I generally only watch hockey during the Stanley Cup playoffs and that’s with a casual eye at best. Between not having an NHL team nearby and never having played the sport, it never ranked very high on my interest list.
Granted, I’ve never hated the sport and usually enjoyed the games I did watch, but I never had a strong connection to make me want to return the next day. I can appreciate good play and have begun to understand what I see. I’ve got a general sense of the history of hockey – I know there were an Original Six, that Montreal dominated for several decades and that Wayne Gretzky was pretty good – so I can appreciate most of what I see, but for a long time I couldn’t have told you the difference between offsides and icing.
I like watching almost any sport when a championship is on the line, and that was the main appeal to watching for me. That and the Stanley Cup itself has to be the best trophy in sports.
A few years back I thought I’d try to get more into hockey, so I closed my eyes and randomly chose a team to follow – it ended up being the Boston Bruins. But that only lasted a week.
This year, though, something grabbed my attention and I think it might not let go. Young superstars have a way of creating excitement where there otherwise would be none, and Sidney Crosby has done that.
Long since dubbed “The Next One,” in reference to Gretzky’s nickname “The Great One,” Crosby has backed up all the hype surrounding him and his potential when he joined the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2005 in a style similar to a certain young Cleveland Cavalier.
Crosby and LeBron James have had eerily similar career arcs. Both were prodigies at a young age, both were the top pick in their league’s draft and both were immediate superstars. Each of them revived floundering franchises and brought them to the brink of a championship within four years.
Like LeBron’s Cavs against the San Antonio Spurs last year, Crosby’s Penguins are struggling in the championship series against a more experienced veteran team, the Detroit Red Wings.
And like LeBron, Crosby has the star power to raise the stature of his league. The NBA, of course, wasn’t exactly struggling for fans, but when LeBron plays, the casual fan gets interested. That’s what Crosby’s doing for me. I’m tuning into the Stanley Cup Finals looking to see if Sid the Kid will wow me. I want to see him make the series be, to steal a line from the NBA marketing machine, where amazing happens.
Even if the Red Wings finish off Pittsburgh, Crosby is sure to make the Penguins a contender for years to come.
And that might actually be able to get me interested in hockey outside the playoffs.
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Sid the Kid brings new popularity to hockey
Daily Emerald
May 28, 2008
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