I am up ridiculously early today, just in anticipation of an interesting NHL Trade Deadline Day. Not only for the league, but I have this strange feeling that the Canucks will be a part of the whole scheme, especially after a few of these years where there has been some posturing for future moves. Nevertheless, I love the deadline for all the interesting news and transactions that set-up the stretch run of the regular season up and we can really start separating the teams who want to be in and figure they're out (the buyers and sellers), making predictions at how the rest of the season will come to pass and then get ourselves ready (especially if our team is in the playoffs) for a long playoff run into June.
Being a guy who runs hockey pools for his friends & family, I like to be in the middle of all the news, so I enjoy keeping up with all the deals and posting them on the hockey pool blog for all to see. I especially like all the trades that have some sort of effect on my pools, just for the sake of conversation and a different angle to approach these deals with. This year, the pools have gotten a bit tighter, in terms of competitiveness, so it will be interesting to see if any of these deals are to play a role in the final results for the money. I have a stake for some money in one of my pools, so I'm really interested again this year.
The television isn't quite on yet, I still have some time to kill before the TradeCentre coverage on TSN begins. That has proven to be the better of the two major sports network shows, I don't find Sportsnet to be all that thorough with their stuff, but they do like to play the rumours a whole lot more, which is also interesting.
Speaking of rumours... I love them. They are the best part of the lead up to Deadline Day, because it gets people talking about trades and transactions, not to mention some of the other bits of nitty-gritty that keeps people interested in hockey. I don't expect any of these rumours to be 100% true, some of them I believe are 0% true, but at least it gets people talking. Granted, getting people to start talking about trades in hockey, does get to be somewhat counter-productive, since most people are just spouting off and seem to lack one side (a lot of times both sides) of thinking when it comes to making up trades, but I suppose I gotta let that slide for the most part.
Twitter has now been a huge part of being an informed hockey fan these days, I've found. It's an important tool for a lot of news, especially since some of the NHL's best writers and journalists are on there now and are posting quite regularly. Of course, some of the league's worst are also on there, but I suppose its up to you to determine which is the best and which is the worst, because that seems to boil down to personal opinion. I have some favourites that I like to depend on for news, no matter what their general opinion of the game actually is and then I have a good number of people I follow for interesting insight into the game, especially from the perspective of being a fan of another team in the league.
If hockey was a religion, the deadline would have to be a holiday that should be observed by the hockey faithful. It should be a time where friends gather around and speak of the divine game and how the different churches change their philosophies in their hunt for the holy grail. I'm mostly kidding about the religious stuff, what a load... but really, for us hockey fanatics, I think there are quite a few that would prefer to have today off to be right in the middle of it all than to be working and find out about it during the day, from friends via text or catch-up when you get home. I've been fortunate to be able to cover the deadline for the most part on my blog without too much trouble in recent years. This year being no exception, as I can spend 100% of my day working on it, hoping that someone might look at my little bits of effort and think, "hey, I can pay this guy to take his good work and put it on my ________ (fill in the blank) and make money." That'd be nice.
Well, here's to hoping that your team (or my team) pleases us with their decisions to trade, not to trade or trade away some assets in the strategy for winning somewhere along the line, which eventually leads to a Stanley Cup. With only one Cup and 30 teams in the league, its always going to be difficult to reach the end goal, but this is a good time to renew hope or settle in for an early summer. The latter only being a difficult subject if your team does really poorly at the Entry Draft or the Free Agent Frenzy.
I wish everyone luck with their teams, except for maybe the Flames... let the trading commence!
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