A Theory of Ice

Defending Byzantium

2012-01-15T15:11:00.011-05:00

“Decline of the Habs Empire” isn’t a title so much as a genre designation. It would be like calling an article about the Leafs “Forty Years of Frustration”, or publishing a Canucks essay entitled “Successful but Still Not Likeable.” Excepting that of the Romans themselves, few tales of decline have been retold as often as that of the Habs. Mordechai Richler wrote on the theme; so did Ken Dryden

A Woman's Place is in the Corners

2012-01-12T00:01:00.007-05:00

“Hockey isn’t about skating from here to there…,” she lifts her stick and waves it vaguely at the far end of the rink. “… it’s about skating from here to there.” She points to the near boards. “Three strides. There’s never more than three strides between you and any puck you need to get to.” She demonstrates. The instructor has a most enviable three strides: low, wide-legged, quick and

Hunger Games

2012-01-07T15:58:00.004-05:00

They are a series of books for teenagers, and although they sound much like many other series of books for teenagers of the dystopian sci-fi variety, I am assured that they are exceptionally well-written and worthy of my time. Unfortunately, I will never read them, because they suffer from the one great failing of all YA lit, that is, the assumption that teenagers are as interesting to everyone

Lovelovelove

2011-12-28T23:42:00.004-05:00

It’s good to be right, but it’s better to be in love.November 2006I do not remember so much about my first hockey game. It was the season of ice storms, cold and snowless. I remember the bright red whirl of the crowd against the grey streets. I remember the darkness in the upper tiers, and the people in front of me who told us to sit down during the American anthem, and the dead silence of the

Elsewhere...

2011-12-19T15:36:00.000-05:00

If you're interested, today's post for today is being very kindly hosted over at Backhand Shelf. I'll have new content up on this site tonight or early tomorrow, insha'allah.

Shang Zhou Shoulda Dropped the Gloves

2011-12-16T14:02:00.005-05:00

[Forgive me if I’ve done this one before.]There is an old joke that says every Arabic word has four meanings: the first is the common usage, the second is the exact opposite of the first, the third is something pertaining to a horse, and the fourth is so unspeakably vulgar that no one will tell you what it is. English word-formation is a cruder than Arabic, so we don’t have quite the same

Sixth Defenseman Shuffle

2011-12-14T20:11:00.006-05:00

[Further to the post Get There From Here, The Theory will be doing an irregular series on methods of general management. The goal of these pieces is not to focus on the specific details of individual moves and decisions, but rather to use specific cases as a jumping-off point for the analysis of the principles and values by which managers operate. Eventually, we would like to get to the

On Narrative

2011-12-11T22:24:00.002-05:00

The PrologueWhen hockey comes into your life, there are other things that come along with it. These complementary customs and rituals vary from place to place depending on regional culture, but everywhere has them, and they tend to involve beer.In Taipei, the ritual was the 7-11. Taipei arena had no dressing rooms and no showers, so there was no question of anyone hauling their sweaty, stinky

Swift Judgments

2011-12-05T14:09:00.009-05:00

You want concision? Oh, you’ll get concision. I had a most interesting and informative discussion with Berkshire from EOTP today about quarter-season player evaluations. He’s working on a massive, detailed review of every player, because EOTP is a high-class site and that’s how they roll (will insert a link in this sentence as soon as it’s up). But down here in the internet trailer park that

Trick

2011-12-03T15:11:00.004-05:00

Just get it on net.“You need to start from further back. Behind your skate.”“No, I just need to get it on net.”“You’d get more power that way.”“But I wouldn’t get it on net.”He sighs. We’ve had this argument before. We always have this argument when we go out to practice. He wants me to do it right. I want to do it however I can actually do it. We’d go around and around and around until he

Ask the Theory: Talking to Losers

2011-11-30T21:21:00.004-05:00

On the Blogger dashboard, all the way to the right, there’s a stats tab, and under the stats tab are more tabs, including one that lets me see the most common search terms that have led visitors to this site. Now, most of the people who get to my blog via Google are searching for the title or some garbled variation thereon, so probably they know what they’re in for. But there are also a lot of

Discipline...

2011-11-29T21:48:00.010-05:00

Where the NHL is concerned, I’m pro-violence. I didn’t come to this stance easily and I don’t take it lightly, and I’d let it go if a strong majority of players come to the point where they don’t want it anymore, but so long as them-who-play find it meaningful and worthwhile for them, I think it makes the game better. More strategically interesting, more viscerally engaging, more socially

Get There From Here

2011-11-28T18:24:00.004-05:00

It is generally bad form to try to talk people out of their team loyalties. Not that loyalty should never be questioned, but a fan’s feelings for their team are personal, complicated things that often have their basis in childhood dreams and family relationships and other such areas that outsiders oughtn’t muck about in. Asking someone to give up their team is like asking them to put aside

