Streaks, spoilers, and other suggested New Season’s resolutions

With opening night of the 2021-22 now less than a week away, it’s time for one of my favorite annual traditions: the New Season’s Resolutions column, in which I offer up a few suggestions for how we could all be a little bit better at this hockey fan thing.

That’s all these are – just ideas, not commandments. As always, you’re welcome to try out all of them, or pick and choose one or two, or roll your eyes and tell me to get lost. But we all have room for improvement, and now’s as good a time as any to think about how we can make that happen.

We’ll start with what might be the most important resolution we can all make this year, because it touches on one of the worst parts of hockey fandom…

Let’s not gatekeep these new fans (especially in Seattle)

With a new expansion team in place, the NHL has a rare opportunity to do something it’s struggled with over the decades and add a significant number of new fans. That’s a good thing, but sometimes you wouldn’t know it by how the rest of us treat the newbies. It feels like so many of us want to descend on the rookies and test them, making sure that they’re worthy of joining our club. Some of us just seem to be waiting for them to make a mistake, so we can declare that they’re fakers and exile them from the kingdom of True Hockey Fans.

I’ll go ahead and give us the benefit of the doubt and say that this all comes from a good place. We love this sport, and we know that means we’re in the minority. We’ve all seen the cheap punch lines and lazy coverage, and we think hockey deserves better. There’s an old joke that hockey isn’t anyone’s second favorite sport, because you’re either obsessed or you don’t care, and whether that’s true or not we’ve kind of internalized the idea. If you’re not obsessed then you must not care, and if you don’t care you’re probably going to do more harm than good, so get lost and let the real fans enjoy what we enjoy.

OK, fine. But that can’t work when it comes to new fans, and new markets. There is a learning curve with this sport, and it’s a steeper one that we’d like to admit. And stereotypes aside, nobody actually goes from being a non-fan to an obsessive overnight. Maybe they get there eventually, but there’s going to be some time where they’re still figuring things out. And that means they might not understand a rule, or get a name wrong, or cheer at the wrong time, or tweet something dumb. If all of us in the old guard are racing to pile on every time that happens, we’re just driving potential fans away from a league that desperately needs them.

To be clear, that doesn’t make it our job to sell the league to a new audience. The NHL has its own PR department, and if you don’t work there then you don’t have to pretend that everything is wonderful all the time. But you also don’t have to actively drive potential fans away by sending them the message that they don’t belong, or that they aren’t welcome. Give them a chance to try the sport on for size. Some will like what they see and stick around, others won’t, and that’s how it’s supposed to work.

Maybe a few of those new fans will even become the next generation of embittered diehards, complaining about the refs and hating the loser point and booing Gary Bettman. If so, awesome. But until then, save the pop quizzes and eye rolls and give them a chance to get settled in.

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Ringing in the new NHL season with some 2021 resolutions

I have this post that I like to do every year right around the time that the NHL season is almost about to start, where I recognize a new beginning in the hockey world by suggesting some resolutions. Get it? It’s funny, because they’re new year’s resolutions, but it’s September.

Welp.

While 2020 will go down as the most messed up year in sports history, it’s at least leaving hockey fans with a nice bit of symmetry. With camps opening over the coming days, we get to have our new season and our new year at pretty much the same time. That means I get to do this resolutions gimmick at the same time you’re probably making the real thing. Or maybe you’re not, and you’re just planning to mark the end of 2020 the same way I am, by standing on your front porch at 11:59 p.m. screaming “GET OUT I HATE YOU” at the sky while your kids slowly inch back towards their rooms. We’re all coping in our own ways, is what I’m saying.

Where was I? Oh right, new season’s resolutions. As always, I’ll be offering up a few suggestions for how all of us — fans and media, newbies and diehards — can do this hockey thing just a little bit better. You’re welcome to pick and choose which ones might work for you. Maybe you already do a few of these, or you don’t think you should. If so, that’s fine. The main point is that we all have room for improvement, and far more importantly, 2020 can go screw.

Let’s stop acting like a shot that hits the post is a lucky break for the goalie

I’ll admit that I tend to pick on goalies. And rightly so, because they’re all huge weirdos who’ve ruined entertaining hockey by getting way too good at their jobs. I’m telling you, kids, this sport was a happier place when the goalies were all 5-foot-3 and had to desperately wave their adorably tiny limbs around to make saves before falling over because somebody made them try to move sideways. Now they’re all RVH cyborgs who wear the power armor from “Fallout” as equipment and who can shave 10 points off their save percentage by learning how to hold their head at a slightly different angle in the offseason. I hate them.

