NHL Playoffs, Round 1

It's NHL playoffs time, and I've watched more professional hockey this weekend than I have all season. I watch a lot of college hockey, but when you root for an out-of-market NHL team (in my case the Detroit Red Wings) it can be almost impossible to follow them on basic cable, but now that it's playoff time I can start focusing on the sport.

Of course, the first thing I have to do is get reacquainted with the players and storylines. The Red Wings' opponent in the first round were the Nashville Predators (an NHL team in Nashville just doesn't sound right). The Red Wings are the number one seed, the Predators the eighth seed, but the NHL is pretty close from top to bottom, and upsets happen with regularity. Sixteen teams make the post-season, which makes the regular season fairly irrelevant, but it does make it difficult for teams to build dynasties, as winning four straight series is pretty tough.

The Red Wings won the first two games at home, then lost the next two in Nashville. Goalie Dominic Hasek, who is sure-fire Hall of Famer, seemed to have lost his edge (he is in his forties) and was replaced in game five by backup (and former starter, years ago) Chris Osgood. I started watching game five in the third period on Friday night, with the Wings up 1-0. Nashville pulled the goalie and managed to tie the score with less than a minute left, but in overtime Johan Franzen grabbed a turnover and netted the game-winner.

Franzen is a player I'm not terribly familiar with. The good thing about the Red Wings is that they've kept quite a few players for a long time. Steve Yzerman and Sergei Federov are gone, but they still have Nicklas Lidstrom, Chris Draper and Tomas Holmstrom from the glory days of the mid-90's, and also have familiar names like Chris Chelios, Pavel Datsyuk and Heinrik Zetterberg. But they have a lot of players who I need to get used to. They have re-added Darren McCarty, who was on all three of their recent Stanley Cup winners. He was out of hockey and destitute but got himself back into shape and worked his way back to the team, which is a nice story.

On Saturday night I watched the wildly entertaining last half of a Montreal-Boston game. Usually I don't watch pro hockey unless Detroit is playing, but this game was a lot of fun, with leads being traded several times in the third period. Hockey is my favorite sport to watch in person, due to the speed, and the fact that the clock rarely stops, so there aren't interminable timeouts. However, it doesn't translate as well to television. The puck can be hard to see, and it's not easy to know who's on the ice at any given time. When I watch the Princeton team, I know all the players immediately, and can get a sense of the line pairings, but on TV you're at the mercy of the announcer, who usually only has time to identify who has the puck.

I watched every minute of today's game six. For a moment I thought it wasn't to be, because the Pope's mass at Yankee Stadium was being broadcast on all channels, inspiring some ugly anti-Catholicism on my part. But I found the game on an upper level cable station, and all was well. Things got even better in the second period when, short-handed, Lidstrom fired a shot in from center ice that skipped past Nashville goalie Dan Ellis, who had been inpenetrable. I should stop here to give kudos to announcer Mike Emrick, who in my book is the best play-by-play man in all of sports. He immediately remembered Lidstrom scoring a similar goal against Vancouver the last time Detroit won the Stanley Cup.

Detroit scored again in the third, this time Jiri Hudler, and added an empty net goal to seal the deal. They win the series, 4-2, and I think will play Colorado next, a nasty rival of theirs. I have to give credit to Nashville, who gave the Red Wings a tough time. They seem to have some spirited fans, and they also have two of the best names in hockey, Radek Bonk and Jordin Tootoo.