Tag: NHL

By Julian Dorey

Columnist

There are plenty of cliché quotes in sports. One that I hear (and say) seemingly every April is: “There’s nothing like playoff hockey.”

What does that really mean, though? All four major sports have a postseason, and all of them are exciting. So what is it about hockey?

It’s simple: a hockey game has the quickest ups and downs. Contrary to a sport like basketball, a goal in hockey means a lot. A simple basket in the NBA is just two or three points out of 100.  In hockey, a goal might be one of two.

When you compare hockey to a sport like baseball, it’s easy to say baseball can be just as exciting—the final scores often look similar to hockey (4-3, 5-2, etc.). But in baseball, it’s very clear as to when a team can score: when it’s up to bat. In hockey, a power play for one team can easily culminate with an errant pass leading to a breakaway goal for the shorthanded team.

In the playoffs, especially—with blood pressure and nerves high, and tenacity at a new level—the typical NHL game is “back and forth.” Every time a player approaches the blue line fans move up in their seats a little bit. Each shot is met with some kind of verbal reaction. The nerves and emotions of every fan shift faster than the skates of every player on the ice.

There’s no other way to explain it. Playoff hockey brings something out of fans that no other sport can. If I had a nickel for every time I watched a playoff hockey game with a non-hockey fan and watched them slowly get into the game like it was life and death, I would be a millionaire.

Two years ago, an NHL team pulled off something in the playoffs that had been done only once in the history of any other sport (and just two previous times in hockey). The Philadelphia Flyers came back from a three game deficit to beat the Boston Bruins 4-3 in a best-of-seven-games series. What was even more shocking was the Flyers were down 3-0 in the first period of game seven in Boston and came back to win the game 4-3 in regulation. If that doesn’t get you going, I don’t know what does.

Results like that tend to make the case for me. And, trust me, there are plenty more great examples.

There are also the traditions. Perhaps the most well-known one is the playoff beard. Each spring, most of the NHL players in the playoffs relegate their razors to the bottom cabinet. It’s supposed to be a “team unity” thing or something. To most fans, it’s just another funky, off-beat part of the playoffs that adds a little flavor. By the conference finals, most of the remaining players look more like cavemen than athletes. It doesn’t seem to affect their play, though.

This year is already off to an incredible start. More than 10 games across all of the first round series have gone to overtime. Upsets are brewing everywhere.

The only thing that remains the same from last year is the feeling everyone gets watching the drama unfold.

Tune in—it’ll be worth your while.

By Winnie Warner
Arts & Life Layout Editor

It’s NHL playoff season and it has started rough. Rough for heartbroken fans, rough for the losing teams, and especially rough for the players at the mercy of the string of dirty hits and scrums that have defined the first round of playoffs.  In the 28 post-season games that were completed by Wednesday night, there were 1,006 penalty minutes, seven injuries caused by dirty plays and eight suspensions. 

At the center of these controversies is the series between longstanding rivals the Philadelphia Flyers and the Pittsburgh Penguins, whose Game Three resulted in 158 penalty minutes caused by a multitude of scrums, fights, and “chippy” plays.  While Game Three stood out for its more-than-usual rowdiness, it wasn’t that far from the norm of recent Flyers-Penguins games.  The next-to-last regular season match between the two concluded with an end-of-game brawl in which the coaches were climbing over their benches to yell at each other.

Games like these have created the need for the NHL to step in to try and take control of the situation by issuing fines and suspensions. Dirty plays and suspensions are nothing new to the game, but recent years have seen a rise in disputes over hits with intent to injure, such as knee-to-knee hits and “headshots.”

At the helm of this decision process is Brendan Shanahan, the NHL’s Vice President of Hockey and Business Development and lead disciplinarian. Shanahan assesses plays in question based upon the extent of the victim’s injury, whether the play appeared intentional, and whether the player in question possesses a history of similar plays.  Now, Shanahan is garnering some flack from fans who feel that the decision processes is flawed and uneven.  Their main rallying point is one of the most controversial plays in the playoffs so far.  In Game One of the Nashville Predators and Detroit Red Wings series, Predators captain Shea Weber checked veteran Red Wing Henrik Zetterberg into the boards and then proceeded to grab Zetterberg’s head and slam it into the glass, all of which occurred within the last seconds of the game.  Zetterberg fell to the ice immediately, but with the protection of his helmet he sustained no injury.  For this, Weber was only fined $2,500.

Fans are becoming more and more irked as they watch their teams’ players receive suspensions while others, like Weber don’t. Their annoyance deepens into anger when they see their favorite players injured by such play time and again.

When a game becomes marred by the loss of a favorite player to injury, or loss of respect for a favorite player who intentionally causes injury, it loses a bit of fun in watching the sport. The playoffs are inherently watched by a larger audience than regular season games, and the large amount of dirty play does nothing to dissuade those who only see hockey players as barbaric thugs on skates. NHL, it is your time to act!