Happy Holidays!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone.

I have been sick these past few weeks but am feeling better now and am going to try to blog again soon, in the meantime I hope everyone has a nice Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or any holiday that you celebrate. If you don't celebrate any holidays try to enjoy the snow, or if you live somewhere without snow consider me jealous.

A Great Story

I already mentioned this in a previous post but it seems as if this story has really taken off and it deserves its own post.

It all started with a forwarded email, I don't know who started it but it started going around the hockey circles. The first time I saw it was on the NHL Home Ice's website.  A few days later apparently Deadspin saw it and asked Sarah Spain of Mouthpiece Sports whether it was true and she confirmed that it was, there were just a few details that weren't. After that it seemed as if every single news outlet in the US and Canada reported on it. Even Peter King wrote about it in his football column on Sports Illustrated's website.  Now once we have all stopped gasping that someone not in the hockey circle decided to mention hockey we can back to the story. The Blackhawks website published their own version of the story.  The link to the original version of the story is in my last post.

Burish and Kaner talked about the situation on the Hawks website.

Isn't it nice when your favorite team is the one creating the positive hype not the negative hype.

Catching Up

I have a bunch of videos to start out with:

I mentioned these in passing a few posts back but since the Hawks have added another I thought I would add them now. At least they are funnier than the ones Americans have to endure from September to early November every year.





The Blackhawks video crew really deserves some sort of award because they never fail to have great videos. At the risk of breaking my blog with all of these videos I am going to post the first one again.







The first and third are my favorites. Isn't it awesome that they are still funny even though it is obvious they were all taped right after each other. Either that or Sharpie is obsessed with that shirt and they travel to Columbus a lot.

To finish off the videos, if you haven't seen Tazer's goal from the other night WATCH IT and if you have watch it again.






That goal is just one of the many reasons that Tazer was named second star of the week, this week by NHL.com and it was certainly well deserved.

It looks to me like there might be good news about Khabibulin. The Hawks have sent Corey Crawford to Rockford. Even if he is not ready to start, I am glad he is on his way back.

Kris Versteeg got an instigator penalty in the last second of the game last night. He was automatically suspended for one game and Joel Quenneville  was fined $10,000. Certainly a one game suspension is not what you want to see for a player who has been playing fantastically of late.



Now for the sort of feel good story for the night:  I really recommend you read the article, its a good one and the sort of story I wish we heard more of rather than all of the bad stuff. I am not sure about the validity of the details of the article I have heard some conflicting things but the main points of the article are true.

(h/t to the Goal Line Report for the link)

A Rookie Fan

This all came about after reading a story from Paul Kukla on NHL.com. The premise was Happy Hockey day. For me it was very simple to come up with an idea. Here is my story:


It was a chilly Saturday afternoon on November 1st. I was working around the house when at 2 o'clock the phone rang. It was a call telling me that I had 4 tickets to the Sabres/ Capitals game in under five hours. I had no problem going, I lead a pretty boring life and I was just going to be watching hockey at home. Now the problem was filling the other three seats. I ended up going with one of my friends, Melissa.  We found two other people to take the other two tickets.

Melissa was a rookie in terms of hockey. She had never been to any sort of hockey game and the only highlight she had ever seen was "The Goal" scored by (her words not mine) "that guy you say is really good" known to the rest of the world as Alex Ovechkin. Oddly enough we were going to a Caps game but Alex was in Russia.

When we got to our seats, I pointed out all of the Capitals who were warming up and as Sabres would skate towards center ice I would point them out as well. I tried to attach an anecdote to every player or connect him to someone she might have heard me talk about. She seemed so interested in everything and so engaged in what was going on. This was my first glimpse of the night ahead. Everything was so new to her that nothing could be negative. Something that a hockey diehard might not have noticed because it wasn't spectacular or wasn't a mistake was noticed simply because it was all new.

As the national anthems were sung I think Melissa finally understood why I knew every word to both the Canadian and U.S. anthems when we used to have to sing them freshman year of high school. Once the game started I tried to explain the rules of the game as they were used and I was very impressed by how much she had remembered from me talking about hockey.

At different points in the game I would hear her gasp or mutter something and even if it was just a simple play that would be normal for us but for a new hockey fan it was an exciting play.

I guess my point is that it was wonderful to go to the game with someone who had never experienced hockey before, since everything was so knew nothing could be negative. None of the players had a reputation for her she could just sit back and enjoy the game. Even though the game ended sort of one-sidedly 5-0 Sabres. It didn't matter because even a simple mistake was not noticed. It made me rethink back to what made me fall in love with the game in the first place. The excitement, the goals, the hits, amazing saves and it made me realize that through the years I have lost sight of that and just focused on the negatives. Which is truly a shame when I think of what I possibly could have missed, but I am grateful that Melissa could come to the game on November 1st because it truly was a happy hockey day, so that I could re-realize what is awesome about the game.