On Seeing

2011-11-23T12:44:00.004-05:00

There are only two major ways of experiencing hockey: playing and seeing. Once upon a time and many years ago, there was hearing, but radio has largely fallen out of favor now, and the only person I’ve ever heard of who primarily listened to hockey was a blind AHL fanatic who could follow the games in the arena by the clacks and thumps alone. Sighted people in the modern era, however, pretty

Hurt

2011-11-22T01:07:00.002-05:00

I wake up with a long ache in my limbs. It’s a vague ache, the sort of ache that has no particular point to make. It’s not punishing me for some previous injury nor warning of any future infection. In fact, although it is a kind of pain, it is not entirely unpleasant- it carries with it a bit of an electric tingle, ever so slight, a residual static charge in the motor neurons. It diffuses

The Opposite of Adults

2011-11-18T14:58:00.005-05:00

[Note: The Q(ual)C(omp)R(ank) column shows the position on the qualcomp list the player occupies on his own team. So 1 means the guy faces the hardest competition on his team, 17 (generally) the easiest competition. I limited everything to players with at least ten games on the season.]Charts are beautiful things: so reasonable, so tidy, with all their neat straight lines and regularly

List: Three Ridiculous, Boring Coaching Ploys Better than Laviolette’s

2011-11-16T22:22:00.007-05:00

Recently, Flyers coach Peter Laviolette was able to stir up a bit of extra notoriety for his team with a creative scrap of hockey theatrics. Surely you’ve seen the clip by now: frustrated with the Lightning’s deployment of a 1-3-1 defensive posture early in the game, Laviolette instructed his team to simply refuse to carry the puck out of their zone, resulting in about 20 seconds of dead time

Bad Habits

2011-11-14T00:11:00.001-05:00

One of the things I enjoy about living in Canada is the frequency with which one just stumbles across hockey-things in ordinary life. For example, this morning (by which I mean early afternoon, since I am seldom conscious during the real morning on a Sunday), I am eating my Cheerios and flipping channels and there’s Georges Laraque, just hanging out on TV.It only takes a second to realize he is

Sigh...

2011-11-11T14:36:00.002-05:00

Fun fact: I hate cameras.

It's Our Limitations that Make Us Who We Are

2011-11-09T23:14:00.004-05:00

With apologies to The Mendoza Line, and the fans of 29 teams who will be angry with me after the last paragraph.The Copper & Blue took the first Habs-Oilers game of the season as an occasion to post a little article on the role of language in the Canadiens hiring policies. The title of the piece- “The Canadiens are Limiting Possibilities with Language Requirements”- is a fact, insofar as any

A Humble Game Preview

2011-11-07T23:59:00.003-05:00

Because every now and then we all need a little narrative.Ladies and Gentlemen, there are many dull Tuesdays in a season. In fact, if I may speak freely, I would say that the games of Tuesday are often the dullest games of the week. Despite the valiant efforts of our friends at Reseau des sports to pump us up for the Tuesday game, we often find ourselves nodding off a bit during the commercials

Hockey Ephemera: Cairo, 2009

2011-11-06T23:59:00.008-05:00

Sometimes, I thought that half the things in Cairo were lost, and half the people looking for them. The city feels huge beyond measurement or organization, a great agglomeration of buildings shoving each other against the banks of the Nile. They are immense, yes, skyscrapers in stature but not demeanor. The big buildings of Cairo are all faded brown and weary-looking, like thirsty travelers

Hockey Exegesis #3: The Moth of Madness

2011-11-04T01:39:00.002-04:00

(Sure, it’s a totally irrelevant title for this post, but it would have been an awesome alternate title for Perdido Street Station, amiright?)“You try to block out all the negatives. You worry about all the negatives, you end up in a rubber room.”- Gary SuterI don’t know if thinking about hockey has ever actually driven anyone insane. [N.B.: Here we are assuming that, by “rubber room”, Suter

Unnatural

2011-11-01T23:34:00.005-04:00

The Toronto Football Club is not very good. I don’t know enough about soccer- yes, I will call it ‘soccer’ throughout, because I’m American and that’s how we roll- to know that, but in case I missed it, the season ticket holder insists on telling me.“Just look at this mess. Fuck! No, no, no, nononono, FUCK! What was that?”The season ticket holder hates the TFC. So far, in this game, they’

Found Objects

2011-10-30T18:16:00.004-04:00

Because we need a break between the heavy stuff.1. Lowetide on the Canadiens- This is the second time in as many weeks I’ve had a prominent Oilers blogger look down from his lofty perch in order to inform me that the Habs suck. Okay, granted, Mr. Lowetide brings up a fair point, and he isn’t trying to make me, personally, sad, but still: one hot start and all y’all getting uppity already.

On Coaching

2011-10-27T17:52:00.002-04:00

Coaching is an odd profession. How many of us have vocations wherein we could switch employers every two to three years, without future employers questioning our abilities? In what other profession can a man be fired two or three or four times- each time a very public humiliation, his failures cataloged in print and on the airwaves- and find a new company eager to hire him the very same year?

