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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   3755 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 25, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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You're going to have to cite your sources if you want to make blanket statements about American announcers being terrible, especially when Hockey Night in Canada featured the grating Jim Hughson for so many years.

Source: Me, after living and breathing hockey for a decade and a half growing up and then moving to America as an adult. Maybe things are different in Pittsburgh, but watching games for the local team in one of the smaller hockey markets (i.e. outside the original 6 and the midwest) was excruciating. Announcers were explaining relatively basic rules, clearly had no grasp on the strategy, positioning or how the game is played and just shoutcasted goals.

Even in Boston, if you go to a Bruins game the presumably CTE-riddled fanbase seems to operate on two principles: if a Bruins player has the puck, yell SHOOT THE PUCK at the top of your lungs. If the other team has the puck, yell HIT HIM. If the Bruins lost, it's probably because they didn't shoot the puck enough.

I grant that things may have been better in Pittsburgh.

As for Fox and the glowing pucks, I wasn't a fan of them either, but it wasn't because they thought Americans were incapable of keeping up with the game.

I mean, maybe I just fell for the Canadian 'hurr durr America dumb' propaganda, but it sure seems a lot of people talked about it that way:

In 1994, Fox won a contract to broadcast NHL games in the United States. David Hill, the head of Fox Sports at the time, believed that if viewers could easily follow the puck, the game would seem less confusing to newcomers, and hence become more appealing to a broader audience...The FoxTrax system was widely criticized by hockey fans, who felt that the graphics were distracting and meant to make the broadcasts cater towards casual viewers; sportswriter Greg Wyshynski stated that FoxTrax was "cheesy enough that it looked like hockey by way of a Mighty Morphin Power Rangers production budget",[5] and considered it "a sad commentary on what outsiders thought of both hockey and American hockey fans". Acknowledging that Canadian-born journalist Peter Jennings (who was interviewed as a guest during the 1996 All-Star Game that introduced the technology) stated on-air that Canadians would "probably hate it", Wyshynski suggested that FoxTrax was an admission that American viewers were "too hockey-stupid to follow the play" or "need to be distracted by shiny new toys in order to watch the sport."[2]

Edmonton won't win a cup in the foreseeable future because they haven't figured out that you can't put your superstars on the same line. Especially when one of them is a center.

I watch far from every Edmonton game, but I'm pretty sure they've experimented with splitting up Draisaitl and McDavid a few years back and I don't think it went well for them. At that point, you can trade Draisaitl for some depth I guess - but man would it take some massive balls to try and explain why you traded one of the top scorers in the league and one half of the most productive duo in the NHL for some solid second-line players.

Kane and Nugent-Hopkins should be able to match Geno on paper. But maybe I'm too deep in the hopium. Perhaps McJesus was the false prophet all along and Brock Boeser will bring Lord Stanley's cup back to the motherland.

There's a reason the Pens won three cups — when you have Sid on line 1 and Geno on line 2, it doesn't matter if you're feeding the puck to Chris Kunitz or Ruslan Fedotenko or fucking Max Talbot.

The Pens won three cups because they had a hell of a lot more than Crosby and Geno. Letang and Fleury were pretty damn good too, and Kessel was on an eldritch hot-dog fueled rampage just to spite the Leafs (which I fully approve of).

The rest of the team is scrubs and has-beens. Defense and goaltending are decent but not stellar. They might make the conference final, but overreliance on offensive firepower killed many a team. This is why the Penguins traded John Cullen in '91 and Mark Recchi in '92.

Dude, their defense and goaltending are ass. They averaged over 3 goals against this season with a franchise record winning streak. But they're also fucked by cap space; how are they going to improve their back end without trading their stars? See comment above about massive balls required to trade some of the best scorers in the league.

All that said, I'm just a meathead who played a lot of hockey growing up and beer leagues as an adult. I have no idea what makes a good NHL team, but thankfully, that seems to be fairly universally true. See the Golden Knights for the entirety of their existence, somehow this year's Canucks.

somehow this year's Canucks.

I know about 'fool me once' and 'fool me twice' -- who should be ashamed over 'fool me four times'?

Your recollections of the comet-puck and American announcers do match mine -- to this day there are radio play-by-plays of hockey games in Canada, I wonder if this leads to a better talent pool?

Also Cherry still seems to be putting out podcasts:

https://doncherrysgrapevine.podbean.com/

Not something I would normally listen to, but maybe I'll give one a try to see how demented he is! As far as I can remember he pretty much always talked like he does in your clips -- maybe it's a sort of Trumpy thing where you need to be on his wavelength?

Not something I would normally listen to, but maybe I'll give one a try to see how demented he is! As far as I can remember he pretty much always talked like he does in your clips -- maybe it's a sort of Trumpy thing where you need to be on his wavelength?

It's true, I played one for a minute and he didn't sound half bad.

My record of listening to Cherry is pretty sporadic. He seemed much more coherent in some of his older legendary rants I've listened to, but I definitely wasn't a tune-in-every-week kind of guy.

Huh, are you one of those rootless millenial types? Just that in my formative years, you were tuning in to Cherry every Saturday night whether you liked it or not. Something something neuroplasticity, foreign languages.

Huh, are you one of those rootless millenial types?

Not entirely sure what you mean by this, but my family and childhood social groups slowly scattered over the last decade or two as Quebec continues to hemorrhage anglos. I had to move a couple of times for grad school, but I have a family/house and I've been in the same city for the past five years or so.

Oddly enough I don't think anyone I knew growing up would watch Don Cherry or even hockey games that regularly. But then, I was also the only kid in the advanced class that played a sport, and I was never that close with any of my hockey teammates so could just be a function of my social circle.

It was just an age joke -- kids these days don't know what it was like to have TFC [1] as their only source of television. But you probably had more than that in Montreal. :)

For vast swathes of rural Canada in the 70s/80s, Saturday really was Hockey Night in Canada, even in the unlikely event that you didn't really care about hockey -- and if you were watching that you were watching Don Cherry in the second intermission.

[1] Two Fuckin Channels

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