Brief Hockey Thoughts

I do not consider myself much of an NHL fan and I can't remember the last time I watched a regular season game consisting of any team not named the New York Rangers. But then again, I am not much of an MLB fan, or a golf or a tennis fan; that doesn't mean I don't thoroughly enjoy watching my favorite teams/players compete. It's very difficult to watch anything when you don't have a personal attachment to the contest, be it emotionally or financially. The latter is really what, in many ways, makes the NCAA Tournament and to a lesser extent the NFL such riveting television: people have money and/or pride on the line.

As for sports like baseball and hockey, they have an obscure dimension to them that makes them, for the casual fan, hard to grasp and even harder to hold on to. One of the major reasons for the struggle to pay attention to hockey is the lack of a consistent star; in the NBA, if you watch a Cavs game, Lebron will almost all the time score somewhere around 30 points and make at least 2 plays that will amaze you. If you watch a Penguins game, the odds are Sydney Crosby scores one point, maybe 2, and that is all you are going to get. That one play might leave you in more awe than all of Lebron's plays combined, but it is only for an instance, and all too infrequent.

So with all that said, a strange thing happened yesterday: After seeing highlights of Game 6 between the Canadiens and Bruins (which featured 6 goals in the 3rd Period) I decided to tune into Game 7, and I was not disappointed. It was the first non-Rangers NHL game I can remember watching, and all I could think was, If only the regular season was anything like this. I remember watching Olympic hockey about 6 years ago and loving every second of it, and thinking all the NHL had to do was cut the season and number of teams in half and elongate the playoffs using the same Group Format as the Olympics. That would be too good to ignore. Alas, that will never happen, so at least we still have these playoffs. The Bruins lost in a blowout but the game was so much more entertaining than the score.

On that note, I want to discuss a few things about the Rangers, a team that I followed alot closer last year than this year. A trip to MSG and a post-game gathering with the players swung me violently back into fan-mode.

- There are different levels of players to like, different categories of guys you respect and appreciate. At the top are obviously your superstars, your Kobes and Lebrons who carry franchises. Then you have, in no particular order, the hustlers (David Lee), the old-timers (Paul O'Neil), and the gutsy who play through injury (Plaxico Burress). But there's that one group of guys that can transcend even the superstars if they play their cards properly...let's call this the Sean Avery Group.

Sean Avery is one of the most all-around entertaining athletes I have seen in a while, a new-age Mike Tyson who will instigate a fight and then knock you on your ass. There are not many like him. A few athletes make us laugh in press conferences, like Iverson, but it is quite a treat to be brought to tears during the actual game; well that is exactly what Sean Avery did when he pranced in front of Martin Brodeur in Game 5 like a man holding a giant match trying to light a moving candle. What he did may have led to a rule-change, but it also led to the mental demise of one of New York's bitter enemies. Backing it up in the post-game press conference only etched Sean Avery in my mental landscape as an eternal favorite: After fielding a question about why Brodeur refused Avery's handshake, Avery quipped: "Well I put my hand out there, but Fatso refused to shake it."

Well done Sean; if that guy can't attract a casual fan or two, hockey's got a tough road ahead of it.

- As for the actual hockey, the Rangers look great right now. Their star goalie, after letting up just 2 goals in the series' first 2 games, struggled abit in Game 3, and then he surrendered 3 a piece in the next 2 games. An outsider might consider this average play at best, but upon further review, the only things Lundquist couldn't stop was shaky ice and his defensemen's skates. Nearly every goal was excusable, a very good sign for things to come.