Come Together, Right Now

2011-10-22T22:12:00.008-04:00

This is what I see:This last game was very close. The game against Colorado was very close. The Canadiens played very well through the first half of the season-opener against the Leafs; they played extremely well for almost the whole game against Buffalo. The two Thursday games, against Calgary and Pittsburgh, I didn’t see all the way through, but by the accounts of eyes I trust, they were the

1-5

2011-10-21T21:53:00.004-04:00

I have this hypothesis that Canadiens fans have no interest in being reasonable about their team. Being reasonable involves staying calm, examining evidence, and thinking long-term, which is not fun. Being batshit crazy, though, involves calling for people to be fired/traded/beheaded, making fun of Scott Gomez, and invoking the weeping ghost of Rocket Richard as often as possible, which is a

Play

2011-10-20T22:20:00.005-04:00

Leaving my apartment at 6:30 on a Thursday evening, I feel very guilty. The Habs home opener starts in forty-five minutes, and I won’t be watching it. They’re going to flash those spotlights all around and splash projected nostalgia across the ice, and there will be kids skating around with flags and all the roster lined up one by one, and the blackness above sparked through with little flashes

Anthology of Interest

2011-10-19T23:42:00.004-04:00

Five things I’ve enjoyed recently, because link dumps are the blogosphere’s way of paying it forward.1. Wyshynski on TauntingLike most general NHL blogs, I’m always a little ambivalent about Puck Daddy. It’s nice to have a one-stop-shop for what’s happening RIGHT NOW, especially for those of us who don’t get TSN and can’t deal with sports radio because we just don’t care about the Leafs and

Hockey Exegesis #2: Control

2011-10-18T23:18:00.004-04:00

“You’re really playing against yourself. You have to learn what you can control and what you can’t control and not let what you can’t control affect your confidence.”- Mike RichterGoalie wisdom is the best kind of hockey wisdom. Skater wisdom is useful, in that motivating, pump-yourself-up, c’mon-boys-lets-go way, but in the end it’s just a lot of different variations on “Try harder.”

Epistemology is a Bitch

2011-10-17T04:41:00.005-04:00

There’s an interesting article over on Backhand Shelf about choice and statistics, and for some reason Kierkegaard. It’s quite well-done, and clearly much thought-over, and although I agree with it in principle, I’m not entirely comfortable with the project it seems to be endorsing.I’ve made a similar point about choice before, in a much longer and unnecessarily florid way, although I wouldn’t

The Charm of the Shootout, First Analysis

2011-10-12T19:19:00.001-04:00

I have been much preoccupied lately with the shootout, and have come up with two different perspectives on it, which are not entirely concordant with one another. So rather than integrating them into a single post at odds with itself, I’ve decided to separate them into two distinct pieces. Perhaps when I’m finished I’ll know better which one I believe.“I sort of hope they make this one.”“What?”

Resurrection Town

2011-10-09T01:11:00.005-04:00

Once upon a time, in a café in Montreal, a very nice, very drunk, very old man tried to tell me that Winnipeg was the true heart of Canada. I am still not very clear on his exact argument, for as I say he was very drunk, and my French is not good. But according to this man, there was at one time in Winnipeg the opportunity for a synthesis of French and English and Native cultures into something

Five Reasonable Discussions with Don Cherry

2011-10-07T01:00:00.003-04:00

The first time I saw Coach’s Corner, I didn’t think Don Cherry was a real person. I thought it was a comedy sketch, and that at some point towards the end it would degenerate into utter surrealism, with beavers in tutus or something, like late-period Kids in the Hall. It wasn’t until the third or fourth viewing that I began to understand that this was, in some way, a serious thing, that this

Shanny and the Slippery Slope

2011-10-05T19:21:00.003-04:00

Let it never be said that Brendan Shanahan, in his new role as head of player discipline, did not begin with the very best of intentions. NHL supplementary justice has, for generations (or generations of players at least) been renowned for its unfathomable workings. Colin Campbell, the previous occupant of the role, operated according to such inscrutable reasoning that his rulings were widely

Hockey Exegesis #1: Sometimes They Hate You for a Reason

2011-10-01T20:34:00.003-04:00

“Every boo on the road is a cheer.”- Scotty BowmanThis is one of those hockey quotations that’s become famous solely as a one-liner. It’s popular as a lead-in for post-game recaps, a pre-game motivator in tough buildings, and one of those random sentences people put at the end of forum posts. It is never given any context or further explanation; rather, it’s taken as a scrap of transcendent

Insults/Teammates/Strength

2011-09-29T08:29:00.004-04:00

A few days ago, allegedly, Wayne Simmonds called Sean Avery a [pejorative term for homosexual]. Sean Avery, being a very sensitive and progressive person, took offense to the use of a pejorative term for homosexuals. Not personal offense, of course, but more the self-righteous offense of the progressive majority on behalf of the embattled minority. The That-Sort-of-Language-is-Just-Not-Right

