Hockey « A Progressive on the Prairie

Current books:

Lonely: A Memoir by Emily White
Dark Heart of the Night (French Voices) by Leonora Miano

Recent books:

Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid by Nicholas Schou
The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker
Monsieur Pain by Roberto Bolaño
Strange Days Indeed: The 1970s: The Golden Days of Paranoia by Francis Wheen
Seth Bullock: Black Hills Lawman by David A. Wolff

Hockey holiday

New Year’s is starting to become one of my favorite holiday periods. That’s because once again this year it was hockey heaven.

Let’s start with New Year’s Eve. At first, I was disappointed the Stampede did not have a home game, which has been a tradition. That did, however, allow me to watch [...]

I damn near fell out of my chair when I saw it today. According to the god of television ratings, Nielsen, Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals on NBC “claimed the top slot in Nielsen’s ranking of the top primetime telecasts on broadcast TV for June 12, 2009. The show drew approximately 8.0 [...]

Celebrating a new hockey season — with books

October is rapidly becoming one of my favorite months. Wednesday night was the draft in the Puck Podcast keeper fantasy hockey league — which has members from the U.S., Canada, Switzerland and the U.K. (I had the first draft pick and took Ovechkin.) The USHL season started Friday night. The NHL Network [...]

Final Frozen Four trip observations

Travel to and from the Frozen Four can be awfully exhausting. I’m just now starting to get back in the swing of things. But then it isn’t just watching three great hockey games, there’s the atmosphere and simply being a tourista. Some final, albeit somewhat random, thoughts:

Add to the hockey games trips [...]

Frozen Four marginalia

Cutting through all the preliminaries: Spending about seven consecutive hours in Pepsi Center to watch live championship college hockey — Priceless.

Granted, the seven hours includes getting there 30 or so minutes early to watch warm ups, a 50 minute break between the semifinal games and a total of five intermissions. But even from [...]

Happy times for hardcore hockey fans

Probably a significant portion of the US population was watching the NCAA men’s basketball championship last night. I didn’t but my NCAA championship is also this week — the Frozen Four.

NCAA hockey flies way under the radar in most of the country. Yet the Frozen Four comes amidst the best time of year [...]

Addiction taking precedence over blogging — and many other things

Okay, I’m addicted. And that’s the reason things have been sparse around here lately.

What am I addicted to? NHL Center Ice. In eight of the last 10 days or so, I’ve spent anywhere from two to four hours a night watching hockey on TV. The two days I missed were because [...]

Seems like a $50 million salary package draws attention

Each year, The Hockey News publishes what it calls it’s “Bucks and Pucks” issue. This year’s edition hits newsstands next week with former Stampede player Thomas Vanek on the cover. According to The Hockey News, the cover story “examin[es] what life is like for Buffalo Sabres left-winger Thomas Vanek after his new contract makes [...]

Hockey on the horizon

In those immortal words, “and now for something completely different,” the leaves turning and fall in the air means one thing — it’s almost hockey season.

My online hockey fantasy league had its draft last night. Among other places, we’ve got guys from Southern California, the UK and Canada. Having randomly been selected to [...]

Finishing the check

One of the purposes of checking in hockey is to disrupt your opponent’s play. The front office of the NHL’s Dallas Stars apparently decided to take a cue from its players and to put a few body checks in their advertising for the upcoming season. Here’s what two of the billboards the Stars [...]