OT: does anyone not like hockey anymore?
- Thread starter Anton Babchuk
- Start date
It's not that I don't like it, it's just that I recently realized how stupid a concept the whole sport is. It's like, the puck is flat, so they have to be on ice, because flat things don't roll. How random is that? Like, just use a ball. My guess is, some kid was playing baseball one time and his dad backed over the kid's ball with his Porsche. His ball got flattened and his dad was like "I know, I'll buy you like $1500 worth of random football equipment and some ice skates, and tomorrow I'll wake you up at 5:30am and we can invent a new, stupider sport with your flattened ball, instead of maintaining our patriotism and just buying you another $2 ball."
Plus, I never understood goalies. Like it's such a big deal when Mike Smith is slightly more talented at handling a puck than Chad Larose, but that's literally the main skill in the game. The goalie is so far removed from any sort of actual, remotely useful skill that any other position on the ice has to have. I'm pretty sure Marty Brodeur doesn't even know how to skate backwards. If Jay Harrison shoots it the length of the ice, when he's tired, for an icing, these boards murder him, but if Marty Brodeur does it when there's an empty net all of the sudden it's like this great accomplishment. Meanwhile, all they're doing is getting paid millions of dollars a year to sit in a sumo suit on some ice for an hour. They're like "here, have this stupid, giant stick to match your stupid, giant pads. If you ever learn to use it better than the worst player on my kid's mite team, you'll probably be known as the greatest puckhandling goalie of all-time." Not to mention, we all got on Anthony Stewart's case for doing P90x, because it "wasn't intense enough," but Cam Ward sits there and does yoga or polenta or whatever the hell it is for a whole summer and all of the sudden he took "great strides to improve his game." It's basically glorified standing, which is only slightly more difficult than actually playing in a game. Hell, didn't Justin Peters sit for a whole summer playing COD and get praised by Tripp at the beginning of the season for doing eyeball exercises or something stupid like that?
Not to mention, the skillset needed to play hockey is so specialized that you can barely call them "athletes." If I ever need to start a team of trained mercenaries out of players from the four major sports, I don't think a single professional hockey player would make the top 100. Yeah, your Blake Griffins, Lebron Jameses, Calvin Johnsons, Adrian Petersons, they'll all make it, they're super athletic AND coordinated, way more than any hockey player. But hell, take the most physical specimen-y, in-shape player you can think of in the NHL, say, Eric Lindros, and you still don't know if they're remotely coordinated because stick handling translates to absolutely zero real-world skills. Even your favorite NASCAR driver could be useful in case we ever needed to rob a bank or something and need a getaway driver. Heck, I'd take Georges Laraque over pretty much any other player, at least I know he'll be able to punch someone in the face at an average level. But of course, enforcers are the punchline of the NHL now, which is everything wrong with this league. All 5'10", 155lbs of me could probably take Gretzky in his prime in a bar fight. Sam Bennett can't even do a pull-up but apparently he's a "good" hockey player. Nathan Gerbe would be touring with the circus if he didn't possess entirely pointless skating and stick-handling skills.
After they won the Cup people started making such a big deal out of Crosby's dedication, his mom was all like "he would shoot that puck into that broken side-loading washer for hours when he was just 5 years old." When I was 5 I would jump off the top stair, fly through the air, and land on a pile of cushions for hours. I feel like both of these actions have equal real-world merit (plus I got really good at jumping off stairs, but you guys arbitrarily decide to spend your time and money on following guys who hit an object with another object into another object when they were 5 and got really good at that, instead). Even stupider, I bought into it, I somehow bought into Crosby's random skill being more valuable than mine, and actually looked to some of these time wasters as role models. The only reason these guys make more money than the rest of us is because they scam us and take our income so that we can acquire the "privilege" of watching them do something that is of the same objective entertainment level as watching my future kids run around in the yard with their underwear on their head.
I'm glad someone finally got around to calling this sport out for what it is. This thread is our freedom.
Plus, I never understood goalies. Like it's such a big deal when Mike Smith is slightly more talented at handling a puck than Chad Larose, but that's literally the main skill in the game. The goalie is so far removed from any sort of actual, remotely useful skill that any other position on the ice has to have. I'm pretty sure Marty Brodeur doesn't even know how to skate backwards. If Jay Harrison shoots it the length of the ice, when he's tired, for an icing, these boards murder him, but if Marty Brodeur does it when there's an empty net all of the sudden it's like this great accomplishment. Meanwhile, all they're doing is getting paid millions of dollars a year to sit in a sumo suit on some ice for an hour. They're like "here, have this stupid, giant stick to match your stupid, giant pads. If you ever learn to use it better than the worst player on my kid's mite team, you'll probably be known as the greatest puckhandling goalie of all-time." Not to mention, we all got on Anthony Stewart's case for doing P90x, because it "wasn't intense enough," but Cam Ward sits there and does yoga or polenta or whatever the hell it is for a whole summer and all of the sudden he took "great strides to improve his game." It's basically glorified standing, which is only slightly more difficult than actually playing in a game. Hell, didn't Justin Peters sit for a whole summer playing COD and get praised by Tripp at the beginning of the season for doing eyeball exercises or something stupid like that?
Not to mention, the skillset needed to play hockey is so specialized that you can barely call them "athletes." If I ever need to start a team of trained mercenaries out of players from the four major sports, I don't think a single professional hockey player would make the top 100. Yeah, your Blake Griffins, Lebron Jameses, Calvin Johnsons, Adrian Petersons, they'll all make it, they're super athletic AND coordinated, way more than any hockey player. But hell, take the most physical specimen-y, in-shape player you can think of in the NHL, say, Eric Lindros, and you still don't know if they're remotely coordinated because stick handling translates to absolutely zero real-world skills. Even your favorite NASCAR driver could be useful in case we ever needed to rob a bank or something and need a getaway driver. Heck, I'd take Georges Laraque over pretty much any other player, at least I know he'll be able to punch someone in the face at an average level. But of course, enforcers are the punchline of the NHL now, which is everything wrong with this league. All 5'10", 155lbs of me could probably take Gretzky in his prime in a bar fight. Sam Bennett can't even do a pull-up but apparently he's a "good" hockey player. Nathan Gerbe would be touring with the circus if he didn't possess entirely pointless skating and stick-handling skills.
After they won the Cup people started making such a big deal out of Crosby's dedication, his mom was all like "he would shoot that puck into that broken side-loading washer for hours when he was just 5 years old." When I was 5 I would jump off the top stair, fly through the air, and land on a pile of cushions for hours. I feel like both of these actions have equal real-world merit (plus I got really good at jumping off stairs, but you guys arbitrarily decide to spend your time and money on following guys who hit an object with another object into another object when they were 5 and got really good at that, instead). Even stupider, I bought into it, I somehow bought into Crosby's random skill being more valuable than mine, and actually looked to some of these time wasters as role models. The only reason these guys make more money than the rest of us is because they scam us and take our income so that we can acquire the "privilege" of watching them do something that is of the same objective entertainment level as watching my future kids run around in the yard with their underwear on their head.
I'm glad someone finally got around to calling this sport out for what it is. This thread is our freedom.
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gocanes88
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