I love the NHL playoffs!
Like most professional sports of our time, the regular season bores me. When things get serious at the end of April, I become the biggest fan who ever lived. I don’t care what teams are playing; any match-up is good enough. It’s great that the fight for the Stanley Cup seems to go on forever, and I always feel sad as the elimination of teams leads to fewer televised games.
The protocol that determines who I’ll root for: If the New York Rangers are involved, they get first consideration. They’re followed by the NY Islanders and LA Kings. Absent those three, I’ll back whomever is an original NHL franchise. If they’re both originals, I’ll stick with the one located closest to NYC or LA. If two post-1970 expansion teams are playing, I’ll root for the home team. In indeterminate situations, I’ll support the team who’s trailing in the series, hoping to get to a seven-game finish. This’s a lot of math for something so simple and essentially meaningless, but I can’t help it. It’s so damn exciting!
How can you not marvel at the speed and grace of this game? What a privilege it is to watch the biggest, best-conditioned players in history move the puck so precisely. And what can you say about the goalies except that they’re amazing! No question, they’re the best athletes on the ice. More importantly, as it applies to the theme of this blog – they share qualities familiar to cinematographers.
First, they’re expected to be perfect in everything they do, every time. They’re constantly under assault by a variety of outside forces. They have tremendous responsibility in their own space, but little authority over the broader thing they’re involved in. They’re saddled with too much of the blame when things go wrong and don’t get enough credit when they go right. Personality-wise, they tend to be temperamental and creative. If I’m stretching on that last point, just look at their face masks!
And if you haven’t twigged already, everything about the NHL playoffs – combined with the time of year – lights me up. The players hark back to an era when I actually respected pro sports and the people involved with them. For crying out loud, they wear suits when they arrive at the arena! They’re intelligent and articulate when interviewed by the pre- and post-game bubbleheads. You never hear about them doing stupid things with guns or causing scenes in nightclubs. And then there’s the traditional, mid-ice handshake line when the series concludes. How can you resist that? After trying to bash each other’s brains out for sixty minutes, it’s all forgiven, man-to-man, with a “…hey, it was just the heat of the moment” confession. MLB, the NBA and NFL could take some pages from that book, if only they cared.
Oh, and did I forget to mention – on many levels, so could the movie industry.