But today, a peace offering to my goaltending friends: We need to stop pretending they got lucky when a shot hits the post.

We all do it. You’ll hear about a goaltender getting a shutout, but then somebody chimes in with “Sure, but they gave up three posts.” OK … and? What does that have to do with anything? They stopped every shot that was going to go in the net, right? What’s the problem?

It’s especially weird since hockey fans generally hate the concept of luck. It’s the one four-letter word you’re not supposed to ever say at a hockey rink. You know the drill. Good teams make their own luck, good players just “find a way,” it all evens out anyway, etc. Fair enough. But then a goaltender has a good game, and we all want to accuse them of being lucky.

If a player dekes a goalie out of his shorts but then fans on the open net, you could call that luck. If a sure goal is taken off the board because the referee mistakenly blew the play dead, sure, that’s luck. If an ancestor of the bat from the 1975 Fog Game swoops down from the rafters just as the goalie is beaten clean on a slapshot and the puck hits it in mid-air, Randy Johnson style, and bounces harmlessly away, then absolutely, that would be luck.

But when a shot that wasn’t going in doesn’t go in? That’s not luck. That’s a shot that missed the mark. It’s not a goalie’s job to stop those. Tom Barrasso was right!

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t make note of shots that hit the post. Those are near-misses, and in a game of millimeters, like the modern NHL, they’re important moments. But the goalie is responsible for keeping the puck out of a very specific 24-square foot space, and that’s it. If they do that job for 60 minutes or more, that’s all we can ask. So let’s stop telling goalies they were just lucky when they weren’t.

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Offering up some New Season’s Resolutions for 2019–20

A new year of NHL action is almost here, which makes it a good time for some New Season Resolutions. Nobody’s perfect, and whether we’re diehard fans, relative newbies or cantankerous media, we can all strive to be a little bit better. The start of a new season is a chance for hockey fans to begin the year right, by setting goals for some self-improvement.

While your own personal resolutions are of course up to you, I can offer up a few suggestions to get you started. If you’re looking for some inspiration, here are a half-dozen potential resolutions for the new season.

Let’s not pretend that every bad team is this year’s Blues

Last year’s Blues were an amazing story. They went from preseason contender to first-half disappointment to dead last in the league to obvious trade deadline sellers to hey wait a minute to the Stanley Cup, all in one year. It was great. If you’re a fan of sports, stories like that are easy to love.

They’ve also very rare. Teams aren’t supposed to do what the Blues did last year. In fact, just about none of them do. That’s part of what made last year so fun.

And it’s something we’re going to have to remember this year, because oh man, every team that starts out slowly is going to point to the Blues as reason for optimism.

You can already feel it coming. Heck, we’ve already seen it during the offseason, when GMs were eager to tell us that if the Blues could win, their team could too. And it’s going to be out of control once we get a few weeks into the season and teams that have stumbled through a disappointing start are insisting that it’s all part of the plan.

It’s not hard to picture, right? Some poor GM or coach or team captain will be asked to explain why his team is already seven points out of the playoff race and whether fans should be worried that everything seems to be falling apart. And instead of actually having to come up with a reason for optimism, or worse, accept that the team isn’t all that good, he’ll just point to the Blues. They were bad. They were even in last place. And they won it all, so everyone just be patient and everything will be fine.

Let’s not fall for it.

For one thing, the Blues were always a good team, at least on paper. They’d made a big trade in the offseason, in an effort to get better. When they started slowly, they made a big move by switching coaches. And they solved their biggest problem by, uh, finding an amazing goaltender in the ECHL. Might not want to put that last one on the recommended list, but they pulled it off.

The key point here is that Doug Armstrong and friends didn’t just shrug and say “Oh well, we stink, let’s just stay the course and hope for a miracle.” And we shouldn’t let bad teams get away with doing that over the next few weeks and months.

Have you made a blockbuster trade? Did you fire the coach? Did you switch out your starting goaltender? Fine, do all of that and then maybe you can claim to be a candidate for Blues status. But if you’re just standing pat and trying to buy time by pointing to some other team’s miracle season, the rest of us shouldn’t be falling for it.

Let’s accept that we’ll need a learning curve on player tracking

At this point, we’re not completely sure when we’ll get full puck and player tracking. It was supposed to arrive this season, then it was going to be the postseason. The league recently dropped its technology partner, but says that won’t delay the implementation. We’ll see.

But whenever player tracking does finally arrive, there’s one thing we can count on: Nobody will be quite sure how to use it.

The teams won’t know. The analytics experts you follow on Twitter won’t know. The average fan sure won’t. We’re all going to be figuring this out as we go.

