Five For Fighting

The past couple of Sundays, I've had the good fortune to catch a hockey game on NBC during the afternoon nap hour. Growing up in the South, I never really played much hockey as a kid. I did do a short stint playing unorganized street hockey after the first Mighty Ducks movie came out. I had a pretty good triple deak. Really, I never even watched that much hockey growing up, though I do seem to remember some cartoon version of Wayne Gretzky fighting crime with Bo Jackson and Michael Jordan. Ongoing train wreck aside, I’ve decided that I really enjoy the game of Hockey. It has the physicality of Football, the skill and tactics of basketball, and the strategy of baseball. What's more is, I think that Hockey has a lot to offer other sports in the way of rules and procedures.

You may not know this, but in Hockey, (at least in the NHL on NBC on Sundays) they don't have to call timeouts to make substitutions. Subs just jump onto the ice right in the middle of the game. Some guys will be skating along and all the sudden they just head to the bench and then a bunch of other guys jump over the wall and take their place. Imagine if basketball coaches didn't have to call timeouts or wait for free throws to make changes to the lineup. For one it would just speed up the game. But it would also eliminate the excuse for teams to have a dozen timeouts per half and consequently eliminate the absurd practice of fouling and burning timeouts to move the ball to half court. (This is a whole other post altogether, but may be the worst rule in all of sports.) Football kind of uses this substitution method already, but it doesn’t really speed up the game because of the fact that everything completely stops in between each play.

Something else you may not know about hockey is the penalty for fouling. This is probably my favorite. I’m still not sure exactly how it works; but sometimes when a player commits a foul he has to immediately sit out of the game for a certain amount of time. Not only is he out of the game for a while, but his team can’t even sub for him. That’s right sports fans; play continues with a mismatch. One team gets to keep playing with more players than the other team. They call this a “power play,” and it’s very exciting. Just imagine if Phil Jackson had to suddenly draw up a play for four players instead of five because Kobe couldn’t keep his hands to himself. Or, imagine if after a pass interference call, the defense had to suddenly defend Payton Manning with no more than ten players. It would be severely interesting to say the least.

Now I’ll admit that Hockey is not without its flaws. The whole fighting thing is kind of weird and, well childish, but admittedly entertaining. But, football is a pretty violent sport altogether and baseball and basketball players are just too cowardly to fight anyway. There is also this business of keeping up with some sort of points that don’t seem to contribute to the score of the game. Really it’s just an advanced way of keeping up with stats, and no American sport really has the right to accuse another of keeping too many stats. There is also the problem of basketball fans that are accustomed to hundreds of points in a game or football fans that always have the consolation of three points for not scoring a touchdown. These are the people who quickly get bored with hockey because someone isn’t scoring every two or three minutes. They could probably stand to learn some patience anyway, and I don’t think James Naismith ever planned on a final score of 121 to 119.

I don’t think that Hockey will ever be as big in the States as it is in Canada. But I do think it deserves a little credit. The pure skill level involved should be enough to entice any real sports fan. And, as much as I hate to be a front runner, the Pittsburgh Penguin's star Sidney Crosby is really fun to watch. Sure, the scoring is a little sparse, and the puck is a little hard to follow. But, what’s not to love about the only sport that has two halftimes.