Hot Ice: NHL Thread

[caja-dglh]

It was a great game. Surprising they came out that fired up for game 3.

[Snake Plissken]

More a case of weathering the inevitable early storm. Got outshot 5-0 over the opening six or so minutes.

I see Berube is complaining about the number of penalties being called. Not the fact that they were, in fact penalties, just that they were being called. Don't give the officials the chance to blow the whistle FFS.

Will be interesting to see if the Blues can bounce back tonight. I think they will head back to Boston with a tied series.

[Femme Folle]

I hope Chara is OK to play in the next game.

ETA: Good grief--just realized the next game isn't until Thursday. He's got time to grow a new face before then.

[ursus arctos]

Snakes have long been thought to have powers of divination.

The Blues can win this if Boston is forced to play with five healthy defencemen.

And Chara is questionable for Game Five.

[Femme Folle]

Don't count Boston out, even if they're shorthanded.

[ursus arctos]

Chara has a broken jaw.

And is expected to play.

Because it's the Cup.

[Snake Plissken]

On the plus side, no-one will be able to reach to hit him on it. Will be interesting to see if he is still running over Tarasenko. (Chara has been matched up against him and taking every opportunity to hit. Tarasenko has - not surprisingly - been dumping / moving the puck rather than taking him on.)

Besides, Patrice Bergeron finished the 2013 final with a dislocated shoulder, broken rib and punctured lung.

[ursus arctos]

Tarasenko's increased willingness to skate with the puck (and the inherent danger to the Bruins when he does so) was very evident after Chara went off in Game Four.

Bergeron is just a ridiculously good hockey player.

[ursus arctos]

Antti Niemi, who was most recently Carey Price's backup with the Habs, has signed with Jokerit

[Femme Folle]

I just learned tonight that people in St Louis went to the hockey arena to watch the game on TV.

When they showed Cam Neely throwing the bottle in the booth, it made me think about the fact that the last time I saw the Bruins play in the Garden, Cam Neely, Ray Bourque and Adam Oates were playing and Mike Milbury was the coach. I feel old.

[Snake Plissken]

Lucky. I never got to see the Bs play in the Garden. I saved up for a year to go watch a couple of games and it was the 94-95 strike season. The strike ended while I was there but opening night was after I flew home. Luckily the Bruins held an open practice at the Garden for fans, so I sat front row, centre ice. Incredible place. Bourque plastered Neely into the boards right in front of me and I thought "OK God, you can take me now."

I have seen the Bruins in a proper NHL game once. Buffalo, 1999. The Mrs is a Sabres fan (she studied at SUNY in Buffalo for a year in the early 90s). Bourque played, but the Bruins lost 6-2. She occasionally reminds me of that.

As for this season - I think we're done.

[ursus arctos]

The non-call on Bozak's trip right before the second goal was scandalous, and exemplary of the awful officiating that has plagued the playoffs.

The Garden had some of the worse sight lines of any arena I've ever been in (the balconies could render also much as a third of the ice invisible), but it was a great place to watch those parts of the game that one could see.

[Femme Folle]

I wonder what it was like to watch hockey in the old Garden. I only saw a couple of Celtics games there and I only remember the seats being very narrow and not very comfortable.

[ursus arctos]

The word that comes immediately to mind is gladiatorial.

Small, uncomfortable, seats. Lousy sight lines from the back. Either hot or cold. And full of Massholes.

And yet there are those who loved it.

[Amor de Cosmos]

And then there were the rats, according to Don Cherry.

[Hot Pepsi]

I just learned tonight that people in St Louis went to the hockey arena to watch the game on TV.

That's pretty standard now for all teams in the final. In Pittsburgh, they've put games on big screens outside too.



I saw a Bruins game in 2006 with an OTFer that we haven't seen here in a while.

I also saw BU beat BC in the Beanpot Final there in 1997. That was during a long stretch where BU-BC were vastly superior to Harvard and Northeastern and BU was almost always better than BC.