Hockey Exegesis #0: The Muqaddimah

2011-09-27T20:53:00.002-04:00

Once upon a time, I received from a well-intentioned but fundamentally unhockeyish relation, a novelty book. It’s the sort of thing that tends to happen to nerdy fans around the holidays, according to the following process:1. Acquaintance/coworker/relative feels an impulse or obligation to gift you something.2. Acquaintance/coworker/relative remembers that you like hockey.3. A/C/R proceeds to

Isolation/Danger/Responsibility

2011-09-25T22:58:00.002-04:00

Three hockey players died by their own hands this summer: Derek Boogaard in May, Rick Rypien and Wade Belak in August. The things they died of are the sort of things we typically ignore: addiction in the first case, mental illness in the latter two. These are not exactly exotic problems in hockey. Anyone who’s been within spitting distance of a hockey rink or, hell, even a hockey bar knows

On Clutch and Choking

2011-09-02T00:25:00.001-04:00

Is clutchness real? I pose the question honestly, because I don’t entirely know. Like most people, I have a feeling that it is real. I have a subjective experience of clutchness. I know there are certain gamestates, not precisely defined but tending to occur at the end of close games and mostly in the playoffs, when a player makes a perfect use of a vanishing opportunity, and whether or not I

Tronna

2011-08-19T22:47:00.001-04:00

Time was Toronto was nothing to me but a headache. Drive from Chicago to Montreal, or Montreal to Chicago, and just about in the middle there’s this awful pain where you have to sit in a crawl of cars sixteen lanes wide for three slow, nauseous hours, and that pain has its own special name, and that name is Toronto. It is the single most dystopian stretch of unavoidable highway on the continent

Apocryphal Chronicles of Trivial Hockey Events #2

2011-01-24T10:45:00.001-05:00

Wherein a wealthy heir tries to make a point with the company money.Once upon a time, there was a man called Frederic McLaughlin. Frederic’s dad, Mr. McLaughlin, owned a coffee company, and moreover owned it during the latter half of the 19th century, when coffee was one of those slave-labor kind of commodities upon which a fortune might be built. Mr. McLaughlin built indeed, built up both a

On Luck, and Scale

2011-01-16T05:54:00.003-05:00

Bruce Boudreau’s problem is that he hasn’t kept any anger in reserve. In autocratic, people-managing positions- coaching, teaching, parenting, presidenting- it helps to have a sort of third gear of rage reserved for extraordinary circumstances. Blow the shock value of an explosive rant too early and, by the time shit gets really dire, you have nothing left with which to scare, or at least

Game 24: The Flesh Offering

2010-12-23T10:33:00.005-05:00

The studio felt like two telephone booths stuck together, or a hipster tribute to the glass cages of bin lang girls. It was small and cluttered and lived-in, a Playstation by the couch and well-thumbed motorcycle magazines on the shelves, empty tea cups on floor with mouldering zhenzhu clinging to the sides. One end was entirely full of the apparatus of the work, and in the clear portion there

Game 14: Predictions

2010-12-04T06:03:00.002-05:00

Those of you not interested in the minutiae of Taiwan hockey, stop reading now.This post has nothing to do with the Canadiens, or the NHL, or any hockey anywhere in North America, or anyone who plays it. Nothing. At all.If there is a larger purpose to this post, beyond the indulgence of my fangirlish tendencies, it is a personal test of the whole concept of ‘expert predictions’. I have my

Game 11: The Work of Hockey in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

2010-11-22T08:59:00.003-05:00

IIn principle, a hockey game has always been reproducible. In fact, the idea of replication is inherent in the idea of organized sports: every game is nothing more than a copy of an ideal game implied by the rules. Moreover, ideas for strategies, tactics, and even individual moves are copied by coaches and players from one game to another, one team to another, one generation to the next.

Game 10: Score

2010-11-19T05:21:00.002-05:00

Long ago (by which I mean last year) and far away (by which I mean a couple of kilometers from my front door), there was a player called Yu Kai-Wen. Or, at least, his family called him Yu Kai-Wen. We called him Kevin Yu, according to the custom of the day. Kevin Yu was probably the first great Taiwanese hockey player, the first Taiwanese player to be able to outplay a preponderance of the

Game 9: Next

2010-11-10T07:03:00.003-05:00

“You probably don’t know it, but you just saw a future star.”I do, as a matter of fact, know it. I do not know major junior hockey so very well, but I know some things, and anyone who knows anything at all about the CHL in 2007 knows John Tavares. In fact, I’m slightly insulted by implication that I would be spending my Sunday afternoons in the Kingston Memorial Center and not know anything

Game 8: Where I Am

2010-11-05T10:52:00.002-04:00

When the Habs begin to play, I am still lost in the final, restless dreams of the morning. Sometime during the first period, I will dredge myself from bed and embark on that awful ritual known as ‘starting the day’. My boys are taking faceoffs and laying checks, and I am processing myself for public presentation: contacts, shower, clothing, shoes, headphones and out the door. When the puck

