Almost as clutzy as me

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saZETkviq4o&feature=youtube_gdata

I'm in Tahoe this week for a little ski vacay. You know--all this beginner hockey stuff is just exhausting.

Saw this video on Puck Daddy and it reminded me of a more graceful version of one of my rushes on the net. I'm too much of a tech idiot to get the YouTube link to publish as a link.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Who do you want Kings to play in the playoffs?

Thanks to the NHL's liberal rules that allow a majority of the team's leagues into the playoffs, the Los Angeles Kings are almost certainly going to the post-season barring a catastrophic collapse in the next two weeks.

But how good are the Kings?

Throughout the season I've been trying to keep an eye on the transparent standings published occasionally by the New York Times. The transparent standings are a bit old-school, as they separate how a team performs in regulation from how it does in overtime.

The NHL standings, on the other hand, only show wins-losses-overtime losses. The standings do not show how many wins were the result of winning the skills competition at the end of overtime -- i.e. the shootout.

In the transparent standings, as of Friday morning, the Kings have a record of 30-25-18 in regulation, meaning they win 41% of their games in regulation. But they've excelled in overtime, going 12-6, including a 9-5 record in the shootout.

One team the Kings should be scared of is the Vancouver Canucks. They are 40-25-10 in regulation time for a win percentage of 53% in regulation. The Canucks are 6-4 in overtime as of Tuesday and 3-3 in the shootout. But who cares about the pedestrian OT stats? More often than not, the Canucks only need 60 minutes to put teams away.

Looking for players for beginner's team in Pasadena spring league

After about a year of learning to skate and play the game, some guys (myself included) from my Wednesday night clinic at the Pasadena rink are forming a team for the spring league. It's lower division, meaning you don't have to be a superstar to play -- in fact, you don't have to be any good at all -- and we still need a few players to complete our roster.

In the past, the rink has just had one league that lumped together players of all skill levels. They're wisely breaking it up into lower and upper division leagues for the spring league, which will have games starting late Sunday afternoon and then going through the evening.

Here's some more information on the Pasadena Ice Skating Center's website. The first games are the night of April 11 and the regular season concludes June 27. It's $300 for the season and players must be at least 18 years old. It's co-ed and our team welcomes any women who can stand both our company and bad passes on the ice.

My team has five players committed plus we're going to be assigned a goalie by the league manager at the rink. I think we're going to get a couple more players from the clinic but ideally we'd like to have 10 to 12 players, given that not everyone will be able to make every game and some of us are oxygen-challenged. The idea of a 60-minute shift is not appealing. 

We're doing this because the idea for most of us all along has been to play real games. But most of us still have a long ways to go to polish our games -- at any given time we're prone to failing to stop properly, making insanely poor passes and moving as slow as molassas. And we're all really nice guys -- seriously!

If you're interested in playing, contact me at steve.hymon1@gmail.com.

For a day, marathoners make hockey players look like a bunch of pussies

I tried to think of a gentler headline for this post. Really, I did. But ultimately I thought it best to allow the truth to prevail and say it like it is.

I spent yesterday watching the Los Angeles marathon from a bunch of different places: the start, mile 12 in WeHo and between mile 23 in Brentwood and the finish line in Santa Monica. To make a long story short, I was going to participate in the race, but a knee injury sidelined me but I went anyway to cheer along a running buddy and to watch what I believe is one of the greatest spectacles in sport: the 26.2 mile footrace.

Once upon a time, I was a sportswriter. That job entailed watching pro athletes compete at the highest level of sport, often for great sums of money. It was fun. And it certainly gave me an appreciation for the pressure on professional athletes to not just give their best effort, but win. Always.

Marathons take that premise and stand it on its head. The vast majority of participants are not paid -- rather they pay to participate. Almost no one "wins" in the sense that they're the fastest. Except for family and friends, most of the racers are anonymous, with maybe their first name on their bibs. And, unlike pro athletes who compete often, marathoners typically train for hundreds of hours over many months, hoping it will pay off in a three- to six-hour span on race day.

And finally there is the issue of pain. All the smiles I saw on runners at the start were pretty much gone by mile 12. At mile 23, most runners looked like people who wouldn't even understand the concept of a smile. The mile marker corresponded with the end of a long, slow climb up San Vicente Boulevard -- when I arrived there on my bike it was just in time to see one young gentlemen sidle up to the grass median and projectile vomit for a spell.

O Canada, O Brother, The Sequel

Go Canada!
Originally uploaded by Michael Caswell

Here's another pic from Flickr that was taken on the streets of Vancouver yesterday.

