in NHL National Hockey League

So This Whole Hockey Thing…

Predators vs Penguins? Is that right?

Let’s get this out of the way right up front. I live in Tennessee, sure, but it’s nowhere near the Tennessee that’s going to be represented on your TV screens when Game Three of the NHL Stanley Cup Finals hits Saturday night, has little or nothing at all to do with me. I live about an hour east of Knoxville, home of the University of Tennessee’s array of sports teams. Nashville is, literally, in another time zone. And don’t even get me started about Memphis.

It’s rare to meet anyone in my neck of the be-wooded and Dolly Parton-filled Smokey Mountains, that gives even one tiny damn about hockey or the Nashville Predators. I mean, they exist, but more people around here have seen a sasquatch, than witnessed people wearing Preds gear. It’s just not a thing.

For me, hockey never really had any appeal. Of all the sports named after horse shit, I can’t say hockey would even be in my top three.

Out-of-state friends informed me over the weekend that “my” Predators had made the Stanley Cup finals. Suddenly Facebook posts from my friends in middle and west Tennessee made more sense. “We made it!” they said. “We.”

With the opportunity placed out in front of me, I decided to put on my stupomitron helmet and dive into this hockey business, full steam. I would watch and live blog not only the game, but my experience with it. And I did, in Monday night’s 5-3 Pittsburgh Penguins victory. We’ll talk more about that in a moment.

It would be a lie to say this was my first experience watching a full hockey game. I actually covered two minor league games about seven years ago, the Knoxville Ice Bears, and the events that transpired therein against the Fayetteville FireAntz only made me more certain hockey wasn’t for me. The second game was by the numbers. It was the first where the shit completely hit the fan.

There were so many fights and so many ejections that there weren’t enough players to finish the game. In all, 19 players were sent packing along with Fayetteville’s coach. This was the first hockey game I ever wrote about. This was my first hockey game, period. And I had to figure out all this mess, the rules, the suspensions and all the weirdness on the fly on an 11 p.m. deadline. It was a shitstorm.

I don’t even watch hockey when it comes to the Winter Olympics. I’ll pretty much watch everything but that. I’ll watch the Netherlands play Austria in a curling match and be riveted. I might check a hockey score or watch highlight, but that’s as far as I usually get. If the “Do You Believe in Miracles” game would have happened in 2014, I would have probably been watching a rerun of Perfect Strangers instead. Yeah, I’m serious. No, you get out of the city.

So what did I think of my first, full-game NHL experience? It was actually pretty difficult to follow. We often think of the NFL as a “speed sport,” but there’s a lot of downtime between plays. That 40-second clock gives my brain a good opportunity to focus on the line up, the situation, down-and-distance and everything else before the ball is actually on the move. Hockey, from what I can see, is just a free-for-all.

The first break in the non-stop chaos was about 15 minutes in and I assumed, based on every single other sport I watched, the same guys had been out there skating and sticking and hockey-ing the entire time, but no. They had slipped in new players constantly on the fly. The puck was a tiny speck I lost pretty much constantly and, I have to tell you, the lack of mullets and Canadian hairstyles was a real bummer. This was not the “hockey” I was promised.

I did really dig the slow motion replays of the scoring plays. It really shows the absolute skill involved in playing a sport where you’re skating at full speed with a spear and firing a flat bullet at a guy in a medieval suit of armor. At one point, somebody tossed a dead catfish on the ice. It was cool.

We also seem to a have a solid, home grown, hockey product these days. From the outside, a decade or so ago, hockey looked like a sport dominated by players from former soviet bloc countries. I expected to see a bunch of hard to pronounce names with way too many consonants, but most of these guys were from this hemisphere. And even the lone Russkie didn’t have that oddball a name, Evgeni Malkin. Evgeni isn’t even a good Russian name. Would Rocky Balboa have single-handedly ended the Cold War by punching Evgeni Malkin’s face in? Not likely.

There were only three former commies on both teams combined and the guy with the most consonants in his name was Harry Zolnierczyk from Toronto. I had to relearn everything I thought I knew.

There was some replay controversy concerning “offsides” and a blue line and, honestly, I never got a solid grasp of the concept. I do know it cost “my” Preds a goal. The Penguins were held without a single shot in the second period and even I knew that had to be a bad thing. Needless to say, the Predators completed the comeback and tied the game 3-3 in the third period.

At no point did Jean Claude Van Damme show up to foil a terrorist plot, but I guess they usually hold that off until Game Seven.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCOxEKkuWG4

The game was apparently a good one. The Penguins won 5-3, with two late goals in the final two minutes or so. “My” Predators are now down 0-1 in a best of seven series that most people, from what I can tell, feel will go all seven games. If it does, I’ll be there every step of the way. I’ve committed myself to live blog this entire series.

In the meantime, Casey Bryant has your real, actually knowledgeable coverage, if you’re into that sort of thing. Check out his Game Two preview and prediction here.

My prediction for tonight? Sometimes you just get a feeling like you need some kind of change. No matter what the odds are this time, nothing’s going to stand in their way. There’s a flame in their heart, like a long, lost friend, that gives every dark street a light at the end. So stand tall on the wings of your dreams, Predators!

To make a wager on any sport, go to the world famous Diamond Sportsbook by clicking here.

Written by Adam Greene

Adam Greene is a writer and photographer based out of East Tennessee. His work has appeared on Cracked.com, in USA Today, the Associated Press, the Chicago Cubs Vineline Magazine, AskMen.com and many other publications.

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