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Browsing All Posts filed under »hockey«
What’s Wrong With Soccer Broadcasting? (Soccer vs American Sports, part 4)
The job of sports broadcasters is to help viewers see the order and intention where the untrained eye sees only chaos. We expect broadcasters to be experts of the game. (By “broadcasters” I mean the entire team, from the people who plan and select the camera angles and design or use replay and “telestrator” technology, to […]
Soccer vs American Sports, Part 3: Going with the flow
July 20, 2010
Dazzling offensive plays are the pop music of sports. Like catchy tunes, they are hard not to love. Even more, they are like the vocals and the melody of pop-music hooks. (You can sing these yourself in the shower or on the school bus, without realizing that the song was a hit because of the […]
Soccer vs American Sports, Part 2: In praise of defense
July 15, 2010
In Part 1 of this little series, I argued — well, asserted — that an appreciation of the individual and team defensive plays and strategies is an essential component of sports connoisseurship. As a corollary, a sport in which defense is either non-existent (say, bowling, golf, or most track-and-field events, for all intents and purposes), […]
A few thoughts on the NHL playoffs
June 11, 2010
The NHL playoffs wound up a couple of days ago, and the World Cup starts in about an hour. Here are a few thoughts on the former, as we move from the season of the fastest “flow” sport to that of the slowest. 1. The Broadcasting. I whined at length about why hockey broadcasting was […]
The dreaded 2-goal lead
May 12, 2010
I’m watching my beloved Montreal Canadiens trying to defend a 2-goal lead in a game 7. As Andrew Potter observes, the worst cliche in hockey is the idea that the 2-goal lead is the most dangerous lead to defend. Now I know what [they’re] getting at: With a one-goal lead, a team keeps its focus, […]
Why is hockey analysis always so lame? Part 3: It’s hard
May 10, 2010
I’m obviously making this up as I go along; but if you’ve read Why is hockey analysis (almost) always so lame? Part 1 and Part 2, thanks for bearing with me. So far I have talked mostly about the ways in which hockey analysis (on TV, in the daily press) is so frustratingly superficial. I […]
Why is hockey analysis always so lame? Part 2: The Broadcasters
May 7, 2010
I don’t remember a world without instant replay; although I was born into such a world. After clever but misbegotten attempts to use instant replay from the mid-1950s on, it is generally conceded that the first “modern” use — and not yet slow-motion — was in the broadcast of the Army-Navy football game in December […]
Why is hockey analysis almost always so lame? Part 1
May 4, 2010
My friend Andrew Potter (author of the sizzling new book The Authenticity Hoax) tweeted a link on Friday [when I began writing this post] to a compelling contrast between the two biggest stars in the world of ice hockey, the Russian Alexander Ovechkin and the Canadian Sydney Crosby. The column in question was by Steve Simmons, who has covered hockey […]
Wayne Norman
This Sporting Life 
July 22, 2010
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