April 10th, 2012, No Comments »
For the average hockey fan, the days between the regular season and the playoffs are torture. There’s very little news, as teams are more secretive than ever about line-ups, injuries and the like. All the media can do is sit around and make predictions. All fans can do is read and ruminate on those predictions.
I started a spreadsheet that shows all the media and hockey blogger predictions I could find. I’ve made it editable by anybody, so that should others discover predictions, they can add them to the document.
I’m currently up to around 450 individual picks from nearly 60 pundits. I don’t claim to be exhaustive, but it’s hopefully representative. Here are some early impressions:
- The longest series is predicted to be NSH/DET, with the shortest being NJD/FLO.
- There’s great consensus in the east, with at least 90% of the media agreeing on the outcome of all four series.
- There’s the most disagreement on the CHI/PHO series, with the media currently going 60%-40% in favour of the Blackhawks.
- Almost nobody picks 4-game series sweeps, which is odd because there’s usually at least one in the quarter-finals each year.
- Confidence in the Canucks is reasonably high, with more than 83% of the media picking them to pick the Kings, in an average of roughly 6 games.
- Hockey writers are almost all Caucasian men.
In completing this little exercise, I couldn’t help but think fondly of Maggie the macaque, who routinely outpicked the TSN staff in years past. This year, I’ll have to settle for a sea lion from Niagara Falls.
In a related note, I’ll be going on something of a social media cleanse in the coming weeks (and months, hopefully). As I’m living in France, I’ll be watching playoff games about 12 to 18 hours after they finish. So, I’ll need to avoid the likes of Twitter and Facebook in order to enjoy the games in a prelapsarian state, if you will.
UPDATE: I thought I’d better store my first round picks here, which I tweeted the other day: NYR in 4, BOS in 7, NJD in 5, PIT in 7, VAN in 6, SJS in 7, CHI in 5, NSH in 7
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January 18th, 2012, 5 Comments »
There’s been a great deal of talk today about some proposed American legislation and its impact on the Internet. I don’t really want to add to the clamour. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, watch this 13-minute video primer from Clay Shirky, this Khan Academy video (thanks to Andy for that) or read Wikipedia’s SOPA and PIPA list of questions and answers.
I have been thinking about piracy lately, though, because I’m considering alternatives to cable television. In truth, hockey is the only thing that binds me to Shaw Cable. I’ve been poking around for alternatives to watching or recording Canucks games on our PVR.
The only legal option is NHL GameCenter LIVE (caution, autoplaying video ahead). Back in October, I could pay $169 to watch nearly any game I want on my computer, iPad or iPhone. They reduce the price throughout the year–it’s currently $119. On the face of it, this seems like a satisfactory offer. I’d rather they amortize the pricing based on the exact day I sign up, but it could be worse.
However, the fine print is pretty hostile to the average customer:
- If you want to cancel your subscription after you sign up, you have five days to do so. After that, you forfeit the entire payment.
- You only get to watch the first two rounds of the playoffs. It’s not immediately apparent, despite some diligent searching, as to how one watches the subsequent rounds.
- Because of league agreements with broadcasters, many games are blacked out. The rules around this policy are pretty inscrutable, though I did read that no games are broadcast through GameCenter in the playoffs in Canada, because they’re televised nationally. There are endless complaints from GameCenter customers on social media and online discussion forums about this practice.
- The reviews of the NHL GameCenter mobile app are not flattering. A typical review in the iTunes store reads “Huge downgrade from the 2010 version. It crashes constantly and it’s way harder to navigate than last years version.”
The NHL seems to be about 60% of the way there to a really great service that enables you to watch all games, live or recorded, over the web.
By the way, there are no current NHL (nor NBA, NFL or MLB) games available through the iTunes store. This seems like an enormous missed opportunity.
Clearly, the NHL has not found its iTunes-esque sweet spot. How do I know this? Because there are a ton of illegal ways to watch NHL games online.
There are streaming sites, usually with multiple options for streams of both the home and away broadcasts for any game, and bittorrent sites. But my favourite example is this grey-market site based in Rotterdam, Netherlands that is a generic clone of NHL GameCenter. They essentially offer the same thing as GameCenter, except with more convenience and at a moderately-lower (a year costs US $99) price point. There are no blackouts, no playoff restrictions and the site seems to be more reliable better than the GameCenter app. In short, this shady Dutch operation out-performs the NHL’s own service.
As is so often the case, when the legal options aren’t satisfactory, illegal alternatives abound. There’s clearly a huge appetite for this kind of on-demand sports content. On my site alone, more than 17,000 people have visited this site alone looking for some variation of “how to watch NHL hockey online”. Not everybody wants the all-you-can-eat package for $169, mind you, but that’s the only legal game in town.