Game 7: A Stereotype Wrapped in a Trope Inside a Cliché

2010-11-02T12:27:00.002-04:00

Hockey has, in the past thirty years, become a polyglot sport. There’s hardly a dressing room in the NHL that doesn’t speak four different languages, and many of them have six or seven represented. English remains the lingua franca of coaching and training, and one assumes all players learn enough of the technical vocabulary to understand what they’re supposed to do, to speak the rudimentary

Game 6: It Is What It Is

2010-10-30T22:53:00.004-04:00

It was inevitable that there would be a new 11. Some numbers are just inordinately popular. The single digits, where they aren’t retired, have the charm of the classic, and the round numbers and the +1s are always highly favored. But nothing is more beloved than the double number. 99 and 66 are taboo, of course, but consider the others: twenty-one NHL teams are carrying a 22 this season,

Game 5: Deflection

2010-10-28T11:24:00.005-04:00

It was sometime in the second period, and the Montreal was down 3-1. Milan Michalek was having a good night, the Habs’ power play was still offline, and Jaques Martin had sent Lars Eller to bed with no supper. In other words, it was yet another of the many, many totally unremarkable moments that fill the long and storied history of the Canadiens. Jeff Halpern and Maxim Lapierre are fussing

Game 4: The Efficiency of the Buffalo

2010-10-25T01:06:00.002-04:00

‘“No” is, generally speaking, a better answer than “Yes.”…’ The real hero of Moneyball is the city of Oakland. Billy Beane has the leading role, of course. He’s The Man Who Brought The Enlightenment to Baseball, and he gets all the glory. He will be played by Brad Pitt in the film, whereas the city of Oakland will be played by the city of Oakland, which is a bit of a step down

Game 3: A Discourse on the Legitimacy of Consumer Dissatisfaction with Hockey Spectacle and the Means of Expressing Said Dissatisfaction

2010-10-19T12:52:00.006-04:00

[Is post. Is half-serious. Still not sure which half.]If you live in Montreal, on any given day, what do the Montreal Candiens look like? Do they look like a group of 23 guys who play pretty good hockey? No. No, they do not. If you are an ordinary person out there on the street, you barely ever see a life-sized, human, normal, fallible, mortal Hab. You see GIGANTIC Habs. Habs ten stories

Game 2: I Dream of Goalies

2010-10-17T07:43:00.002-04:00

Dreams are the most fundamentally bizarre aspect of human experience. Everyone, no matter how staid and stolid, reasonable and rational, no matter how utterly devoid of creativity or artistry, is a pornographic Dadaist in their dreams. Your brain, in the process of clearing its RAM and defragging its hard drive for the new day, will throw out all sorts of unspeakable things, both pleasures and

Game 1: Rivulous

2010-10-10T07:34:00.003-04:00

Never try to learn a foreign language. Learning a foreign language is a process of being beaten over the head with grammar rules, and it sucks, and nobody but prodigies would bother if we weren’t convinced it made us cooler and/or wealthier. Every language, from English to Persian to Chinese, will whip out its dustiest, fussiest, most difficult, classical, and obscure rules just to torture poor

Shell Game

2010-10-07T20:17:00.004-04:00

It was, in their defense, a long wait. Not a complicated drill by any means, basically just penalty shots, but some of the kids take an awkward long time. Edison, tiny and new and unsteady on his skates, takes half a minute alone to make it from the blue line to the net, and this is a half-size rink. There’s a lot of wobbling and slipping and losing the puck, especially among the youngest.So

What Everyone Remembers

2010-09-29T01:01:00.003-04:00

I must have seen the paintings four times before I suddenly recognized the significance of the image. They sell them at major junior games, you know, not all of the franchises but a lot of them. I don’t know if it’s one painter who sets up booths everywhere, or the same idea copied again and again by a legion of local artists plugged deeply into the collective unconscious. Whatever the mode of

On Luck, and Definitions

2010-07-24T05:52:00.003-04:00

Consider the stars (she said, oratorically, with a great flourish of arms) (yeah, it’s going to be one of those). Consider them, more specifically, as they look to the unaided eye- which is to say, human eyes, on earth, at night, without benefit of telescope, perhaps lying in a field on a summer night at some nonspecific high-altitude point on the globe. From this perspective, stars are points

Pro

2010-07-11T10:34:00.001-04:00

Hockey is a sport most of the time. It’s a sport, except when it’s a game, which may or may not be the same thing. Sometimes, also, it’s a business, which is rather a different game altogether, and other times it’s entertainment, and still other times it’s a culture, and I am told that in some peculiar corners of the world, it’s a religion. So hockey is actually a terrible lot of things and it

Gone, Goalie, Gone

2010-06-23T09:29:00.001-04:00

It is not wise to draft goalies. They take a long time to develop, and draft position- in other words, quality of teenage play- is not a good indicator of future success. This is not an opinion, it is a certainty. A goalie, even the best of goalies, will not make an NHL team better at 18, or 20, and probably not even at 22. The majority of them are at least 25- that is, two years away from