I went with a woman who I ended up dating for a while, so it was a win-win. Now she lives in Las Vegas and is really into promoting the merits of cannabis.

I did a tour of the old garden right before they tore it down in 1995. What a dump. The old locker rooms at my high school were more spacious.

The current Garden, whatever it's called, is fine but not much different from the other NHL arenas I've been to (which isn't many) except the XCel Center in St. Paul which is different because it's only built for hockey.

[ursus arctos]

I'm absolutely certain that it had rats, but one didn't see them in the public areas.

I was in the third Madison Square Garden as a child, but don't remember it very well. In many ways, my memories of it have conflated with those of the Boston Garden, as they both had the massive overhanging balconies that were the style at the time and gave everyone the sense that they were hanging over the ice. I do recall the then-new fourth Madison Square Garden (current location, but before the latest major renovation) seeming like a completely different type of structure when it opened a year or two before the Knicks' first title run - much more open, clean and colourful with broad concourses, rather what we have come to expect in modern arenas.

[Hot Pepsi]

It definitely had rats. I don't know how many made it into the public areas, but I'm pretty sure I heard stories about them in the locker room.

The T has rats and the Big Dig displaced a lot of them, not doubt, so surely many ended up in The Garden.


I was in MSG in 1989. They've certainly reno'd it since then, right?

[ursus arctos]

Yes, 89 would have been pretty much the original after 20 years.

They spent about a billion tarting it up over three offseasons between 2011 and 2013.

[Snake Plissken]

The Garden definitely had rats. Obviously by modern standards it was a terrible venue but the atmosphere seeped out of the walls. Those old buildings had seen huge events.

[Femme Folle]

I just learned that the Boston Garden was originally called the Boston Madison Square Garden. That's crazy talk.

[ursus arctos]

And people thought that the one on 50th was far from Madison Square

[Snake Plissken]

So. The Bruins manage to win 7-2 and 5-1 in the opposition building and it's still going to a Game 7.

[Snake Plissken]

I have to decide whether I want to go to work on Thursday morning.

[Flynnie]

The destruction of Boston Garden was a crime against architecture, although it couldn't have survived as an arena (my BG memories: the scuff marks on the tiles leading from the locker room to the tunnel, thanks to the skates, and the tiny aisles) the fact there was only a parking lot where where Shore, Orr, Russell, Havlicek (RIP) and Bird played is just heinous. There's some sort of mall/hotel/eateries development going there now, which looks modular and boring but is a distinct improvement on the literal nothing that was there before. At least you won't enter from the side and pausing to look away from the concrete wall that looked out onto Causeway-st.

The funny angles at the ends were because the Garden was built for boxing, so although you couldn't see anything from the nearest end to you you had a hell of a view for Rocky Marciano or Marvin Hagler delivering upper cuts.

There's a few arenas that still have something like the old galleries you saw in the Original Six era, Toronto and St Paul have them, but I tend to think hockey has suffered from the sudden and dramatic homogenization of its arenas. Everywhere is the same three level bowl with a 200 x 85 rink. The Small Rink Club should have been encouraged to retain their smaller than regulation rinks (Boston would have absolutely done kept its 191 x 83 rink) and there should have been some more leeway the other way. Would Montreal, building a new arena without needing to consider an NBA team's presence, go for 205 x 90 to take advantage of their traditional speed? Maybe, maybe not.

Basketball and hockey arenas in general seem to have missed the boat on design. I can see why nobody has tried to build a Camden Yards for football, the traditional football stadium is either a single-level bowl or a baseball park, but only the Indiana Pacers play in a consciously retro arena (designed to evoke Hinkle Field House, which it actually does fairly well). The only really retro thing the Canadiens did at the Bell Centre was keep the red/white/blue colour combo for seats, although to pander to the lower bowl corporates ALL lower bowl and club level seats are red, so literally 60% of the arena if not more gets the once highly coveted red seat.