Saturday, December 11, 2004
PUCKBASHING
I know there's a lot of people out there that care about hockey much less than I do, but...
Here's a couple of nuggets from Adam Kispert's C1 waste of space in this morning's Bremerton Sun, a piece which they haven't posted online because they probably knew I'd link to it...
...hockey is an excruciatingly boring sport to watch on TV.
Kispert follows this up with a juvenile comparison to a CSPAN congressional vote, and spends three paragraphs on how the World Series of Poker beat out playoff hockey ratings.
But if you're going to call it boring, don't just say it's boring. Say you don't like the defensive styles, say that the one game you saw was the Devils against the Wild, say that there's certain aspects of other sports that you like better. At that point, it just seemed like a fairly baseless argument to me.
But the one thing that separates poker from hockey on TV is that you can actually see what's going on in poker. To me, watching hockey is simply an exercise in trying to find the puck while a bunch of guys...slap it from one end of the rink to another.
I know I've watched hockey on more than one occasion, and I saw some of the glowing-puck era Fox telecasts and compared that to CBC telecasts, and guess what? It's not that freakin' hard to see the puck! The black disc may be a bit small, but it's not too hard to see people hacking at it, people running at it or people smashing the player handling it into the boards, etc.
Kispert then says the only time he knows where the puck is is after a goal is scored, and the red light goes off, but he never saw the puck go into the net. He's not even trying. I'm convinced.
Hockey's inability to translate well to TV has always held it back...and because of that, it will never be able to compete with football, baseball or basketball.
No, the NHL is having trouble competing right now because Gary Bettman is evil and because their marketing is doing a terrible job. I told Jeremy the other day that every NHL team needs a Tod Leiweke (now on the Seahawks' payroll). There's no reason the Minnesota Wild, an expansion team, should have done that well that quickly in the Twin Cities, years after the North Stars moved south to Dallas. But thanks to an effort spearheaded by Leiweke, the Wild sold out every game in their first three seasons, and the fans even got rabid enough to grow an intense hatred for the Canucks.
Kispert then says soccer will bypass hockey if the lockout lengthens and the NHL will go extinct in the United States. He likes the lack of hockey because it takes up less space in the paper, etc.
For one thing, I'm under the belief that any amount of corporate money put behind soccer will never, in this country, put it ahead of hockey. All I've heard about Major League Soccer is that it's where washed-up European players go to play out the end of their careers, and as I saw with Landon Donovan in the last week or so, it can be used as a minor league for the Europeans as well. But let's be honest here...the future of Major League Soccer right now is on the shoulders of Freddy Adu, a 15-year-old. I don't doubt his ability, but should it really come to that? A 15-year-old?
Another thing. Soccer bypassing hockey? Earlier in the article, Kispert said hockey was boring; has he tried watching soccer? I even tried to like watching soccer during World Cup play, but I just can't. For me, there's way too much open field and not enough scoring chances (maybe the Continental Indoor Soccer League would have suited me; the Seattle SeaDogs did win a championship, after all). I'm sure the fact that I never played organized soccer doesn't help me, so I can't see different plays materialize, but I just can't watch soccer.
Also, I played baseball for 11 years and have watched it for longer, so it doesn't even register with me half the time that some people think baseball is boring. I can see why, though. The ball really isn't in play that much of the time during the 2.5 to 3 hours that a game is being played. Pitcher throws ball, batter either hits/swings at/lets ball go by, and the play will be over within five seconds before time is out again. Someone could be bored stiff by the down time. I'm not blind to this. There are people out there that can't appreciate or get wrapped up in the mental game that is baseball.
I knew a soccer fan that hated American football because they run one play, that play ends, and they take at least 35-45 seconds to run the next one. Again, it's the down-time argument. In soccer, the balls goes out of bounds, they throw it right back in and the clock keeps moving. In hockey, there are no timeouts for substitutions, and making a bad line change can lead to a goal on the other end of the ice.
And what about basketball over the last 5-7 years? Has anyone enjoyed the onslaught of 73-70 games? There's a chance Kispert might have liked these highly defensive games, but I can tell you that the Sonics' ineptitude and the fact that college games were scoring higher than the NBA were two reasons I didn't watch the NBA with any regularity since 1999-2000, when the Sonics reached the playoffs with Paul Westphal at the helm.
Finally, Kispert slips in a reference to the Puget Sound Tomahawks, because when you watch one of their games in person, "you can actually see where the puck is about half the time." Yeah, that's a ringing endorsement. More like backhanded.
So to translate Adam Kispert's article in three words: he hates hockey.
Why do I miss hockey right now? Well, it's because the Canucks were part of my routine last basketball season, and the Sonics sucked. I'll be honest, I'm covering the Sonics more right now not just because the Sonics are good, but because they have a cable deal this year so I can see every game (KONG didn't reach Ellensburg; if FSNNW had a package one year earlier, I would have covered the Sonics a lot more), and because there's no Canucks.
Another thing: the Seahawks are crap. For me, the Canucks last year filled the hole of the Sonics being inept. This year, I don't have the Canucks as the team that would fill by void of sadness with at least a chance of happiness.
This post may seem off the cuff, but it got a reaction from me as I ate my cereal this morning. Hence, that was my reaction.
[Edit ~4:41p -- I'd originally said in the last paragraph that this "article" may seem off the cuff, but I don't really write articles, and I hope that didn't get misconstrued for me referring to Kispert's article being off the cuff.]
