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Thursday, June 03, 2004

Game five

All I want to say is that anyone who’s not watching the Stanley Cup finals tonight-- we’re just at the end of regulation time (never mind the post date-- this server is on Greenwich Mean Time), with the score 2-2-- is missing a fine, fine display of athleticism and speed and mad skills.  It certainly beats watching the NBA playoffs-- in the East, what was with those 64-61 final scores?  did they have to fish the round ball out of the peach basket each time the Pistons and Pacers scored?  --and in the West, what’s the point of watching Shaq backing inexorably toward the hoop and the championship?  Yes, b-ball has amazing athletes and great buzzer-beating dramatics, but (a) structurally, it’s like hockey slowed down to human speed; the only time a hockey team gets to “set up” an offense, and pass the puck around the perimeter, is when it’s on the power play (and even then it happens less than half the time), and (b) someone who loves basketball-- not me-- has to do something about all those timeouts, commercials, timeout commercials, and commercial timeouts.

For those of you who don’t bother with this site’s hockey blogging:  believe me, I know full well that the game is almost unintelligible on television.  The appropriate TV sports analogy is baseball, in which you simply don’t see what fielders do unless you’re at the park, where you can see the catcher lug it down the first base line on a ground ball or watch the infield prepare for a relay throw from left center.  But in baseball, 90 percent of the game is conducted between the pitcher and catcher, and that’s not all that hard to capture on the small screen.  Hockey is considerably more elusive.  For example, one of the things you don’t see on TV is one of the most crucial features of the game, namely, line changing.  You know how basketball coaches get all kinds of props for creating matchups, resting key players, putting out a fast and small squad or a couple of big men against the other team’s subs?  Yes, well, hockey coaches make those decisions every 45 seconds, and they do it without the benefit of play stoppages.  (Tampa Bay has been trying, all series long, to make sure that they always have someone on the ice to counter the Flames’ superstar Jarome Iginla.  Tonight it’s defenseman Darryl Sydor.) Even more amazing are coaches’ mid-game decisions to break up and rearrange their offensive lines:  for instance, tonight, for the crucial third period, with his team one goal down, Tampa Bay coach John Tortorella front-loaded offensive stars Brad Richards, Martin St. Louis, and Vincent Lecavalier on the first line.  But you wouldn’t know this if you weren’t paying attention to the rhythms of the series as it’s developed so far.  The result, on TV, is that hockey is a little like literary theory, unintelligible to the uninitiated even when presented the most fan-friendly format.

Anyway, once the Cup finals are over I’ll try to explain more fully why hockey, for all its terrible brutality and general inscrutability, strikes the ideal team-sport balance between luck and skill, pattern and chance, team effort and individual heroics.  Right now I’ve got to go watch overtime-- there’s nothing like it in all of sports.  Turnovers can happen anywhere, and it only takes five or six seconds to skate the length of the ice. . . .

UPDATE:  Flames win 3-2, and prove my point about individual/team effort.  Iginla gave the Flames a 2-1 lead all by himself late in the second period, spotting an errant Tampa Bay pass in his defensive zone, sprinting to the puck as it skittered down the ice, and firing-- almost from the right boards-- an insanely sharp shot off the far post and in.  In OT, just after another Tampa Bay rush and turnover (and at the end of what must have been an exhausting shift), Iginla got a chance in the Lightning zone, held onto the puck, sliding subtly from right to left from 35 feet out until he got an open shooting lane, just long enough to fire a blistering shot on Khabibulin; Oleg Saprykin picked up the rebound Khabibulin couldn’t control, and fired it home.  But the interesting thing is that after Iginla, Saprykin was the Flames’ best forward all night, and he clearly deserved-- that is, created-- a break like this.  He repeatedly beat the Lightning to loose pucks, and when he didn’t beat them outright he harassed them and forced turnovers.  He and Iginla and Shean Donovan and Chris Clark have all the speed the Lightning can handle, and Craig Conroy and Martin Gelinas and Stephane Yelle have created open ice out of nothing on every other shift, even though they’re unknown, journeyman players to everyone except serious hockey fans.  So after the Cup finals are over I’ll try to explain the Zen aspects of hockey, and why it’s important to accelerate to the puck all game long even if your efforts never show up on the stat sheet.

Um, I’ll also explain why I was clearly wrong to predict the Lightning in six.

Posted by Michael on 06/03 at 04:46 PM
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