Take Your Eye Off the Puck: How to Watch Hockey By Knowing Where to Look

by Greg Wyshynski

Case in point: they never have to make the puck glow in the arena so you can locate it. Or give it a comet tail.

there aren’t “people who don’t like hockey,” but rather people who have yet to let the light of hockey into their hearts. And the best way to bring these heathens to our religion of choice is to get them to one of our frozen temples and watch a game live.

“Being on the ice after a minute is sort of like being in a bar after 1:00 am—there’s no guarantee that something bad will happen, it’s possible that something good will happen, but the odds are slanted heavily in favor of something bad.”

Those Moments When the Puck Accidentally Hits the Referee during Play, and It Screws up Everything and You’re Convinced He’s Conspiring against Your Team You know, those moments.

Where will you be sorted? You have the flexibility of a senior citizen in skinny jeans, so you figure goaltending is out. You’re a bit undersized and you shy away from the rough stuff, so you’re pretty sure it won’t be on defense. Your vision’s perfect, so you won’t be an on-ice official. Your heart isn’t a cocktail of rage and depression with a megalomaniacal complex, so you certainly aren’t a coach.

Wayne Gretzky is famous for an incalculable number of things, and one of them is a quote that the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs converted into a mantra: “Help, I’m a terrible coach and the Coyotes stink and the NHL owes me, like, $9 million….” No, wait, that’s not it…. “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”

So there you go, folks: sweaters is the choice for authors with awkward misogynist leanings.

Braden Holtby of the Washington Capitals is, for my money, the personification of this creepy goalie tradition. He’ll put his goalie stick to his mouth, blade up, and start rotating his head back and forth, eyes wide open. Then he’ll slip the blade over his eyes and move back and forth, almost wearing the stick like a blindfold. The routine continues during the game. During stoppages, you continue to see him dart his eyes around with his mask off. Occasionally, he’ll actually squirt his water bottle into the air and track the liquid with his vision, like he’s the dog from Duck Hunt tracking fowl. There is a (scientific) method to this madness. John Stevenson is an Alberta-based sports psychologist who helped train Holtby in the ways of visualization. That includes Kaizen, a Japanese concept for continuous improvement that Holtby adopted to the point of having two Japanese characters on his mask that represent it. What Stevenson found was that Holtby had a knack for mimicking other goalies just by watching them. Holtby said that process began when he watched Hall of Famer Patrick Roy as a young fan. “I haven’t seen that in any other goaltender ever. The way [Roy] competed, and not only competed but was able to raise his level once things got hard and once his back was against the wall in order to do something. He needed to step up and be a leader on his team,” Holtby told the Washington Times. “As a goalie it’s not always the easiest thing to be a leader on a team.…Whenever...

Puck Bunny: A term that was used to describe groupies that was regrettably turned into a blanket label for all women who follow hockey. It’s an insulting pejorative that should be removed from the societal lexicon, so let’s do that, shall we?