Hockey Today

Do you realize that to the majority of the population sport is as interesting as a noisy neighbor?  Sport is the first past the post entertainment winner in a crowded field of candidates. How much land mass of the planet does the USA occupy? Less than 2%.  Sport numbers I do not know.  However logically they are somewhere in the thirties at best. Yet sport dominates the message from our media. The reason is obvious its as close a direct interface to our lizard brain we can get without actual mortal combat. Even pansy sports fire up the lizard transmitters and make us think about conflict. If you have conflict you have wolf packs,  and humans have advanced that concept to highly advanced tribes. My tribe right or wrong, it does not matter what team Beethoven plays for him I want to see him crushed in a sonata.

I grew up in Canada in a village in the central north.  Total population 1200 people.  We had a hockey arena. Can you imagine Toronto if it had an arena for every 1200 people.  That would be more ice than Rob Ford could manage. Now a half century later the only what if question I still consider, is why did I not make the NHL. Sure I knew the odds and acknowledged I was not very good.  But what coach failed me when I needed a boost to a larger neighborhood? The NHL was built upon players like me, people who respected the code and would do what they were told.

For most of the twentieth century the NHL was a sideshow in the great enterprise of sport. It was the used car dealership of sport. Yet the game overcame.

Today we suffer from overexposure to fans who could care less about an offside than goaltender interference. Imagine the Indy 500 where drivers where hired to crash into the contenders and just generally slow down the speed and skill to a level where anyone with a G license who was willing to risk their skull could partake as well.

The NHL was built upon a six team league. Don Cherry extols about these times
but does not seem to realize what made that era great is something upon which he constantly drops the dime.

The fix is in, we know what to do. We see it in the playoffs, and its comming to Sochi too. Drop the goons, call the passengers, let the flyers fly and it does not mean there will be no blood on the chin.

H/T JT (she mostly says what I mean about hockey)