When Hockey Stops Being Fun
I love hockey. When my team plays like shit, it's not fun, but generally, if I'm watching hockey, I'm a happy camper.
My team has been completely inconsistent this season, so it's been a little stressful and a little frustrating to be a Gopher fan this year. This weekend is the beginning of the league playoffs, best-of-three series all around the league. The Gophers, 7th in the league, are playing University of North Dakota, the 4th seed, a team long-infamous for being full of cheap hacks, guys fond of ugly plays and unsportsmanlike bullshit, who currently have a coach who thinks that this is a professional way to lead a team. (To be fair, there were ten years in the 90s and early 00s where they were a much more pleasant team to play and to watch, thanks to a different coaching staff.) They killed us on Friday night and we won Saturday, so the deciding game is tonight.
AND I AM NOT HAVING FUN ANYMORE.
(Keep in mind, four of our six defensemen are about two feet tall. They are not super-effective when it comes to Enforcing.)
Here's what happened in the second period:
- An intentional knee-to-knee hit on one of our defensemen in front of our goal that resulted in him limping off the ice. No penalty called.
- A hit on another of our tiny defensemen, with the ND player leaving his feet, hitting our player at his blindside, and getting the blade of his stick in our player's face. Clearly a hit with intent for injury, which should result in a game misconduct. Instead, the ND player only gets a 5-minute major. Our defenseman is out for the game with a head injury.
- A UND player going into goal, making no attempt to stop, throwing an elbow into our goalie's head, knocking his helmet off and his head into the post of the goal. Our goalie, not shockingly, took umbrage. He got called for a penalty, the UND player did not.
- A body check (UND on MN, shockingly) in open ice after the horn blew to end the period.
Also, UND scored, so they're winning by a goaltwo goals (the shithead who should have gotten tossed just scored, AWESOME), which is just sort of the icing on the cake.
Here's the thing. I don't terribly mind playing a cheap team (North Dakota isn't the only one in our league, though they're by far the worst this season). The earlier UND/MN series this season at one point involved five guys for both teams in the penalty box at the same time (yes, that's everyone on the ice, save the goaltenders). I found it so amusing that I took screenshots and emailed them to my dad, who was out of town and didn't get to see the game.
But there's a world of difference between playing cheap in kind of a fun way (according to my dad, who has 40 years of college hockey fandom under his belt, the only UND team he's seen that's played uglier than this team is the '79 crew) and playing cheap in a way where people are going to get really hurt. This game is the second kind, and I am not enjoying myself one bit. The score doesn't make any difference to me at this point, I just want everyone to get off the ice okay.
My team has been completely inconsistent this season, so it's been a little stressful and a little frustrating to be a Gopher fan this year. This weekend is the beginning of the league playoffs, best-of-three series all around the league. The Gophers, 7th in the league, are playing University of North Dakota, the 4th seed, a team long-infamous for being full of cheap hacks, guys fond of ugly plays and unsportsmanlike bullshit, who currently have a coach who thinks that this is a professional way to lead a team. (To be fair, there were ten years in the 90s and early 00s where they were a much more pleasant team to play and to watch, thanks to a different coaching staff.) They killed us on Friday night and we won Saturday, so the deciding game is tonight.
AND I AM NOT HAVING FUN ANYMORE.
(Keep in mind, four of our six defensemen are about two feet tall. They are not super-effective when it comes to Enforcing.)
Here's what happened in the second period:
- An intentional knee-to-knee hit on one of our defensemen in front of our goal that resulted in him limping off the ice. No penalty called.
- A hit on another of our tiny defensemen, with the ND player leaving his feet, hitting our player at his blindside, and getting the blade of his stick in our player's face. Clearly a hit with intent for injury, which should result in a game misconduct. Instead, the ND player only gets a 5-minute major. Our defenseman is out for the game with a head injury.
- A UND player going into goal, making no attempt to stop, throwing an elbow into our goalie's head, knocking his helmet off and his head into the post of the goal. Our goalie, not shockingly, took umbrage. He got called for a penalty, the UND player did not.
- A body check (UND on MN, shockingly) in open ice after the horn blew to end the period.
Also, UND scored, so they're winning by a goaltwo goals (the shithead who should have gotten tossed just scored, AWESOME), which is just sort of the icing on the cake.
Here's the thing. I don't terribly mind playing a cheap team (North Dakota isn't the only one in our league, though they're by far the worst this season). The earlier UND/MN series this season at one point involved five guys for both teams in the penalty box at the same time (yes, that's everyone on the ice, save the goaltenders). I found it so amusing that I took screenshots and emailed them to my dad, who was out of town and didn't get to see the game.
But there's a world of difference between playing cheap in kind of a fun way (according to my dad, who has 40 years of college hockey fandom under his belt, the only UND team he's seen that's played uglier than this team is the '79 crew) and playing cheap in a way where people are going to get really hurt. This game is the second kind, and I am not enjoying myself one bit. The score doesn't make any difference to me at this point, I just want everyone to get off the ice okay.