That’s going to lead to a lot of confusion and to a lot of information being thrown out into the world without enough useful context. What if Connor McDavid skated further in tonight’s game that Auston Matthews did? OK. Is that good? Does it matter? Do any of these numbers tell us anything useful about who’s going to win?

While we’ll all be struggling with those sort of questions, they’ll especially apply to TV broadcasters, who are going to be flooded with new information that they’re not quite sure what to do with. TV is a visual medium, so you know we’re going to be inundated with flashy graphics and rapidly updating numbers about things like skating speeds and cumulative pass distances. Some will be helpful. Most probably won’t.

And when that happens, it’s going to be tempting to get up on a soapbox and put on a big show of complaining. Some of that will be justified, especially when our screens are all clogged up with obvious nonsense. But let’s resolve to remember that there’s going to be a learning period here for everyone, just like there was when we started getting better statistical data near the start of the cap era. We didn’t get it all right from Day 1 back then, and we definitely won’t now.

Eventually, we’ll look back on the first few years of players tracking and shake our heads at all the misplaced attention and useless red herrings we wasted our time on. We’ll figure it out. But in the meantime, let’s accept that some of this will get silly and that we won’t get anywhere if we don’t let people make some mistakes along the way.

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New season's resolutions for 2016-17

It’s almost that time of year again.

With the World Cup of Hockey done and the exhibition schedule wrapping up, we’re now just over a week away from opening night of the NHL’s regular season.

It’s a great time to be a fan. The real games are almost here, but today everyone is still tied for first, and there’s a sense of hope lingering over just about every team. Everyone’s best-case scenario is still on the table.

Of course, that won’t last — one bad shift in the first period of the first game will have you screaming at your TV and wondering why you ever bothered getting your hopes up.

But we're not quite there yet. This is still the time of year when anything is possible.

Since this is the start of a new year on the hockey calendar, let's take a moment to make some new year's resolutions. After all, none of us are perfect, and every fan has room for some self-improvement.

We could all come up with an idea or two of our own, but if you'd like a few suggestions, I'm here to help.

Here are a half-dozen New Season's Resolutions that it wouldn't hurt some fans to make.

Let's not rig the all-star game vote this year

Hey, remember the whole John Scott thing? That was fun, wasn't it?

You may not have thought it was especially funny at first – the NHL sure didn't – but you have to admit that it all worked out pretty well in the end. Seeing Scott win all-star MVP honors and get carried off the ice by his teammates was a moment worthy of Hollywood. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime things.

It was great. So let's not try to do it all over again this year.

Oh, it will be tempting. There was a long history of all-star vote rigging that led up to Scott; remember Vote For Rory in 2007, or when a small Baltic nation took over the vote in 2014 or whatever the heck it was that led to this happening?

We've been down this road before, and there's going to be an urge to do it again. Somebody out there is probably setting up a wacky Twitter account right now.

But let's not. Scott was too perfect. It was the walk-off home run of ballot-box stuffing. Trying to recreate it would just be lame.

Hopefully the NHL will remove the temptation by coming up with a way to avoid the problem in the first place. But this is a league that occasionally doesn't get around to things in time, so we can't count on them.

Instead, let's just all agree that we had our laugh, and the joke is over.

Rory was funny. Scott was perfect. The concept has run its course. Let it rest.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet

New season's resolutions for 2015

Training camps open this week across the NHL, with the exhibition schedule getting started over the weekend. And you know what that means: Every player in the league has never worked harder in the offseason, is in the best shape of his life, and is primed for the greatest season of his career. Yes, literally every player. Once this guy starts doing crunches, it’s officially unanimous.

And since everyone in the league has apparently spent the summer becoming the very best versions of themselves, that means it’s our turn now. With just three weeks until opening night, now is the time for hockey fans to make some new season’s resolutions, in an annual rite of passage in which some idiot sportswriter tells you what to think a nice man shares some helpful ideas for self-improvement.

As always, your personal list of resolutions is up to you. But we do have a few suggestions to get you started.

Let’s Just Accept That Gary Bettman Doesn’t Always Tell the Truth

As NHL commissioner, Gary Bettman is the face of the league, and quite likely the most important person in the sport today. He is also somebody who bends the truth when speaking to the league’s fans with stunning regularity. And honestly, that really shouldn’t bother you.

Like him or not, Bettman has a tough job. He has to serve many masters. He has to juggle multiple competing priorities. And he has to do it all while pretending that he really, deeply, sincerely cares about making the NHL’s fans happy.

