January 17th Column

The New NHL uniforms will be awful. Or really great. If you ask the players, the opinion you'll get. From the proponents (The St. Louis Blues, surprisingly, considering who wears No. 7 on that squad) to the opposition (The San Jose Sharks) you have to truly wonder how much this is going to affect the NHL. Is it a good thing that players will be allowed to be portrayed as muscular symbols of mighty manhood? I suppose so. Is it worth sacrificing the sacred emblems that define our league? Absolutely not. From the Indian head (Chicago) to the blue note (St. Louis) to the winged wheel (Detroit) to the map of Long Island (Wanna Guess?), team logos are more than just a picture on a sweater, they define us as hockey fans, and as people. They stand out more than anything on any other paraphernalia in sports, and if they are interested in changing that, then I want no part of it.

So let's say the logos are kept the way they are, and what they've chosen to change is the horizontal stripes on the sweaters. Heresy! Teams like the Blackhawks, Devils, Rangers, Bruins, Maple Leafs and Canucks are so recognized by the horizontal stripage on their sweaters; to remove any of them would simply be too much for me to stand.

Why can't the uniforms just be form-fitting? Why must everything change?

Some good news is coming from this mess. Apparently, teams will go back to wearing white, and only white, at home next season. This also means that team's will FINALLY stop wearing third jerseys, though it's unknown if vintage sweaters will still be allowed since, after all, they resemble and form of tradition that our game once had.



The NHL On NBC returned to mostly good reviews from hockey fans, as it usually does. Fans tend to be more sympathetic to NBC than Versus because NBC is our network broadcaster, and we're used to shoddy work done by the Big 4. But NBC seems to care about hockey. They've given us more games, an online pregame show, and have not skimped on personnel decisions. They could've saved money and just let Bill Clement and Ray Ferraro work the studio, but they felt they needed someone to stir the drink in that studio. So they got Hull. As for my thoughts on the golden boy? He got us talking, and that's a good thing, trust me.

What NBC does is they give us the game, and while there may be a little more talking over it than your normal local telecast, this must be done to sell the game to people who probably have spent half the year watching football and ignoring us, and are probably watching a game for the first time this season because they haven't had a clue to where Versus is. Let them sell the sport, they seem to be doing a decent job of it.

NHL Center Ice customers, while treated to Hockey Day in Canada on Saturday, were surprised that when 2:00 p.m. rolled around, the coverage was blacked out. According to many dissatisfied customers, this was done under direct orders to shut off the telecast. Coincidentally, or not so much, the coverage resumed at the end of the Penguins-Flyers game. Hmmm. Anyway, I'm absolutely disgusted that this 8-3 blowout was not on my television so that I could not ignore it! How dare they!

The St. Louis Blues are a desperate team, and desperate times call for desperate measures. Enter into action Free Food Day at Scottrade Center. To get people out for the nationally televised game, they decided to offer free most-everything-non-alcoholic to the good people of the Gateway City. Nearly 18,000 showed up and saw an exciting game, which included the first Japanese player to ever grace the NHL ice: Yutaka Fukufuji. This just proves that every time you go to a game, you'll see something you didn't before.

God bless Mike "Doc" Emrick, he just keeps finding out things nobody knows. On Monday night's telecast of Montreal-Detroit, Doc told us that Canadiens forward Guillaume Latendresse is the first ever NHLer to wear the number 84 in a game. If you knew that before-hand, good for you, but I'll guess about 90% of the audience didn't. It's good to have a historian like Doc as the main voice of the NHL because, as mentioned before, he is a tie back to the great past that hockey has.

The NHL has to be anticipating some juicy playoff match-ups this spring. Right now, if the season ended today, they'd be able to put Rangers-Devils and Red Wings-Sharks on TV every other night in April. Minnesota-Anaheim and an exciting potential Lightning-Sabres set has the NHL looking forward to an interesting postseason. Of course, the way things are rolling now, we could end up with all six Canadian teams in the playoffs and New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles all out of it.

Christie Brinkley, as she has been on several occasions this season, was in attendance for the Islanders game on Monday against Tampa Bay.

One, how can you not love a woman dressed in a white Potvin No. 2 sweater? (Take that, pink jersey-makers).

Two, where was her husband, the mites game dressing room or the ice girls dressing room?

The NHL All-Star Rosters have lost for me whatever credibility the game had before. No, I'm not going to cry Rory fowls 'till the end of time, but still, any hockey "All-Star" exhibition not including the following names: Jagr, Iginla, Kovalchuk, Hasek, Semin should be disregarded.

-SFM-