We’ve solved online music. We’re making good progress on television and movies. It looks to me like sports leagues, or at least the NHL, still have a very 20th century attitude towards the web. What’s holding them back?
UPDATE: Coincidentally, I was poking around on my iPad tonight, looking for hockey highlights. None of the CBC, TSN or Sportsnet apps offer video highlights, and the associated sites only offer video highlights in Flash. When I visit NHL.com looking for highlights, I get forwarded to their GameCenter offering. In short, the NHL expects me to have to pay to watch video highlights on my iPad.
Of course, somebody has routed around the bogosity, and hosts a simple site for NHL highlights that runs very smoothly on my iPad.
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May 16th, 2010, No Comments »
The other day I lent a book to a friend. Before handing it over, I paged through it, and discovered an article I’d torn out of the Vancouver Sun. It’s from April 7, 2005, and features a poem by Richard Harrison. He’s writing about the labour lockout which resulted in the cancellation of the 2004-2005 NHL season. I also thought its sad tone was applicable to any fan mourning the loss of their team’s exit from the post-season.
NH Elegy
Once, men came home from war,
or from the sides of family graves,
to lace up skates and play for it
as if everything could be remade
in a silver bowl passed hand to hand.
For years it etched the seasons
with their winning names,
and took the touch of triumph
into each triumphant house. It paused
just once – to mourn the dead, and
stayed unmarked to mark their passing.
Today, left idle in the Hall of Fame,
while rich men quarrel to no profit at its base,
untouched upon its plinth it stands.
And all who see it can tell you now
how a fallen thing is one that no one holds.
Back in 1994, Harrison wrote a lovely book of hockey poems entitled “Hero of the Play”. I highly recommend it. You can read and hear some of his poems elsewhere on the web.
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May 4th, 2010, No Comments »
As I recently wrote, the web loves infographics (today’s random example is about the working world). In recent talks, I’ve been urging people to make them. They can be a low-risk, easy win in terms of driving traffic and visibility. And they’re fun.
A reader recently sent me this awesome example, which tries to resolve the nerdy problem of comparing hockey stars from different eras. It’s a creative, thoughtful approach to the issue, and a great visualization of a ton of data. Here’s a screenshot of a small section:
The graphic is actually a big PDF, but it’s worth checking out whether you’re excited about the playoffs or not.
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July 3rd, 2009, 9 Comments »
I haven’t written anything about the Canucks for a while, so here are a few thoughts on the draft, recent free agency activity and the rest of the summer:
- In the first round of the draft, the Canucks selected Jordan Schroeder, a 5’8″ American forward from the University of Minnesota. College players usually take longer to development, and enter the NHL later, so don’t plan on seeing him in a Canucks uniform any time too soon. He led the US team in scoring at the World Juniors last winter, so that’s encouraging. Hopefully he’s the second coming of Cliff Ronning. Here’s a two-minute video profile of him.
- Credit Canucks GM with re-signing the Sedins. I hoped and expected this to happen, but I think it’s an excellent deal. $6.1 million a year is, to my thinking, a little below market value for these guys. That money makes them the 34th and 35th best-paid players in the league (great looking salary site there, by the way). If you check out some of those players (Jovanovski, Stastny, Gaborik, Gomez, among others) ahead of them on the list, that money looks well spent.
- The team lost Mattias Ohlund, which was almost a certainty. Ohlund is never a player who’s seemed comfortable in the limelight, so I suspect he’ll be quite happy being more anonymous in Tampa Bay.
- Maintaining the Canucks’ Swede quotient, Gillis signed Mikael Samuelsson. The 32-year-old winner scored 19 goals and added 21 assists last season. He’ll make a decent replacement for Taylor Pyatt, who I expect to be signed by another team over the coming weeks. Well, a decent replacement on the ice. Samuelsson’s eyes are decidedly less dreamy than Pyatt’s. More importantly, Samuelsson has a ton of playoff experience and even played with the Sedins for a bit back in Sweden.
- The team extended restricted free agent Kyle Wellwood a qualifying offer, which I imagine he’ll sign. He was kind of a revelation this year, and an excellent reclamation project. They same goes for another RFA, Jannik Hansen.
- I’m optimistic that the team won’t re-sign Mats Sundin. He’s done, and looked it in the playoffs.
- The Canucks’ most urgent need is on the blue line. Even with Ohlund, the defence looked decidedly creaky against Chicago in the playoffs. They urgently need to get younger and faster. I’ve read some rumours about signing Francois Beauchemin, who would be a great addition. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s anybody on the farm team who can step up, and the team doesn’t have a lot of spare assets with which to make a trade.
