Sports Product Review

If you’re like me, you don’t really start paying attention to the NBA or the NHL until the playoffs begin. And why would you? The seasons start in October, they compete with MLB playoffs, the NFL, and college football and basketball, plus everyone makes the post-season anyway. But now, unless you find game number 34 of a 162 game baseball season more riveting, the NHL and NBA playoffs are the sports fan’s best bets. So when I can choose between hoops and hockey on TV, why does the puck win? Ten reasons, (in no particular order) below:

1. Momentum: Huge momentum swings in basketball take time. Yes, it is exciting when a team chips away at an eighteen point lead and narrows the gap to five. But teams trade momentum in hockey like Olympic table tennis players trade volleys. Listen to the crowd in a close playoff hockey game. Twenty thousand people yelling “Oooh” with the regularity of ocean waves crashing.
2. Minutes (as in two minutes): Two minutes to go in a basketball game? There’s time to take a walk, use the bathroom and make a sandwich before the excitement begins. Two minutes left in hockey. Better not get out of your seat. In two minutes the game will be over.
3. Overtime: Unless it goes into overtime. Imagine basketball overtime if the first basket won. Do you think there’d be some defense played? Combine sudden death with the most momentum-trading sport there is, and you’ve got instant thrills.
4. Checking: When was the last time you said, “Whoa!” out load about a good box-out under the basket?
5. Fans: No glamour, not there to be seen, just intense, ready to pound the glass and help their team win.
6. Players: See Fans.
7. Seven: As in Game Seven. They’re huge in both sports, but add the wild card that it might go into sudden-death overtime, and hockey is the winner.
8. Breakaways: Watch the majesty of a skater on a breakaway. The goalie hunching back into the net like a cornered rat, the player dusting off the puck while flying 60 MPH towards the net, looking for options and openings where there are none, and then finally finishing the job. Compare that to jogging down the court wide open and finishing with an uncontested one-hand slam.
9. Dunks: Which leads to dunks. I’m not impressed that a 6’ 11” guy with a four foot wing span can throw it down. Is there anyone that size who couldn’t? I don’t get why that makes # 1 on the list of Sportscenter top ten plays every morning. Give me a gorgeous one-hand wrap-around while attached to a defender any day.
10. Degree of difficulty: Oh yeah, by the way, they do it all on ice skates.

Source: NHL