Every June, I find myself torn between pursuing summer activities such as drinking beer outdoors until I look like I’m suffering from mad cow disease, or meekly popping out while trying to bash home runs at softball (“You may run like Mays, but you hit like shit!”) and watching the Stanley Cup Finals. I usually make a half-hearted effort to watch some of the Finals, but inevitably end up flipping channels to check out the Blue Jays or basketball playoffs. I can’t help it; it just feels weird watching hockey in June.
So here we sit in mid-September, and NHL training camps haven’t opened yet. Hmmm… wait a second. Could it be? I’ve got it! Maybe the reason the playoffs run into bikini wax season every year is because of the ridiculously late start to the season. I’m not advocating an early September start but honestly, would it kill the league to start the regular season sometime in September? I can see why they wouldn’t want to directly compete with the opening of the NFL season (fantasy NFL tip: never draft Matt Leinhart unless there is a “number of tanned blonde, breast-augmented frat chicks boned over the off-season” scoring category), but a two-week gap would surely be sufficient.
I love the NHL playoffs, but something about watching guys skating through a white, muddy ice-like substance in 30 degree heat turns me off. The league needs to do their players and fans a favour and start and finish the season earlier. I want to be more excited about the Stanley Cup finals than angry about J.P. Ricciardi’s arrogant clusterfucking of the Blue Jays roster (look for the first non-hockey column in Hockeysmack history when we skullfuck, er, examine the J.P. Ricciardi Blue Jay era later this month), but when both occur in June, my body tells me it’s shouldn’t be hockey season.
Come on Gary Bettman! Do this one for me. After that, we can work together on getting rid of those 1 pm Stanley Cup Final weekend start times.
JB
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment