This week in hockey crimes and misdemeanors: what to do when the goalie drops his stick?

And the mistakes go on and on and on....


The Crime: Due to some kind of cosmic burp, I’m playing center. We’re up by a goal late in the third period, in the left faceoff circle and on offense. I kind of win the faceoff and pull the puck backward on a diagonal – a four o’clock direction – into a space unoccupied by any of my teammates. An opponent picks up the puck and heads down the ice unescorted.

The Result: First, I almost crapped my hockey pants. Second, the opponent got off a pretty good shot, which was blocked by my goalie. We take the puck back up the ice, warding off the threat.

The Lesson: I had the right idea – pull the puck back to one of our D-men. Problem is, I didn’t check immediately before the puck dropped to see where our D-men were stationed. If I had seen there wasn’t anyone there, I could have either signaled to my teammates to move or tried harder to make sure I didn’t send the puck the other way up the ice.

The Crime: I’m at wing and follow the other wing into the other team’s zone. I set up in front of the crease and in the jostling for a rebound that follows – get this – the other team’s goalie drops his stick. I give it a girlie kick away from the crease to get it out of my way and, of course, deny the goalie the use of his stick. But it only goes three feet or so and a D-man from the other team is above to recover the stick and give it back to the goalie before we take another shot.

The Result: Even though the goalie got his stick back, I had a decent screen going and the other wing takes a shot from the slot and scores.

This week in hockey crimes and misdemeanors

The league I play in doesn't do much in the way of stat tracking -- hell, the Pasadena's rink didn't even work for yesterday's set of games. But I've often occasionally about my plus-minus rating, although I'm probably happier not knowing it. My hope is that I've gotten to the point where I can achieve a zero rating -- nothing too good or bad happens when I'm on the ice!

And what that in mind, the latest batch of hockey mistakes that keeps me awake at night:

The Crime: Yesterday's game. I'm at right wing. My team's up 3 to 1 or 4 to 1 with maybe less than five minutes to go (thank you, non-working scoreboard!) and I'm working the puck up the boards in the other team's zone. I manage to get down to the corner before the other team's D-man steals the puck and takes off around the net, with me chasing him. I reach out with my stick and...

The Result:...allegedly trip him, according to the late whistle from the referee. I actually think it was more of a hook than a trip, but who am I to quibble about details. In any event, we're protecting a lead late in the game and now I've put the other team on the power play. All the way down at the other end of the ice I can hear my goalie call out to me "Steve!" as in "Steve, what the f--k were you thinking?" Excellent question! We almost surrendered a goal on the power play, but my goalie was able to sit on the puck an inch before it crossed the goal line. I'm sure he was silently thanking me for that puck suppository.

The Lesson: What was I thinking? The answer is, of course, I wasn't thinking. I was playing hockey, which attentive readers know shrinks one's brain matter to one percent of normal capacity. I was in "get the f--k away from my puck" mode and probably the only thing that was gonna stop me was a taser to the testicles. That said, the lesson here is think. Although many hockey teams -- including mine -- have pretty good penalty kills, a penalty kill still cripples a team's offensive chances and few teams are good enough to sacrifice quality shots on goal. So if you're reading this, don't revel in your PIMs. Vow to reduce them.

Hockey crimes and misdemeanors

It's that special time again -- when I look back at my last couple of games and shudder in horror at some of the many boneheaded mistakes I made. To wit:


THE CRIME: Nine guys show up for our game. As captain, I put four on defense and five on offense. The D rotation is easy -- two guys on the ice, two off. We treat O like it's a pickup game. A guy/girl comes off, someone on the bench takes their position. Sounds easy...

THE RESULT: Except it's not. It's confusing. From shift to shift, we're in different and sometimes unfamiliar positions on offense. And we get tired. And we lost by three goals to a team with just seven players.

THE LESSON: We should have gone with three on D and six on O. The general rule of thumb in hockey is that D-men can withstand more minutes on the ice anyway and this would have resulted in a better organized offense.

THE CRIME: In aforementioned game, I end up playing center on some shifts. The center is usually one of the better players on the team. I am not one of the better players on the team. And, by the way, I had never actually taken a faceoff in a real game and on three or four occasions I find myself taking a faceoff. Hey, here's a fun hockey fact: faceoffs are really important!

