Beautiful chaos

A dozen bearded men, in ridiculously padded uniforms, charge up and down a slick surface, chasing after a small disc of frozen, vulcanized rubber, all the while smacking into one another and driving each other into the walls surrounding the surface.  Each is armed with a stick, a helmet, and his own wits and muscle.  Does this sound like entertainment to you?  Because it does to me.  This sounds like NHL playoff hockey.

Hockey doesn’t get the press that other sports get in the United States.  Walt Whitman never waxed poetic about Wayne Gretzky or called hockey “our game” (because, really, it’s more Canada’s), and Ernest Thayer never said there was no joy in Newark because the mighty Brodeur couldn’t save the winning shot.  (This could well be because Brodeur wouldn’t have missed it.)  The Stanley Cup finals—despite the lovable rituals surrounding the trophy, itself—don’t get the Super Bowl treatment, and no one has ever written a rap hit about his affection for ice hockey.  But, for those of us who’ve learned to appreciate the game, none of that matters, especially at playoff time.

We’re not there, yet, but in about six or seven weeks, it will be the time of playoff beards and a new intensity to every game.  And that’s a lot of intensity.  The best NHL game combines the physicality of NFL football, the creativity of Premier League soccer, and the sleight of hand of NBA basketball, and it presents all these things at about three times the speed of any other sport.  The biggest challenge for an analytical hockey fan can be figuring out what the teams are doing while still keeping track of the puck.  What’s happening on the ice looks like chaotic brutality, but, when the horn sounds for a goal scored, you know there was more going on the whole time.

But, unlike leagues such as the NBA, the NHL is actually worth watching before the finals.  This year in the NBA, the consensus is that the Golden State Warriors will face the Cleveland Cavaliers in the finals.  So why bother tuning in, until then?  History shows that the higher-seeded team wins the great majority of the time, only five eighth-seeded teams have defeated a number one seed, and in nearly 70 years of play, two teams have won nearly half of the championships.  In contrast, first-round playoff upsets are common in the NHL, and a record of regular-season success is no guarantee of hoisting the Stanley Cup.

So for those of us who love sport and strategy mixed with a dose of anarchy, the NHL is beautiful theater.  Don’t mind us as we thrill to the sound of skates scraping on ice, the crunch of bodies into boards, and the final horn that signals a victor.  Playoff time is when we get to see a full-contact chess game play out on the ice.  It’s not an affection you can explain. You just have to see it, and figure it out, yourself.