What the Puck

What a brilliant title! I am so damn witty.

So I attended my first pro hockey game this past weekend, between the Capitals and the Florida Panthers. It was certainly better than I expected, although hockey is one of the few sports that I don't follow, nor have expressed any interest whatsoever in following, so "better than I expected" doesn't carry too much meaning. Yes, it's true what many people have told me in the past, hockey is much better live than on TV. Of course, you could say that about most sports, with the possible exception of football, which was seemingly made for television. This was a sloppy game though, or so it seemed to me. "Passes" went to the other side just as often as to the passing team, and most shots seemed either rushed or else too delibrate. That seems to be the philosophy in hockey, as far as I can tell; fling enough pucks at the goal, and some are bound to go in - scoring by attrition. But then again, what the hell do I know, right?

There were several women among our sizable group there that lamented the dearth of fights and bloodshed in hockey (I guess the NHL cracked down on that a few years ago?), which I don't quite understand. That's always been one of my hockey turn-offs; if the sport is that good, and the players that skilled, why do they let these thugs out onto the ice to fight a few times a game? I don't know if that's been eliminated from hockey completely, but judging by this game it has, and that can only be a good thing. Now if only the players were more skilled, or at least more consistent, than the two mediocre (at best) teams that I saw on Saturday.

So that's the final verdict from this corner: hockey, it doesn't suck completely, but it's pretty damn close. I would actually attend another game, if I didn't have to buy the ticket, and there wasn't anything better going on that night (like a good baseball, basketball, soccer, or football game on TV, for example).