THE RESULT: My memory is a little sketchy, but I do recall basically not touching the puck on my first two faceoffs. On the third or fourth one, I actually won -- in all likelihood because of divine intervention of the Hockey Gods. Or, more likely, because the other team was even more shorthanded than we were and didn't have the services of its regular center.

THE LESSON: If you're on a hockey team, practice faceoffs -- because sooner or later it's gonna be you in the middle of the circle and you want to at least look like you know what you're doing. In other words, don't be like me and hold the stick wrong (and don't assume you're friendly referee is going to show you the right way because he feels sorry for middle-aged men learning the exciting sport of ice hockey). And maybe it would even be a good idea to watch the following video, which has some good pointers.

This week's Hockey Crimes and Misdemeanors

Did you know that it’s possible to buy cattle prods online? And that cattle prods can be purchased for as little as $61.50, batteries included?

This is what city living does: you get so obsessed with urban technology such as cell phones, you forget there’s a whole wide world of rural technology that may be useful for a beer league hockey player.

Sadly, my team lost again yesterday. We’re eight games into our first season now – and for most of us it literally is our first season – and we’re 0-7-1. That’s rough. Sundays can’t come soon enough.

So why the cattle prod?

I want to be shocked. I want to be punished. I want to tie the cattle prod to one of our defenseman and have said defenseman ram that thing up my ass every time I do something stupid.

Which brings me to this weeks’ version of Hockey Crimes and Misdemeanors – all the reasons that I deserve a few volts of unwanted electricity:

The Crime: I’m playing right wing. The puck is in our zone, I’m guarding the other team’s left defenseman – a pretty big dude. He’s about five feet inside the blue line. He gets a pass from down low. I lunge to my right to try to take the puck from him. He moves to his right, away from me and cranks a slapshot.

The Result: With moderate traffic in front of our goal, the puck finds the net -- no one touches it -- to give the other team a 1 to 0 lead. I am quickly filled with a blimp-ful of shame and if I was a Samurai, I’d be writing this while headless.

The Lesson: If I had stayed in front of the guy I was guarding I would have had the opportunity to block the shot or get a stick on his stick and disrupt him. Instead I gambled and my team paid the price. Cattle prod, stat!

My growing rap sheet of hockey crimes and misdemeanors

Well I'm closing in on one goal -- and not the kind with a net. I've managed to devote 99.9% of my waking hours to thinking about hockey.

Seriously. In the past two weeks, I had coffee with a lady friend with the barn door wide open for an hour and twice have gone out in public with my shirt inside out. I've also misplaced my ATM card five or six times and had trouble recalling my home address recently -- I've only lived here seven years.

In other words, if I can eliminate the .1% of the time I'm thinking about eating, going to the bathroom and girls, I'll have achieved perfect harmony with the hockey universe.

So why the obsessiveness?

Because my team -- the team I helped organize because I wanted to play in real games -- has started the spring league season 0 and 4. As I mentioned in a recent post, we're not getting butchered. But we have eight guys out of 13 playing in their first ever hockey league and we're not winning.

As for the scores, we've gone down 6 to 3, 4 to 2, 4 to 0 and 5 to 1. Our defense is actually playing fairly well. Our offense is improving and we're taking more shots. But we're still doing enough things wrong to prevent The Hockey Gods from awarding us with a win.

The Domestic Partner came to yesterday's game and shot about 13 minutes of video. With 99.9% of brain activity devoted to hockey I stayed up half the night watching the low-res clips. My intention was to make some notes on how we were doing as a team, but I ended up focusing on yours truly and it was like watching a hockey horror show over and over again.

Let's catalog some of my efforts to rewrite the position of right wing:

•THE CRIME: There I am on the right side of the left face-off circle in our defensive zone. The puck scoots over to me. I know the puck has now entered The Death Zone -- that area in front of our goal -- so I give the puck a nice dainty slap to the left toward the boards. Never makes it there--puck instead goes to a guy wearing the wrong color jersey who actually seems surprised I made such an accurate pass to him. In other words, I didn't even manage to get the puck out of our zone.

RESULT: The other team didn't do much better with the puck and we were able to clear it up the right boards and make a rush on their goal. So my turnover didn't result in a goal against us.


VERDICT: I had the right idea, but the execution was poor and essentially brainless. I should have either taken off with the puck OR taken a split-second to look around for a pass OR for fuck's sake, iced that rubber motherfucker.