NHL 2013: The Truncated Season at its Midpoint

Nobody is catching Jonathan Toews and the Blackhawks.

It's about that time for me to compose some thoughts on the current NHL season and its combatants. My hockey fanhood seems to peak each year right around the midpoint of the schedule, slowly trailing off into the spring as baseball begins and the combo of stretch-run NBA, NHL, and a fresh baseball season becomes too much for me to keep up with all at once.

For now, I'm intensely following the lockout-shortened 2013 NHL season and greatly enjoying it. The condensed 48-game schedule has teams only playing opponents from the same conference and lots of games going on virtually every single night. This feels like the way it should always be. Both the NHL and NBA (and MLB, for that matter) badly need to shorten their regular season schedules but with massive amounts of TV revenue flowing in, that's just not going to happen.

Since we're dealing with a relatively small sampling of games (just a handful of teams have reached the 24-game halfway mark at this point), I'll try to keep this short.

At dhe Shootout

"Hockey Night in My Livingroom"

Enjoyed an evening full of exciting hockey tonight thanks to the amazingness of an obscure little website, atdhe.net, which allowed me to peek at all the games being played around the country. I began watching at around 5 PM Pacific time and my attention was drawn to two northeast matchups: the Ottawa Senators in Boston facing the Bruins and Montreal defending their home arena on a Saturday night against superstar Alexander Ovechkin and the talented Capitals.

The two games had started at the same time and moved along parallel to each other in excitement, forcing me to watch both on my laptop screen at the same time (while listening to the sounds of only the Montreal game, preferring the raucousness of the spotlight game on Hockey Night in Canada). Amazingly, the two games I watched proceeded in the exact same fashion. Both visiting teams, the Senators and the Capitals, jumped out to 2-0 leads in the first period. In both games, the home team came back in the 2nd to tie it 2-2.

Now here is the amazing, eerie part...