Someday, Baby

2010-06-16T22:14:00.002-04:00

Chicago is not an especially parade-happy city. Sure, Chicagoans like floats and chicks with batons, but not nearly so much as we like open streets upon which cars can be driven during all daylight hours. I can remember, vaguely, going to a couple of marching-intensive events as a child, but those might have been in the suburbs. Or in Iowa, for all I know. But I cannot remember seeing one single

IIHF Challenge Cup of Asia, Part 3: Star

2010-06-06T11:33:00.002-04:00

yes, i know this is not at all timely. i'm being counter-hegemonic.The Taipei Times was not impressed. The Challenge Cup of Asia does not generally get a lot of media attention, being as how the countries represented are not known for their broad interest in hockey. There was some television coverage- it was shown locally in Taiwan, and both the Kuwaitis and the Emiratis brought some kind of

In Other News...

2010-05-28T14:45:00.002-04:00

For those of you who didn't know, I'd written something for The Walrus a few months back.And another one, just now.Further blogging in a couple of days, but man that was tiring.

Made-Up Shit

2010-04-30T05:09:00.003-04:00

“…when people say that a team lacks the 'intangibles' to win, they are *making shit up* after the fact to match the results.” - Gabe DesjardinsFirst, a confession: I believe in intangibles. I believe there are small, mysterious human forces at work within hockey players and across hockey teams that can and do influence the outcome of particular games. I believe in leadership. I believe in

IIHF Challenge Cup of Asia, Part 2: Winter

2010-04-26T11:18:00.004-04:00

MONGOLIA vs. HONG KONGIn Taipei, we have just crossed the threshold of April, and it is indeed a cruel month so far. Cruel, at least, to the spirit, for it is the fifth- or sixth or perhaps three hundredth, a long time anyway- month of perpetual rain. The temperature fluctuates from frigid to chilly, but the rain is a uniform, unvaried drizzle day after day, week after week. There hasn’t been

IIHF Challenge Cup of Asia, Part 1: Love

2010-04-13T11:05:00.009-04:00

Believe it or not, there are credible Asian hockey powers. Japan, South Korea, and China- while not ‘good’ at hockey by Canadian standards- have been producing capable homegrown hockey players for nearly a century. They play in or about Division I of the IIHF rankings, in the same category as the chilly but unspecialized European countries. They run, between them, the ALH- Asia League Ice

Play for Something

2010-03-16T20:29:00.001-04:00

Gary Bettman doesn’t like the Olympics. He offers a few reasons for it: the risk of injury to NHL-property, the disruption of the NHL schedule, the loss of the NHL All-Star Game. These are slightly reasonable concerns. Yes, it’s possible an NHL player will get injured in an Olympic game, but the Olympics consist of a small number of relatively bloodless matches- the probability of a serious

Apocryphal Chronicles of Trivial Hockey Events #1

2010-03-04T00:34:00.002-05:00

Wherein Jordan Eberle confronts the possibility of perpetual failure.‘Pats’ is one of those meaningless old-timey hockey names, like Maroons or Thistles or Arenas. It’s an odd non-sequitor of a word that’s lost whatever deeper logic it once had, and now serves only as a kind of etymological radiocarbon date- a team called the Pats must have formed before the Second Word War, just as a team

Fragile Things

2009-11-03T05:24:00.005-05:00

They wouldn’t have named it, back in the old days, the helmetless days. Like all nameless experiences, it was hardly even real, a problem no one had because no one knew it was possible. When they tried to think or talk about it, they probably interpreted it as the signs of exhaustion or aging, or the wages of sin- feelings of forgetfulness and weariness, headaches and dizzy spells, impatience

Game 11: 9/10ths

2009-11-01T01:39:00.003-04:00

I’m not sure I believe in ‘puck possession’.No, I’m not advocating some transcendentalist hockey philosophy that suggests that no one can truly every possess the puck, the puck being a free object controlled but none by the hockey gods themselves. That, probably, would be silly. I believe that there is such a thing as a puck that may be possessed by a particular player at any given moment.

Game 10: Mixed Blessings

2009-10-26T10:49:00.001-04:00

Against the New York Rangers, the Canadiens played a terribly symmetrical game. The equivalency wasn’t just an eerie evenness between the teams- although it was that, as NYR seemed to have the same problems as the Canadiens, if not the same assets. It was also a harmony between the Habs’ own strengths and weaknesses- a creepy kind of yin/yang balance between exciting offence and excruciating

Game 6: Memento Mori

2009-10-22T11:19:00.004-04:00

…everyone you know someday will die.You would definitely have noticed them.The camera noticed them. They must have been among the more heavily-adorned fans that night, in their jerseys and face paint, but they couldn’t possibly have blended in. Nor would they have wanted to, for what else could be the point of dusting off the old Nordiques gear for the Canadiens’ season opener?The cameras found

