Hockey-Reference.com just launched this clever sponsorship model, apparently taking after Baseball-Reference.com. You pay a small amount of money to put a text ad on any player, team or coach page on the site. The price varies based on how much traffic the page gets, apparently based on roughly $2.50 for every 1000 page views. I checked out Trevor Linden and Mattias Ohlund–they were both going for $40 a year. Gordie Howe is worth a $100 a year.
The meal portions are enormous. Of course, as all Canadians know, this happens when you enter the other 49 states as well.
You’re less than 150 km from the arena, but the Sharks-Flames game isn’t on any of the 30-odd channels in your hotel room. Sure, there’s women’s college softball on ESPN 2, but no NHL. Fortunately, one television in the hotel bar has the game on satellite.
While in the bar, you overheard this conversation between two women:
WOMAN #1: Are you still running?
WOMAN #2: No. My running partner got new boobs.
WOMAN #1: Are they too big for running?
WOMAN #2: Well, they’re really big. But one of them actually got infected.
WOMAN #1: Oh.
In defense of California, that conversation could have easily occurred in Vancouver, too. I’m off to Web 2.0 Expo. If you’re bored, there’s usually distracting stuff in my link blog in the sidebar (or here’s the RSS feed).
Who is Fabian Brunnström? With a name like that, I wondered if maybe he won the latest edition of Swedish Idol. In fact, he’s an undrafted forward (listed as a left-winger here) in the Swedish Elite League, and allegedly one of the best hockey players outside the NHL.
Yesterday, the CBC reported that the Canucks were close to signing Brunnström. From Scott Morrison’s blog:
No fewer than 20 NHL teams expressed interest in the 23-year-old Swedish winger, who went undrafted and played the past season in the Swedish Elite League with Farjestad.
As reported on Hockey Night in Canada on Saturday, Brunnstrom had a short list of five or six and further reduced that to one: the Canucks, whose general manager, Dave Nonis, did a good job of selling the youngster on the team and the city.
On the broadcast, Morrison calls Brunnström “the hottest player not in the NHL right now” and “speedy”. Here’s an earlier article from The Hockey News:
Brunnstrom, a 6-foot-1, 195-pound forward, is a classic late bloomer. Last season he was playing First Division in Sweden, which is two steps under the Elite League and was a star at that level, which prompted Farjestad to sign him this season. He skates very well and his three goals and 13 points in 21 games are probably not a clear indication of how good he is offensively.
Why wouldn’t he come to Vancouver? Canada is considerably more similar to Sweden than the US, it’s got the most favourable climate in the country and the Canucks are chock full of Swedes. I assume that the team has some kind of Swedish quota, and the Canucks are signing Brunnström anticipating Naslund’s forthcoming departure. Darren Dreger speculates that he might sign at $2 million per season.
If the Canucks do sign him, Brunnström will undoubtedly get a long audition with the Sedin twins. They’ve been missing an effective triplet since Anson Carter was stricken with delusions of grandeur. Who knows? Maybe he’ll fit in where everybody else on the roster hasn’t. I’ll also be pleased to see the team get younger.
Here’s a little video compilation of in action:
He’s wearing a #96 jersey. If he does play for the Canucks, he’ll have to decide whether he wants the monkey that comes free with that number on his back. When a team has a bad year, there’s often extra pressure on signings like this. Hopefully he can shoulder it.
I can map my serious interest in the Canucks to Trevor Linden’s career. Growing up, I always kind of followed the team, but I didn’t get seriously interested until my teens, about when Linden entered the league. I don’t really remember his first game or anything, but I do recall the city being abuzz about this 18-year-old, drafted second over all behind Mike Modano. Modano scored more goals over the years, but I’m glad the team got Linden (that was a good draft year–four five great players in the top ten picks).
Like so many Vancouverites, Linden became my favourite player. I liked his intensity, his tenacity and his endless willingness to do the hard work on the ice. He was never the fastest skater, but I did like the little hitching half-step he took with his first stride. Especially in the early years, he wore his heart on his sleeve. Nobody seemed to feel a defeat more dearly in the media scrum following a game. I remember 1994 with fondness, how he put the team on his back against the Rangers and almost carried them to the promise land of the Stanley Cup.
Wayne Gretzky said that the legs are the first thing to go, and you could see Linden slowing down in recent years. He deserves a break. He’s sweated blood in the NHL for nineteen years. I hope the organization will find a spot for him if he wants it. And as Rebecca suggests, I hope they name a street after him. Sign the petition if you hope so, too.
Yesterday, while considering going to a local public house to watch some of the Canucks vs. Minnesota pay-per-view game, I consulted this list of pubs showing the game. It’s just two big, unsortable tables covering all of BC. Unless you’re only looking to confirm that a particular pub is showing the game, it’s nearly useless.
