playoffs. Attendance in some markets reflects the fact that you can’t give away tickets for regular season games.
The evidence would suggest that problem is with the markets, not the length of the season. Sunrise, FL is never, ever, ever going to be a good place to sell tickets to NHL games.
I personally would be fine with the season being shorter, but in this age of cable and streaming, finding alternatives for one’s viewing pleasure does not strike me as being a difficult task.
Don’t care at all about hockey, but I’m not Canadian, so that’s all right.
Anything after the original six rates a meh.
When the NHL expanded to a 16 team playoff in the late seventies/early eighties (after absorbing what was left of the WHA), there were only 21 teams in the league. All season to eliminate 5 teams!
Since 1950, Canada’s population has increased 2.5-fold, and at that time, virtually all NHL players were from Canada. Just under 50% of all NHL players today are from other countries. So, for round numbeers, the talent pool for the NHL has expanded to four times what it was in the 6-team era. Which means there is enough comparable talent for about 24 teams to play at the same level of competition. Enough for abut 15 teams based on the expansion of Canada’s talent pool, plus another dozen from non-Canadian imports. There are 30 teams, so that is a very slight, almost negligible dilution of the available talent to stock NHL teams, and the quality of play should be about equal to what it was in the 6-team league.
Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, and most of Bobby Orr’s career is meh? Patrick Roy? The Montreal superteams of the 70s?
[QUOTE=jtur88]
There are 30 teams, so that is a very slight, almost negligible dilution of the available talent to stock NHL teams, and the quality of play should be about equal to what it was in the 6-team league.
[/QUOTE]
This is a good response to the old “oh, expansion waters the talent pool down” argument, and it works for every sport. But it doesn’t go far enough. In fact, the talent is much greater now than it used to be.
Aside from the obvious fact that the NHL is drawing much a much larger pool of available athletes, both in terms of Canada being bigger and European and American talent being much more numerous,
- Athletes today are much more rigorously (in the academic sense of that word) trained. Technique is far better studied and understood and taught to young players. The science of hockey is better understood, and tools to study hockey are much more prevalent - in 1956 nobody was showing junior hockey players slo-mo videos of how tight their left turns were.
This is extremely obvious in the specific case of goaltenders. The way goalies play the position now only vaguely resembles how it was played in 1967. A goalie fromn the Original Six era, put in a time machine and asked to play today would, even if given superior modern equipment, be badly outmatched.
-
Athletes today are in much better physical shape. Sports nutrition, strength training, endurance training and the science of injury recovery are light years ahead of where they were in 1967; it’s not even a close call. Today’s players are much bigger, much faster, much quicker, and talented players who are hurt are likelier to recover and continue playing at a high level.
-
The talent development system is much more advanced and thorough than it was in the past. Today essentially every young player in hockey-playing nations is known, in detail, to the NHL. Once it is established that a boy is of unusual talent, his progress is tracked in exacting detail and he is appropriately funneled though the development system of his country (none more so than in Canada.) The semipro and minor leagues are development bases for the NHL. There is almost no chance at all that an NHL-level talent will not get a solid chance to be an NHL player.
That was not necessarily the case in the past, when professional sports was not as big a business and pro teams were dependent upon the work of scouts who travelled and saw players briefly and independently. Talent could be missed simply because ol’ Red didn’t see a guy, or saw him on a bad night, or because a particular school, town or territory just wasn’t well covered, or because Red just wasn’t a very good scout.
Again, this is not a thing unique to hockey so don’t take this as a shot at the old NHL; all these things are true of all pro sports. Bill James notes in “The Historical Baseball Abstract” that in the 1900s there are two occasions he could find of someone playing in a major league baseball game who arrived at the park by buying a ticket.