So, what will the line-up look like come the opening night of the 2009-2010 season? Here’s my best guess:
Sedin – Sedin – Burrows
Samuelsson – Kessler – Demitra
Raymond – Wellwood – Bernier
Hordichuk – Johnson – Rypien
Mitchell – Salo
Edler – Bieksa
O’Brien – Nycholat
Luongo
Schneider
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June 9th, 2009, 4 Comments »
There’s a back lane behind our house. It’s an unusual feature on the west coast, and presumably it’s a reflection of the neighbourhood being at least a hundred years old. As children have done for at least that long, there’s a couple of kids who haul nets, sticks and a tennis ball into the lane to play hockey. They’ve even chalked out a little ice rink, with faceoff circles and a centre ice line.
As you probably know, the NHL playoffs are winding down. In fact, if Detroit beats the Pittsburgh Penguins tomorrow night, they’ll hold aloft their fifth Stanley Cup in 12 years–a remarkable feat.
I was walking down the lane the other day, and noticed a new addition to the chalk-and-cement rink. Somebody drew an oversized, stick-wielding bird with legs akimbo at centre ice:
The lane is sloped, so you pay a price when you miss the more southerly net. I instantly recognized this as a kid’s decent interpretation of the Penguins’ logo, which appears at centre ice in Pittsburgh’s Mellon Arena:
Here’s another view, for some perspective. Clearly the kids are pretending to be Crosby and Malkin, not Zetterberg and Datsyuk.
I was a pretty solitary kid growing up. I preferred to tape out a goal on one wall of our two-car carport, and shoot tennis balls at it from the far side. If a ball took a particularly bad bounce, it ended up on the steep, wooded slope between our house and the neighbours. I had to psych myself up to retrieve those wayward balls. The neighbours had a surly Doberman named Sasha, and she didn’t care for children.
Mellon arena photo by EnsErmac.
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May 15th, 2009, 1 Comment »
During last night’s game seven between Detroit and Anaheim, I was amused to see this sign posted on the wall behind a bored team official:
Obviously it’s no great security risk, but I just thought it was funny that they accidentally broadcast the password to several million TV viewers.
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March 10th, 2009, 3 Comments »
I’m a longtime player of sports games on the PC, and a recovering technical writer. So I take an interest in the manuals that accompany the games I play. As most gamers will attest, game manuals are usually awful. They’re under-written, incomplete and, for narrative games, spend too much time on useless back story.
This problem is usually solved by the far-superior in-game tutorial. Learning by playing is much more effective than learning by reading. There are few tutorials, however, in sports games. That’s fine, because usually gamers know how to play the sport in question, but not always.
When I worked in Ireland, we often played PlayStation games around the office at lunch time (or, you know, other times). A favourite game (and I don’t think it was my Canadian influence) was EA Sports NHL 2002. Most of the Irish guys playing the game had never actually seen a hockey game, either live or on TV. Their understanding of the term “hockey” was strictly verbal. They had a vague idea what offside was from football (i.e. soccer), but no sense of what the icing rule was about. In any case, they mostly played with those rules turned off.
I was just glancing through the manual of a reasonably new soccer (i.e. football) game, and encountered this section:
These are team-wide tactics which you, as their godly overseer, can instruct them to execute. Though I’ve casually watched soccer for years, I only have the vaguest idea of what these are. Wing Play? Flat back? And ’3rd Man Release’ sounds downright dirty. The manual doesn’t include an explanation of what these tactics are for, how they work or when you might use them. It assumes, like icing and offside, that I already understand them.
Missing G and H on the A to Z Scale
Lee recently described a kind of learning model that applies here:
From talking to educators and influencers, we’ve learned that our videos are often used to introduce a subject – to get everyone on the same page at the beginning of a class, workshop, etc. Recently, as part of our planning for 2009, we came up with a model that helps tell this story. We call it the A-to-Z Scale.
The scale represents the path to learning a subject. On the left side are the basic, fundamental ideas. On the right, the details and applications of the ideas.
Thinking about sports games manuals, they’re really missing the Gs and the Hs of the games they’re simulating. Most players will understand that you throw the ball in the basket, or hit the ball into the hole with the stick. However, many casual players may not understand the nuances of the neutral-zone trap or the dreaded third man release.
Do we need to grasp these details to enjoy the game? Probably not (though the jargon in an American football game is pretty thick and commonplace), but all it would take is an extra couple of pages in the manual or a game tutorial to explain these concepts. I’d imagine that the developer looks at both of those as cost centres, though, so I’d expect they feel that less is more. What do you think?
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