I'm not sure what to say about this dude. I think that's an inflatable suit he's wearing but who knows -- maybe one Molson led to another to another.

--Steve Hymon

O Canada, O Brother

Vancouver 2010, Hockey Gold
Originally uploaded by tripleman

I found this photo on Flickr taken on the streets of Vancouver minutes after Canada beat the Americans yesterday in the Olympic gold medal game.

Can't say I liked the result of the game, but you have to admire the passion.

--Steve Hymon

How can anyone ever watch baseball again after that?

The final score of the Winter Olympics' gold medal hockey game on Sunday may be disappointing to those of us who badly wanted to witness Canada get whooped on their home ice.

Yet, it was such a thrilling game hat it's hard to be too bummed that the Frozen People of the North got the medal they needed to validate their when-will-my-balls-thaw existence.

At least you weren't stuck on the subway in Vancouver yesterday; check out the above video to see how that went.

My observations on the game:

1. There should not even be a discussion over whether the NHL should send its players to the Winter Games in Sochi in 2014. The past week earned more publicity for the sport than the NHL can ever generate on its own with less-than-brilliant marketing techniques such as ice girls and strobe lights.

2. As my friend Scott pointed out in an extremely caffeinated phone call before the third period, did you happen to notice that the game was really exciting despite there being no fighting? Fighting isn't permitted in the international game and I didn't hear one person say they missed it. As I've written before, fighting may be fun sometimes, but it likely turns off more people than it turns on and gives a beautiful sport (which is plenty violent without fighting) a bad image. As long as fighting is allowed and encouraged by the NHL, the NHL will be treated as a minor league sport on par with tractor pulls, pig races and funnel cake eating contests.

3. Which, of course, is a shame. Can anyone who watched today's game imagine sitting in front of a TV for 2 1/2 hours watching a baseball game? Or golf? I think the only sport that comes close on excitement level is pro football and let's face it, today's game was at least 37.3 more times exciting than the Super Bowl -- which featured about 10 minutes of game action and three hours of nut-scratching (albeit nut-scratching in high def!).

4. I'm not so sure that Team Canada is better than Team USA. After two games plus part of an OT period, the U.S. had scored seven goals to Canada's six. The Canadians seemed to have a little more offensive flash throughout the Olympic tournament, but I don't think anyone can argue they were a dominant team. Yes, they slayed Russia. But Russia's goaltender had a mental meltdown that in the old says would have earned him hard time on the Siberian outpost.

Go USA!

Well, I'm immature enough to admit that I had trouble sleeping last night due to the exciting prospect of watching the U.S.-Canada gold medal game.

Which, by the way, begins in 273 minutes.

--Steve Hymon

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Someone buy this girl some skates

Not knocking any of the other U.S. skiers, but how can you not simply love the way Sarah Schleper throws herself into a run? I told The Domestic Partner it would be completely alright with me if she could scream like this before diving into any of our fave intermediate runs at Mammoth.

As for Schleper, someone needs to get her on hockey skates, stat. There is no doubt she has the proper mental aptitude for the sport.

--Steve Hymon

What's the right -- or left -- way to hold a hockey stick?

Probably the smartest story I've read during the Olympics came, not surprisingly, from the New York Times, which examined this interesting phenomenon: In Canada, more left-handed hockey sticks are sold than right-handed ones. In the U.S., it's the opposite.

But get this: in both countries, more people are right-handed. Excerpt from the story:

A lot of experts would argue, however, that having the dominant hand on top makes for better control and stick-handling. 

The United States Olympic women’s hockey coach, Mark Johnson, is in that camp, but he said: “Whether you’re living in a hotbed hockey community or you live in a naïve place where you don’t really know hockey, and you’re a mother or a father taking your daughter to a hockey shop, you’ll ask, ‘Which way do you write?’ If she says right-handed, well, she’s going to be right-handed.

“That’s generally not the way you want to do it. You want your dominant hand on top of your stick. But you look around and there’s a lot of right-handed female players, more so than with men.”

Well, that's certainly interesting and it does seem to makes sense. I picked up an ice hockey stick for the first time last April and it never crossed my mind to anything but righty -- I'm right-handed and it felt natural to shoot on the right-hand side. Puck dribbling didn't feel as natural, but I just chalked that up to the newness of hockey. 

As it happens, I have an old left-handed wooden stick that someone gave me. I've been doodling with it in the driveway and I do like having my dominant right hand on top of the stick. Shooting lefty feels awkward but not as awkward as trying to hit a softball or tennis ball left-handed.

I'm not going to switch as this point. But if I had to start all over again, I might have gone the left route.

--Steve Hymon