Your Annual Hockey Post

So once a year, whether you want it or not, I write about the NHL. But only tangentially, so that all of you long-suffering puckheads can pule. Pule, puckheads, pule!

The first point we get to make is how wonderful it is that old-time franchises are recovering from their past marketing mistakes and getting away from cartoonishly awful merch. You know, the same stuff that people bought before, otherwise they wouldn't have made it. You have to love sports fans for this; if a team makes a terrible jersey, some fool is going to have to catch 'em all, then be so happy when they go back to the old stuff. Mark my words, some smart / horrible franchise is going to come up with a different jersey for every game of the year. (The early odds? Jerruh Jones. But I digress.)

Next up in the same line is word that the NHL is, I am not making this up, working to create superhero "Guardian" types for each city, so that Hockey Fan can think about their sport in the realm of Good and Evil. Which leads one to wonder, really... who are the villains in a hockey fan's universe? NBA fans? Anti-fighting activists? Style elites who shun the mullet? Or, just, well, Gary Bettman? (The answer, of course, is Bettman. Though they are also strongly in favor of any form of entertainment in which ESPN programmers who handle their sport badly can punched in the face, too. Hockey Fan is angry in the way that only white people with too much money can be angry...)

I'd say more about both of these things, but then I'd go over my 300-word annual limit on all things hockey. See you again in June, when some team that I have a vague remembrance of caring about enters the playoffs and makes me go, "Heh, that team's in the playoffs again. I guess that's good."