But here’s the thing: Gary Bettman doesn’t work for you. You are his customer, but you are not his employer, and telling you the truth is not in his job description. Oh, he’d certainly prefer you to be happy. It makes his life much easier, and it makes the lives of his bosses — the team owners — much easier, so all things being equal, he likes you and wants you to be a satisfied customer. But he has a job to do, and telling you the truth is not part of it. Sometimes, a little bit of spin, PR-speak, or even flat-out dishonesty is in the league’s best interest. And once you accept that, you’ll find yourself a lot less aggravated by Bettman’s existence.

So this year, don’t get angry when Bettman swears that all 30 markets are in great shape. Don’t be offended when he pretends that Las Vegas expansion hasn’t been a sure thing for the better part of a year. Don’t keep holding a grudge over all the times that he tried to act like his latest lockout had anything to do with ticket prices. And if the media reports that a team is about to move and he accuses them of “making it up” and that team does indeed move just a few days later … you know, again … just roll with it.

That doesn’t mean you can’t hold him to some sort of standard. It’s OK for him to lie, but he’s supposed to do it while maintaining some small grasp on reality, so if he drops a truly ridiculous eye-roller like last year’s bit about fans not caring about player salaries, go ahead and mock him for it. But for the rest of it, don’t expect the whole truth and nothing but the truth from Bettman and you won’t be disappointed.

Remember, he’s not lying because he’s a bad guy, or because he doesn’t care about you as a fan. He’s just doing his job. Don’t take it personally.

Let’s Stop Calling the Puck-Over-Glass Rule ‘Black-and-White’

The NHL’s puck-over-glass rule is divisive. Many think it’s a dumb rule, one that almost always ends up being called on plays that everyone knows were purely accidental. Others like it, arguing that it prevents intentional delays and boosts offense by adding an element of risk to clearing the defensive zone. You’re probably already firmly entrenched on one side or the other, and I’m not going to try to change your mind today.

But there’s one thing we should all be able to agree on: We need to stop referring to the rule as “black-and-white.” That’s a term that always comes up whenever the rule is discussed, usually offered as a defense. We already rely on the referees’ discretion for almost everything else in the rulebook, the thinking goes, and we all seem to think that they blow those calls way too often. Whatever flaws it may have, at least the puck-over-glass is the one rule that gets called consistently across the board, with no room for interpretation or judgment calls. Which would be a decent argument, if there were any truth to it.

Here’s what happens when a referee calls a hooking penalty: His arm goes up, the player complains a bit and then goes to the box, and we line up for the faceoff. Here’s what happens when a referee calls a tripping penalty: His arm goes up, the player complains a bit and then goes to the box, and we line up for the faceoff. Here’s what happens when a referee calls a cross-checking penalty: His arm goes up, the player … well, you get the idea.

Here’s what happens when a puck gets shot over the glass: Everyone on one teams start wildly pointing and waving, as if the officials somehow didn’t notice what just happened. Then everyone on the other team starts slapping their hands together in the universal sign for “It was deflected.” Then all the officials, referees and linesmen both, huddle up for an extended discussion, in which they attempt to triangulate the puck’s exact exit point to determine if it went over the end glass or the bench, since the rule treats those areas differently. Then they make a decision, skate over to each bench, and explain the verdict to the coaches. Then we watch a series of replays, none of which is remotely conclusive. Then everyone gives up, shrugs, and tries to remember what the score was back when this whole mess started.

That whole scenario is a lot of things, and if you want to argue that it all adds up to a net positive for the sport, then go ahead. But it’s sure not “black-and-white,” because black-and-white rules don’t require an all-hands-on-deck meeting of the minds every time they’re called. The puck-over-glass rule may have some things going for it, but simplicity and clarity aren’t on that list.

If anything, it’s just about the least black-and-white rule in the rulebook. Defend it if you must, but at least do it using words that make sense.

>> Read the full post on Grantland

Suggested new season's resolutions

Finally, NHL hockey is kind of, sort of back.

After weeks of signings and trades, offseason training updates, and fuzzily tweeted photos of rookie scrimmages, today’s the day that full training camps officially open across the league. The 2014-15 season has finally arrived.

As we count down to opening night in less than three weeks, this is a good time to make some new year’s season’s resolutions. After all, everyone who enjoys this sport, from the brand-new fans to the longtime diehards, could probably stand a little improvement. So let’s take a moment to think about the ways in which we could all become better fans.

You could probably come up with a few self-improvement ideas of your own. But if you could use a nudge, I’ve taken the liberty of making a half-dozen suggestions.

Let’s stop making everything about character

To be clear: Character matters. It matters in all walks of life, and that’s especially true in professional hockey. Some guys work hard, and others are lazy. Some guys are good in the room, and others are poison. Ninety percent of NHL players are so close in talent these days that a little extra effort here or a little bit better team chemistry there could be the difference in deciding a game or two, and those one or two games could decide who makes the playoffs.

