Greetings from Amsterdam.
Well, technically, greetings from the Schiphol Airport. I’m not leaving the airport and currently waiting for my connecting flight to Stockholm, where I'll be spending the rest of this week connecting with colleagues from Elite Prospects and also watching some Swedish hockey in person.
I will have more on Swedish hockey later this week, I’ll probably write about this trip at length, and now that another big project is behind me, I have the time to give Shap Shots a bit more of the quantity it deserves.
Anyways, my layover here in Amsterdam reminded me, naturally, of my trip to Amsterdam back in March, when my wife and I were here for vacation, and I somehow convinced her to go watch a hockey game with me.
You can go back and read that whole story above, but reading back through it myself, this part stuck with me.
But this story is about the human experience, the fact that close to 2,000 people on a Saturday night in Amsterdam jammed themselves into an arena to watch ice hockey. It’s about the universal language of sticks clattering, pucks booming off the boards, and that beautiful kssh, kssh of skates cutting through ice, interjected with fans “oohing” and the apparent universal language of “ref you suck!” after a call was made against the Tigers.
Hockey has become my universal connector. It’s allowed me to see the world a bit, introduced me to some great people, and given me an easy entry into conversations with strangers.
In fact, on my flight to Detroit to Amsterdam, I sat next to a Swede who is a die-hard fan of HV71. He happens to live in Gothenburg now, where Frölunda plays, but even while he was in the United States for two weeks, he was living and dying with the results for HV71, even if the results had been more distressing than positive lately.
It’s also a funny day to fly to Europe as a North American hockey writer, because today, Tuesday is a “Frozen Frenzy” day with all 32 NHL teams playing and with staggered start times from 6 ET to 11 pm ET. Here in Central Europe, games will be starting at midnight and running through roughly 7 am, so maybe I'll find a place where I can enjoy breakfast and the third period of the game between the Boston Bruins and San Jose Sharks.
The Frozen Frenzy is also a bit of a tease.
It’s the league thinking outside of the box to stagger the start times, and it’s setup to create some national attention and coverage through ESPN, which helped engineer the idea. But it always leaves me wanting a bit more, and wondering why this has to happen on a Tuesday in October, and why it has to feature every game starting in the evening.
If the league is going to embrace occasional day-time games, like it will this season on select Mondays, why isn’t that happening with Frozen Frenzy? Why aren’t we getting wall-to-wall coverage starting at lunch time and taking us through midnight?
(Just some food for thought, which I’m primarily putting out there because I know there are people from both the league and ESPN that read this publication.)
OK, that’s the quick entry from Amsterdam, where I’m enjoying a stroopwafel and a double espresso. We will talk again from Sweden.
As always, thanks for reading.