Game 5: The Boy

2009-10-15T10:51:00.004-04:00

[Please note that the following is highly personal and subjective in nature. It contains almost no general-interest discussion of the Canadiens, nor any particular hockey analysis.]beebeebeebeeep…beebeebeebeeep…beebeebeebeep…BEEBEEBEEMOTHERFUCKINGBEEPSomewhere, just over my head and to the left, the cell phone becomes insistent. I can’t tell if the boy is awake or not. He’s not, of course,

Game 4: Growing Pains

2009-10-11T13:18:00.002-04:00

In Vancouver, the Canadiens finally found the kind of defeat they’d been searching for since game 1. It was a drastic, merciless, unambiguous pummeling by a Canucks team determined to win as decisively as possible. They used their speed to find gaps and press advantages in every direction, and the Canadiens- this time- were unable to rise to the challenge. They folded, despondently, and ended

Game 3: Elevation

2009-10-11T02:45:00.004-04:00

The worst thing about hockey, the most frustrating, hair-tearing, sleep-depriving, enthusiasm-crushing, despair-inducing facet of the game, is not Gary Bettman. It also isn’t the CBA, southern expansion franchises, the instigator penalty, or Sean Avery. It’s not fighting, or dudes who don’t backcheck, or local television color commentators. It’s the luck.Over the long term, maybe, there is a

Game 2: Uneven Strength

2009-10-08T01:44:00.000-04:00

[N.B.: As I live on the opposite side of the planet from virtually all NHL games, my comments will routinely be lagged a day or two. In the future I hope to keep the intervals shorter. In the meantime… well, there are plenty of more current blogs out there.]There are two kinds of hockey people: people who like even strength, and people who like power plays. Even strength people are the

Game 1- Monster

2009-10-04T03:31:00.002-04:00

It is a hockey custom, of a kind, that a player who has recently switched teams make some sort of performance of hatred towards his erstwhile teammates. It’s an empty gesture. This is not 1957, no one really believes that 21st century hockey players are such sentimental creatures as to play soft against dudes they like. Nevertheless, it is de rigueur to display added hostility; bare minimum,

Brief Introduction: Brian Gionta

2009-08-19T08:45:00.003-04:00

The Reputation: Brian Gionta, he one short dude. He played his whole career heretofore with the Devils, within whose dull, disciplined ranks he won the Cup in 2003. And he’s kinda small. He’s a natural scorer, so they say, fast as hell and ingenious in the o-zone, tougher than he looks. Also, he’s like 5’7”. Prone to streakiness, but fuck, show me a ‘natural scorer’ who ain’t. But 5’7”…

On Personal Lives

2009-08-11T09:28:00.005-04:00

Precipitating incident: Two days ago, Patrick Kane, 20 years old, star of the Chicago Blackhawks, pride of Buffalo, by all accounts professional, polished, and preternaturally career savvy, beat up a cab driver over twenty cents.The summer that Michael Vick was caught killing dogs for entertainment, perhaps the most sensational sports scandal in recent memory, the Staal brothers were arrested.

Brief Introduction: Travis Moen

2009-07-20T00:27:00.002-04:00

The Reputation: Absolutely glowing. Some people seem to mildly dislike him, a few find him overrated, but the prevailing attitude seems to be deep affection tinged with a platonic desire to have his babies. He’s tough, he’s ethical, he’s defensively responsible, he works hard in the regular season and harder in the playoffs, he accepts his role, he stands up for his teammates, he’s as good as

Brief Introduction: Paul Mara

2009-07-14T12:36:00.002-04:00

[In which the author attempts to control her chronic logorrhea, and at the same time get to know the new Canadiens.] The Reputation: General consensus seems to be that Mara’s a large, aggressive, #5-6 guy; solid enough defensively when not attempting offense (which he’s not particularly good at anyway); ‘tough’ in the generally admired ways; perhaps pestilential under the right circumstances.

The Dark Age

2009-07-11T13:49:00.002-04:00

The Canadiens’ centennial season should have been a glorious thing. It is a rare sports team that survives a hundred years, rarer still one that survives them in such winning style. In a perfect world, it would have celebrated all that distinguishes this most distinguished of teams, a long and laudable history of excellence girded with a unique cultural cachet and graced by the most intense

Faith, Rescinded

2009-07-01T13:56:00.006-04:00

On the twenty-fifth day of the second month in the year of Our Lord two thousand and seven, Bob Gainey didst trade Craig Rivet to the San Jose Sharks for Josh Gorges, and the pundits were perplexed, for Rivet was a solid D-man of size and combativeness, yet Gorges was small and obscure and the pundits knew him not, and they were skeptical.Yet the fans cried out, trust in Gainey, for he has a

Stage Management

2009-06-29T16:59:00.000-04:00

A discourse on unnecessary fights, following a somewhat tedious introduction.First principles: games evolve. We are prone to reifying the game, any game, imagining that it is defined by a very specific internal structure which, cosmetic shifts aside, holds essentially true over long stretches of time. But this is a fallacy- games grow and change, and while the pace of change may be sometimes

