There are many professional-level sports to watch on TV, from football to baseball to basketball. Recently, many people have probably watched their March Madness brackets fall apart, or their brackets are somehow doing well – I applaud you on that one. I, however, think the best sport to watch is hockey. The general premise of the sport involves grown men running around in knife shoes, chasing a three-inch puck around an ice rink with occasional brutal hits into the glass.
Because I have attended a few professional hockey games, I might be biased when I say hockey is the best sport. But I stand by what I say. One reason I believe ice hockey is the best sport is because of how fast the game is played. In many sports, the game is stopped for people to switch in and out of play – that doesn’t happen in hockey. When it is time for players to change, they switch in and out while the clock is still running. They have to be careful about this because if they aren’t fast enough the team gets a penalty for having too many men on the ice.
This leads me to my next reason: penalties and the penalty box. Most of the time, players go into the penalty box for two minutes for minor penalties. Such penalties are for actions like hitting, tripping, high sticking, holding and unsportsmanlike conduct. The game stops for a referee to call out the player who committed the penalty. That player is then, essentially, put in timeout for not playing nice… kind of like a toddler. This sometimes leads players to get upset like toddlers. There are also major penalties;.The most common major penalty would be fighting or instigating. These kinds of penalties cause a player to be in the penalty box for five minutes.
The fights! Personally, these are my favorite part of the game because they happen in a split second. The game is happening one moment, and the next moment grown men have dropped their gloves and are throwing punches at each other. Then the crowd gets involved and cheers on the fight.
Fights can start for any reason. We can’t hear what was said before punches begin to fall. If you are lucky, a goalie fight could happen. Since the goalies stay in the net and on one side of the rink the entire game, it is a rare sight to see a goalie fight happen. Semi-recently there was a major goalie fight that happened between the St. Louis Blues and the Minnesota Wild. Marc-André Fleury of the Wild skated across the rink to fight Jordan Binnington of the Blues after Bennington started a brawl with, quite literally, the entire Minnesota line.
But the absolute best part of hockey is the crowd. Again, I might be biased, but hockey crowds are the best because of how rowdy they get. Each stadium has unique chants for the fanbase. Bridgestone Arena, home to the Nashville Predators, has many chants and traditions that happen throughout the game. For example, one of Nashville’s classic chants is to say, “it’s all your fault” to the opposing team’s goalie when the Predators score. Additionally, each stadium has the classic chant of “let’s go (insert team name)!”
I could go on for a while about my love for hockey, and if you ask me, I will gladly explain why hockey is the best sport.
