The Voice was going to write another edition in the spotty but oh-so-glorious history of “Da Scoop” this week, but something far more pressing came up. The NHL season began. The NHL, if you’ve never seen it, is pure, unadultered excitement and joy at its swiftest. Wait, no it’s not.
It’s basically a bunch of guys from Canada beating the crap out of each other while skating around in several hundred dollars worth of equipment.
Many theories have been proposed for why hockey has yet to catch on in the good ol’ U.S. of A. There’s one simple reason, and that’s because our country is ass backwards with regard to sports. Soccer is the most popular sport in the world! We celebrate it by naming a team “The Wiz.” Wiz. Hehe.
Anyway, hockey begins this week, and this season could actually prove to be somewhat interesting. A lot of top players?among them Jaromir Jagr and Dominik Hasek, two of the most dominant performers at their positions for the past decade?have switched teams, and the power balance may finally be altering. In addition, for the first time in about ten eons, the league didn’t make a single rules change over the summer, and to my knowledge, they didn’t ask ABC to continue the “illuminated puck” idea, best known for making a bunch of Canadian guys complain about the decline of the game over their LaBatt’s Blue.
Gary Bettman, the commish of the fine league, said about this season, “We’re entering under an umbrella of stability.” Uhh, Garydog? Saying you’re under an umbrella of anything is bad, and umbrellas don’t signal stability. They signal rain.
So what’s gonna happen in the NHL this year, eh? Don’t look at me, fool, I’m not Nostradamus. Even if I were, I’d probably be wrong. City of God. HA.
I’m gonna go out on a limb here, as I’m prone to do, and call the San Jose Sharks as the eventual Western Conference Champions. My connection to this team began rather superficially. I was shopping for posters for my Harbin dorm room about one week before NSO that year, and I stumbled upon a Sharks one for about six bucks at Modell’s. I bought it and started following the team.
The team is young, quick and poised for dominance. Vincent Damphousse and Owen Nolan are both younger than most kids at this school. Adam Graves and Bryan Marchment add toughness and veteran poise on the blue line, and they bolstered their line-up big last year by adding Teemu Selanne, who has the worst name of all-time, but is one of the most prolific scorers in the current NHL.
Think I’m crazy? Consider the rest of the perennial powers in the west: Avs? No Forsberg, no big keg cup in June. Stars? More centers than goalies, defensemen and coaches combined. Red Wings? Average age falls somewhere north of the CBS viewing populace. Flames? HAHA. What you smokin’?
Eastern Conference is sort of a joke. The Caps were on the verge of becoming the main draw of this city with the acquisition of Jagr, the best scoring forward in the world. Then MJ came back, so now the Capitals are going to take a backseat like a middle child on a trip to auntie’s.
Rangers got Lindros, who is about three games from the end of his career. The next time he meets Scott Stevens, it’s basically all over. That, in a beautiful segway, brings me to the New Jersey Devils, the pride of LXR 324, who will win the Eastern Conference again. How could they not? Scott Stevens is a beast. You see him on the other side of the blue line, and you start skating the other way. Unless you’re the Islanders, in which case you probably think that’s the way you skate anyway.
So yea, you heard it first right here, in da Voice. Sharks vs. Devils, June 2002. Stanley Cup Finals. If I’m wrong, I’ll buy 100 tickets to the Homecoming dance next year.
Wait, no I won’t …
