Is The Shootout Good For Hockey?
SULLIVAN: Hockey was dead long before the 2004 lockout. The last year the sport had any cachet in New York was in 1994 when Mark Messier promised to bring home a Stanley Cup to New York-then did it. Messier became the new Joe Namath, and hockey gained some street cred.
This year, with the new rules making the game faster and fairer for the more skilled players-unlike the goons who dominated the game in the past-hockey is back, and getting bigger. The Rangers are in first place, and the game has become part of the sports conversation again.
The game-ending shootouts are brilliant. Witness Ranger Marek Malik putting the puck between his legs before scoring a penalty goal to win last Saturday's game against Washington. That was like an old ABA move and, man, did that make the highlight reels. And that is what hockey needs. Excitement. Fast skating and quick scoring.
Only a Luddite like you, Hollander, would have a problem with these new rules that will save the game of hockey.
HOLLANDER: Gee, what's next, pistols at 30 paces?
The shootout is a cheap gimmick. It takes the game out of the player's hands. After skating hard and checking bloody for three periods plus overtime, no self-respecting hockey player wants to decide the game on a pee-wee practice drill.
Could you imagine settling an NFL game with a punt, pass and kick contest? The NBA went to the three-point shot to soup up its "product" and now nobody can shoot anywhere from the outside and the game is crumbling at its fundamental core. To please moronic, home-run-happy fans, baseball turned a blind eye to steroids and then major leaguers forgot how to move a runner over, hit behind the runner, bunt or steal a base. Now, in a desperate appeal to reptilian minds like yours, hockey has gone too far.
You're right: The NHL's new rules have significantly increased scoring opportunities. Goals per game are up from 5.1 last season to 6.3. And that's exactly why you don't need a shootout to decide a game, because the Jagr's, Alfredsson's and Shanahan's will definitely, eventually score in overtime.
No matter how long it takes, you play until there is a victor.
Or bring back hockey's banished jewel: the "tie." Many say a tie is like "kissing your sister." But, in greater Saskatchewan and Finland's nocturnal region (two major hockey breeding grounds), kissing one's sister is a venerated custom.
The shootout offends every player on the ice and insults hockey culture.
SPIKE VRUSHO: Listen, you two Frankenstein monsters from the castle ruins of New York Sports Express, stop all this IMDB movie-talk nonsense. This is not ESPN Classic, just to throw another one of my ex-employers into this disgusting soup. You Knick fanboys with your inflatable ball need to own up to the fact that the 'Gers are going all the way this year! I watch them nightly on the "Rangers in 60" MSG replay after my night shift as a Gannett drone in Dutchess County. They win faceoffs. They hustle. They play on crappy, Cablevision home ice that is barely skateable, and they are in first place! I'm telling you right now that Michal Rozsival is the Czech Bruce Driver! How can a team of six Czechs, including the Michael Jordan of hockey, Jaromir Jagr, plus a Slovak, a Finn, a Lithuanian, a Swede, a pair of Russkies, five Canadian hosers and, oh yeah, three Americans, be denied?
I ask you sports types this question because soon you will be doing lame recollections of where you were in '94. Me, I was at Ryan's Fake Irish pub on Second Avenue in the East Village. I remember a preppie girl leaving the ATM at St. Marks Place and making celebratory confetti out of her receipt as an NYPD officer looked on. Woo-hoo! Sorry for the interruption, you hard-boiled scribes. Now I've got to go pay my eight -dollar water bill at the Village of Rhinebeck town hall.
SULLIVAN: Now I have Vrusho and Hollander attacking me. It's like swatting away gnats.
Once again, Hollander, you have proven how you have descended into the dreaded hell of sports intellectualism. Hockey culture? What the hell is that?
And as for Spike "Rhinebeck" Vrusho's trip down memory lane, I was in a bucket-of-blood Queens bar in 1994 when the Rangers won the Stanley Cup. The hockey heads broke out into a rousing donnybrook as a celebration. I stood off to the side pushing fat-backed grocery clerks into the fray as they tried to remove themselves from the fight. That, Spike and Dave, is true hockey culture. Uncouth white men beating the holy hell out of each other, and that is also why the new rules limit this goonery you two fancy boys seemingly revel in.
As for kissing sisters, I, for one, would kiss Dave Hollander's sister. She's a lovely woman, and I mean that with respect. But if I caught either Hollander or Vrusho kissing one of my sisters, I would channel the old Broad Street Bullies and beat the holy hell out of both men.
And I would love to see pistol dueling at 30 paces as a way to end all sports games. The perfect match in football would be Keyshawn Johnson versus T.O. facing off à la Hamilton and Burr. And the best outcome would be they would hit each other and the bullets would pass through them, nailing John Madden and Al Michaels.
Now that would be sport!
HOLLANDER: Sullivan, if you even think about my sister, let alone mention her name again, I will level you with a Bertuzzi-like blow to the head, deadening what's left of that puny marble your doctor calls a brain. It's best you stick with Vrusho who, these days, I hear, does his "high sticking" around the neighborhood Brownie Troops in Poughkeepsie. That's more your element.
God, the two of you are the Hanson Brothers of hockey writing.
That Saturday night Ranger game against the Capitals you referred to-that freak show-took 15 shootouts before it ended. 15 shootouts! C'mon man! An additional overtime or two not only would have been shorter and but much more compelling. It would've been, um, actual hockey. With your facile support of the shootout and loony tangents on dueling and fat white men, you have put the "dick" back in ridiculous.
If hockey fans want their speed, violence and equipment without having to endure the basic game of hockey, then why not just turn the whole damn thing into Rollerball?
Come to think of it, Rollerball would be alright with me.