205 Drop: Top 12 ways to fake an interest in the NHL Playoffs

Today's list of snark plays on my 20-year-old knowledge of the NHL, a league that I used to geek so hard on, I used to organize Strat-O-Matic tournaments over it, and started my own pre-Internt stat league. Nothing, and I do mean nothing, says Geek Thug Life like running a league before the Net, and yes, this was The Before Women Era. How did you guess?

Anyway, I used to know everything there was to know about the league, to the point of winning the dork crown (and paying for my Steve Yzerman jersey) three years in a row. So what happened? Well, all sports viewing went away for a while in the '90s when music was my unpopular side career choice (rather than, well, this), and the NHL did everything they could to become less relevant to my life. Dull games -- the New Jersey Devils' "zone trap" alone made the game unwatchable -- work stoppages, crazed cable money grabs (you can still make old-time NHL fans shudder with the words "Sports Channel") and the worst management decisions ever made by a purported major league made me question why I was here, and if I really had to stay.

When a hockey game is low-scoring, it can be fascinating... but it can also feel like the outcome is more or less random. No player in any sport has more impact on a game than a hockey goalie; if he's terrible, you lose no matter what, and if he's great, you win no matter what. Most of the time, the games aren't decided by the difference between the pipes, but it happens enough of the time, and kept happening to my Flyers, to make me wonder why I watched or care.

Being a Flyers fan also didn't help, as it meant my team would routinely kill my hopes in the post-season and make me hate management (Bobby Clarke, the player, good -- Bob Clark, the GM, horrifying) and my fellow fan. People talk about Philly Fan as if he's always the same guy, but he really isn't. Sixer Fan is not Flyer Fan is not Phillies Fan is not Eagles Fan; there is a different mix of defeatism and rancor that ratchets it up the line as you move away from sports where both teams have to play well to make it watchable for anyone but the laundry enthusiast (basketball, hockey), to activities where domination by your team isn't ever boring (baseball, football). This makes your fan base more or less tolerable to be around, in my opinion.

Anyway, as the blog has now greatly exceeded its yearly quota of NHL talk and given hope to the folks who are desperate for any non-NBA post, go click and enjoy the cheap heat already. With any luck, I'll have Canadians insulting me soon enough, because it's just adorable when they try to do that...