Its time for yet another edition of the blog of the week. After looking through a variety of bloggers and their posts this week…this is what we came up with. So show some love to the lady and congrats to all the hockey bloggers out there.
THIS WEEK’S WINNER: A Theory of Ice
The Convergence
Trying really, really hard to like the playoffs
Here’s an analogy: The playoffs are to the regular season as a shootout is to a regulation game. I don’t just say that to irritate old-school fans (well, maybe a little bit), but because there’s some validity to the comparison. The two events both exist because people want to see someone win. It is perfectly conceivable that the regular season could simply be it, all that there is of hockey in the NHL, the ‘winner’ being simply whoever ends with the best record. Maybe some seasons two or more teams would end with the same record, in which case, there’d be a tie. That would be fair. But it would also be totally unsatisfying- maybe once upon a time hockey fans could deal with a tie game every now and then, in the interests of fairness, but at the end of the season, you want to see someone win, and not just win in an abstract, statistical way, but actually win everything in a single game.
Like a shootout, the playoffs are a very different challenge than the preceding events. Success in the regular season is usually based on either structure or phenomenal natural talent, but neither is a guarantor of playoff achievement. Hockey, apparently, becomes a very different game in the postseason. Not necessarily a better game, because the increased importance of every match seems to be generally counterbalanced by increased conservatism in play-style- I mean, let’s not let it get too exciting. Some things that are trivial on the scale of the normal season can have massive significance in the playoffs. A normally marginal 4th liner goes on a quirky scoring run in November, it’s a curiosity, but in the playoffs it suddenly becomes absolutely the most amazing thing in the entire universe, freakin’ manna from heaven. A center with a weakfish faceoff percentage is just ‘something to work on’ for most of the year, in the playoffs, it’s a catastrophe, worthy of benching and possibly decapitation. Conversely, things that are terrifically useful in normal hockey suddenly become less useful in playoff hockey- a high-scoring but streaky forward is a great investment over 82 games, less so when there are only 4.
Even in a fairly predictable playoff season, such as this one, wherein everyone who is Supposed To Win does, the differences from regular season play are readily apparent. The rules are the same (mostly), but the things that decide a game are different. Compared to the regular season, playoff games are won and lost on teeny, tiny things. Every now and then there’s a real disastrous blowout where you can point to a solid, obvious hockey-reason for the outcome- say, terrible goaltending or bad defensive coverage. But this time of year, everybody is playing tighter, more careful, more aware than usual, and most games really could go either way. Too often it’s one very small moment that makes the difference- one lucky bounce, one bad turnover, one half-second of distraction. It can be painfully boring and tremendously exciting at the same time, since there are huge stretches of time watching two teams waltz in the neutral zone, trying to out-trap each other, but then suddenly there’s one dazzling, freakish play that’s like nothing you’ve ever seen and turns out to win the game. Not being a particular partisan of any of the teams playing, there’ve been a lot of games I wanted to turn off, thinking to myself, wow, this is some slow hockey (thankfully, less so now in the Conference Finals), but it’s unexpectedly hard to change the channel, because if something cool happens, it will be both really cool and really important.
For the rest of this blog….check out The Convergence.