The Venerable

2009-06-22T00:28:00.001-04:00

“So, uh, I just wanted to ask, has anyone ever suggested that Crosby might be a bit of a diver?”It’s a very late on Thursday night, or more accurately very early on Friday morning, and all over North America it is just before the end of the Stanley Cup Final, and my dad is asking me, very politely, if anyone else thinks Sidney Crosby dives. It is to laugh. No, it is not to laugh, it is to

Third World Hockey (Part 1)

2009-04-05T09:14:00.001-04:00

Wherein Australia plays South Africa. The women look like miniature showgirls on lunchbreak. Two-inch false eyelashes in blue and purple, glittery cheeks, long sweeps of feathers rising from shellacked hair, holding light coats wrapped over sequined lingerie, they sit at the Starbucks counter slurping coffee and inhaling muffins as quickly as their lipstick allows. In between bites, they

Inoffensive

2008-11-18T00:25:00.003-05:00

If you’d notice anything immediately about the ice rink at the Taipei Arena, it’s the blank whiteness of it. Even when bustling, the arena is a gaping pallid space. It is wholly undecorated save for one large banner, blue and red, proclaiming bilingually the simple existence of the 2008-2009 CIHL season. There are no advertisements. There are no collections of memorabilia. There aren’t even

This is the Best Photograph of Me That Has Ever Been Taken

2008-11-02T13:33:00.002-05:00

And I'm way too deep in the net.Shit.

Rinks of Kaohsiung

2008-10-27T15:02:00.005-04:00

How elastic, exactly, is the word ‘rink’? Must a rink have seats? Must it have glass? What about boards? Changing rooms? Showers? How many of the conventional accoutrements of a hockey rink must a given playing surface possess to earn the title?Must it have ice?If the answer is yes, than there are no rinks in Kaohsiung. Similarly, if hockey is by definition an ice-bound sport, than there

The Lie of Averages

2008-10-23T13:56:00.004-04:00

There’s an interesting post over on JT's blog concerning the perceived underachievement of the Canandiens’ ‘first line’ early in the season. Her take is an admirably rational response to something that shouldn’t even be an issue. The Canadiens are currently 5-0-1 in six games with a positive goal differential- fabricating points isn’t a problem. It is only the myth of the ‘first line’ that

Hockey Men

2008-10-15T13:31:00.007-04:00

The bar is a small room on a small street just off Dunhua. It’s full of smoke and hockey equipment and a cross-section of Canadian expatriate masculinity. There are forty-something guys with polo shirts tucked into belted khaki shorts and twenty-something hipsters with elegantly contrived facial hair and extensive tattoos, all swapping League gossip and gratuitous profanity over beers and

Canadiens Review: 10/10/08-10/11/08

2008-10-12T14:47:00.007-04:00

[Note: I’m not always going to be able to catch games in a timely fashion this season, so rather than write one much-delayed recap per match, I’m going to do occasional multi-game commentaries. Just notes on whatever has seemed remarkable, disturbing, or entertaining in the past few matches.] It’s always discouraging to lose the first game of the season. Maybe it doesn’t mean any more

The Outlier

2008-10-07T14:52:00.003-04:00

Consider, if you will, the creature called Tanguay. What do we know of him? Not, as it turns out, very much. He is a being from the Western Conference, which we (particularly after just seeing the recent Oilers-Flames preseason game) like to think of as ‘Bizarro Conference.’ For all we know, it’s entirely populated by sentient capybaras and Sheldon Souray. This is only a slight exaggeration.

Never Again

2008-10-03T12:56:00.005-04:00

It’s nearly 2 am. Outside, nondescript lights float by in murky black. The bus is dim and quiet, pulsing with the low hum of engines and faintly leaking headphones. Amongst the ordinary commuters, there are seven soon-to-be hockey players dozing in impossibly vast reclining seats; amongst the usual baggage, there are seven hockey bags and sticks rocking in the hold.Described in certain terms,

Hockey!!!

2008-09-23T14:33:00.003-04:00

And...

2008-07-03T06:22:00.002-04:00

We're back.Updates, apologies, and perhaps explanations to follow.

4-28-08: Flyers 3, Canadiens 2

2008-04-28T22:01:00.003-04:00

I’m incredibly busy this week, so ain’t no time for a cutesy recap today. Nope, we’re going straight to the core conundrum with no detours anywhere else. The Habs are losing. Who or what should we blame? Here are random thoughts. 1. The skaters are playing as well as they ever have. Yes, they’re having trouble finishing, but Biron has been

4-26-08: Flyers 4, Canadiens 2

2008-04-26T23:36:00.003-04:00

Fucking karma. 1. There are bad wins, and there are good losses, and all too often getting one of the former means that there’s one of the latter in your near future. If Martin Biron was playing normally, the Habs would have taken this game decisively. As it was, the puck was snuggling into his pads like a sleepy kitten all night, no matter how much