Here's a couple of nuggets from Adam Kispert's C1 waste of space in this morning's Bremerton Sun, a piece which they haven't posted online because they probably knew I'd link to it...
...hockey is an excruciatingly boring sport to watch on TV.
Kispert follows this up with a juvenile comparison to a CSPAN congressional vote, and spends three paragraphs on how the World Series of Poker beat out playoff hockey ratings.
But if you're going to call it boring, don't just say it's boring. Say you don't like the defensive styles, say that the one game you saw was the Devils against the Wild, say that there's certain aspects of other sports that you like better. At that point, it just seemed like a fairly baseless argument to me.
But the one thing that separates poker from hockey on TV is that you can actually see what's going on in poker. To me, watching hockey is simply an exercise in trying to find the puck while a bunch of guys...slap it from one end of the rink to another.
I know I've watched hockey on more than one occasion, and I saw some of the glowing-puck era Fox telecasts and compared that to CBC telecasts, and guess what? It's not that freakin' hard to see the puck! The black disc may be a bit small, but it's not too hard to see people hacking at it, people running at it or people smashing the player handling it into the boards, etc.
Kispert then says the only time he knows where the puck is is after a goal is scored, and the red light goes off, but he never saw the puck go into the net. He's not even trying. I'm convinced.
Hockey's inability to translate well to TV has always held it back...and because of that, it will never be able to compete with football, baseball or basketball.
No, the NHL is having trouble competing right now because Gary Bettman is evil and because their marketing is doing a terrible job. I told Jeremy the other day that every NHL team needs a Tod Leiweke (now on the Seahawks' payroll). There's no reason the Minnesota Wild, an expansion team, should have done that well that quickly in the Twin Cities, years after the North Stars moved south to Dallas. But thanks to an effort spearheaded by Leiweke, the Wild sold out every game in their first three seasons, and the fans even got rabid enough to grow an intense hatred for the Canucks.
Kispert then says soccer will bypass hockey if the lockout lengthens and the NHL will go extinct in the United States. He likes the lack of hockey because it takes up less space in the paper, etc.
For one thing, I'm under the belief that any amount of corporate money put behind soccer will never, in this country, put it ahead of hockey. All I've heard about Major League Soccer is that it's where washed-up European players go to play out the end of their careers, and as I saw with Landon Donovan in the last week or so, it can be used as a minor league for the Europeans as well. But let's be honest here...the future of Major League Soccer right now is on the shoulders of Freddy Adu, a 15-year-old. I don't doubt his ability, but should it really come to that? A 15-year-old?
Another thing. Soccer bypassing hockey? Earlier in the article, Kispert said hockey was boring; has he tried watching soccer? I even tried to like watching soccer during World Cup play, but I just can't. For me, there's way too much open field and not enough scoring chances (maybe the Continental Indoor Soccer League would have suited me; the Seattle SeaDogs did win a championship, after all). I'm sure the fact that I never played organized soccer doesn't help me, so I can't see different plays materialize, but I just can't watch soccer.
Also, I played baseball for 11 years and have watched it for longer, so it doesn't even register with me half the time that some people think baseball is boring. I can see why, though. The ball really isn't in play that much of the time during the 2.5 to 3 hours that a game is being played. Pitcher throws ball, batter either hits/swings at/lets ball go by, and the play will be over within five seconds before time is out again. Someone could be bored stiff by the down time. I'm not blind to this. There are people out there that can't appreciate or get wrapped up in the mental game that is baseball.
I knew a soccer fan that hated American football because they run one play, that play ends, and they take at least 35-45 seconds to run the next one. Again, it's the down-time argument. In soccer, the balls goes out of bounds, they throw it right back in and the clock keeps moving. In hockey, there are no timeouts for substitutions, and making a bad line change can lead to a goal on the other end of the ice.
And what about basketball over the last 5-7 years? Has anyone enjoyed the onslaught of 73-70 games? There's a chance Kispert might have liked these highly defensive games, but I can tell you that the Sonics' ineptitude and the fact that college games were scoring higher than the NBA were two reasons I didn't watch the NBA with any regularity since 1999-2000, when the Sonics reached the playoffs with Paul Westphal at the helm.
Finally, Kispert slips in a reference to the Puget Sound Tomahawks, because when you watch one of their games in person, "you can actually see where the puck is about half the time." Yeah, that's a ringing endorsement. More like backhanded.
So to translate Adam Kispert's article in three words: he hates hockey.
Why do I miss hockey right now? Well, it's because the Canucks were part of my routine last basketball season, and the Sonics sucked. I'll be honest, I'm covering the Sonics more right now not just because the Sonics are good, but because they have a cable deal this year so I can see every game (KONG didn't reach Ellensburg; if FSNNW had a package one year earlier, I would have covered the Sonics a lot more), and because there's no Canucks.
Another thing: the Seahawks are crap. For me, the Canucks last year filled the hole of the Sonics being inept. This year, I don't have the Canucks as the team that would fill by void of sadness with at least a chance of happiness.
This post may seem off the cuff, but it got a reaction from me as I ate my cereal this morning. Hence, that was my reaction.
[Edit ~4:41p -- I'd originally said in the last paragraph that this "article" may seem off the cuff, but I don't really write articles, and I hope that didn't get misconstrued for me referring to Kispert's article being off the cuff.]
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