I wondered aloud (as I was by myself), “wouldn’t it be cool if somebody could feed all this data into Google Maps, and I could use that to determine which pubs were closest.”
With some help, I almost got the thing up and running. Then I ran into some roadblocks, got busy and forgot about it.
I still have the same problem. Tonight I’m giving a talk, and wanted to be able to slip out afterwards to catch the second half of the Flames/Canucks game. I figured I’d have another crack at the problem. This time I’ve been successful–witness my l33t mashup skillz!
Here’s how I did it (it’s not exactly rocket science):
I went to the Canucks website and copied all the details–name, address and city–of the pay per view venues. I dumped that data into an Excel spreadsheet.
I needed to associate latitude and longitude values with each address. I used this handy free tool to ‘geocode’ each venue. I added the location data to my spreadsheet.
I imported my spreadsheet into Google Docs. You can see it here.
Somebody has probably already done this in the meantime, but I wanted to see if I could do it myself. It was encouragingly straightforward, and only took me about an hour from start to finish. It’s not perfect–the Grizzly Bar is floating in the Atlantic south of Nigeria–but it’s a reasonable solution to my problem. Steamworks on Water Street seems like the right fit for tonight.
The Leafs goalie Vesa Toskala just let in what is possibly the longest shot in league history. In his defense, the thing was bouncing all over the place.
For the past decade or so, I’ve made a habit of watching hockey highlights on television. I began with the sadly-defunct SportsPage (a triple-A show for much of the Canadian broadcast talent you see on the CBC, SportsNet and TSN), and subsequently watched TSN or SportsNet.
During the winter, these shows almost always open with hockey highlights, so I’d sit down at 23:00 and be done by 23:15 at the latest.
Living in Malta, there’s obviously no Canadian highlights shows on TV. Plus, we don’t have a TV. So, as I mentioned a few weeks back, I’ve been watching highlights on the web (the CBC, mostly).
This has resulted in one subtle shift in my viewing. Instead of sitting back and watching the highlights from all the games played, I must now pick which clips I want to view. What’s the result?
Surprisingly, I watch far fewer highlights. I always check out the Canucks, obviously, but after that I’m kind of left staring at the other results and wondering which I should choose. I lean toward the Canucks’ divisional rivals and Canadian teams, I guess. Plus I’ve been watching a lot of Penguins and Blackhawks highlights, because they have the most exciting young players in the league.
Part of my problem, I suppose, is that I don’t know which highlights are worth watching–besides the score, there’s no metadata. I can’t tell which games went to overtime, or to a shootout, or which featured a fantastic goal or save.
Here’s a feature request for CBC Sports: add rating functionality to each video clip, enabling viewers to judge each clip. That would help me assess which highlights I ought to watch, and which I can give a miss.
What’s the big lesson? Well, there’s isn’t one. What’s the small lesson? A reminder about mediums and messages, and how moving video from the TV to the web inevitably changes our relationship to it.
Artist Kurt Kauper is causing quite a stir in the Canadian media because of his nude (and a little homoerotic, if you ask me) paintings of 1970s hockey icons:
“I was … interested in the way the male nude is received in our culture,” he said. “I think that it’s seen as something dangerous and threatening. And that’s not at all true for the female nude.
“It’s almost impossible to show a full-frontal male nude,” he added. “To show a male nude is to suggest that men and masculinity are passive objects to be looked at and I don’t think that our culture wants to think about men in those terms.”
I dig provocative, interesting work where sports and art intersects. One of my favourite books of poems is Hero of the Play by Richard Harrison. Here’s a recording (MOV) of “Russians”, a poem from that book (other recordings are here). In another poem, there’s a terrific line about Jagr sliding the puck under the goalie “like a surprise confession”.
This morning I had the peculiar experience of watching a Canucks game in Malta. Courtesy of the NASN, I was able to catch last night’s Vancouver/Calgary game (not live, thankfully) while eating breakfast at our local bar.
And the Canucks won. Considering their early season play, that was a nice bonus. They took a 3-0 lead and then, in classic Vancouver fashion, made it interesting by taking the third period off. Happily Luongo played the full sixty minutes. They did look like a team missing three of their regular defencemen.
This will probably be the only hockey game I ever watch serenaded by the clanking metal-on-metal sound of a blacksmith across the street. When I say ‘blacksmith’, I’m serious. Change this guy’s clothing, and he could be living in any of the last ten centuries. He’s got an anvil at the centre of his workshop, an open fire, and every surface of his workspace is covered in black soot.
Those guys need to learn how to pass the ball rubgy-style.
Speaking of North American sports, I’m pleased to announce that tomorrow morning I’m going to hit our local pub for lunch and, thanks to the North American Sports Network, watch Toronto play New York. At ice hockey. Amusingly, the pub is called “Rangers”, so I’m going to Rangers to watch the Rangers.