But while character matters, it’s not the only thing that matters. And that may come as a surprise if you spend much time consuming what passes for hockey analysis these days. At some point over the last few years, it feels like character went from being one factor out of many to being the most important factor, sometimes even the only one. Every coach explaining away a loss, every columnist breaking down the action, every fan who calls in to the postgame show … these days, everyone drones on and on about character.

And that’s kind of ridiculous, because character isn’t everything. It’s not more important than talent. It’s not more important than systems. It’s not more important than using a player in the right role for his skill set. It’s not even more important than luck (more on that one in a bit).

And yet character — along with related concepts like chemistry, culture, body language, and compete level — has taken over hockey analysis. Teams don’t lose anymore because they have bad players or a flawed game plan. Now, they only lose when they don’t compete hard enough. If everyone had just worked harder, we’re told, everything would have been fine.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is kindergarten thinking: “Everybody can be a winner if they just try their very best.” Well, no, they can’t. Not in the NHL. It’s all well and good to be a hard worker and a good teammate, and players should certainly strive to be both. But some players are just better than others, and sometimes the coach’s X’s and O’s turn out to be a mess, and sometimes you play great and the puck just bounces the wrong way. And at some point we all just stopped talking about that stuff and decided to make it all about personality.

There’s a concept in psychology called the fundamental attribution error, which basically goes like this: When something happens to us, we consider a wide range of reasons, but when it happens to somebody else, we assume that it can only be the result of internal factors. If I cut you off in traffic, it’s because I’ve had a hard day at work and my kids are screaming in the backseat and all of this rain has reduced visibility. If you cut me off, it’s because you’re a jerk.

Once you learn to recognize it, the fundamental attribution error starts showing up everywhere in today’s hockey coverage. A star player who hits a cold streak over the course of a playoff series couldn’t have been shut down by a superior player, or put in the wrong role by his coach, or limited by an injury, or just had a run of plain bad luck over a short span of games. No, he has to have suffered a moral failure. He didn’t compete. He didn’t want it bad enough. He was mentally fragile, he’s not a winner, and he didn’t “just find a way,” whatever that means.

We’ve taken a small but important part of success or failure and made it everything. We’ve turned hockey into a modern morality play, complete with heroes and villains, where the good guy always wins in the end. Because, after all, whoever wins is by definition the good guy, since otherwise they couldn’t have won.

It makes us sound silly, and it’s time to rein it in. “Just do your best and everything will work out fine” is a cute thing to tell a nervous kid on the first day of school. But it’s not a strategy for a professional sports team, and we shouldn’t try to pass it off as intelligent analysis.

>> Read the full post on Grantland

Grantland: New Year's Resolutions for the NHL Fan

The NHL exhibition season has begun, which means in some sense, a new year of hockey has finally arrived. So it’s apparently time to come up with a few New Year’s resolutions — those little things we could all do to make ourselves better fans.

After all, is there anyone in the hockey world who can really claim to already be perfect? Oh, right, this guy. Man, he ruins everything. I hate him. [Adds “stop being jealous of perfect people” to personal resolutions list.]

But the rest of us still have room for improvement, and now seems like as good a time as any to work on it. So here are a few suggested New Year’s resolutions for hockey fans to consider. Pick one or two. Pick them all. Or pick none of them and just berate me in the comments. [Adds “stop being thin-skinned about the comments” to personal resolutions list.]

Wait, where were we? [Adds “stop overusing that distracting third-person device” to personal resolutions list.] Right, the resolutions. Here are 10 suggestions for your consideration.

Let’s try to go easy on the steroid speculation

It’s an Olympic year, which means any players picked to go to Sochi will have to be drug tested. And let’s just say that IOC drug testing is slightly more comprehensive than the NHL’s system.

So if you were an NHL player who dreamed of playing in Sochi but happened to be dabbling in the occasional PED use, you’d probably think twice about continuing that this year. And that fact will no doubt lead to all sorts of rumors and speculation for any potential Olympians who get off to a slow start this season.

We went through this four years ago — Alexander Ovechkin was a popular target — and there’s no doubt the subject will come up again this year. Under its current testing program, the NHL has suspended a grand total of one player for PED use. In a league in which strength and endurance are crucial, common sense says that somebody out there must be getting away with something.

But while there’s little doubt that some players probably are cheating, it’s also true that everyone goes through an occasional slump. So when some NHL star struggles through October, let’s let him get a week or two into November before we go full Pujols.

>> Read the full post on Grantland