Aha! This is pretty recent, and I've seen the actual play that is being, uh, highlighted.

The Colorado Avalanche (COL, white jerseys) are dead last in the NHL this season, and it isn't even close. They are beyond terrible. I'm a fan, but this season is so grim that I can't bring myself to watch games; just catch up once in a while on a week or two's worth of bad news. I saw this play came up just a few days ago.

In the play in question here (can't see much of it in the video, I'll embed below) a Colorado player gets a breakaway. Scoring a goal wouldn't do anything dramatic like get them back in the game, or save the season or anything. But it might save some pride and make it actually appear like they are professional hockey players. Hell, I think Avs fans would have been happy if he just hopelessly shot the puck right into the logo on the goalie's chest. Going through the motions would be an improvement for this team.

Instead, he inexplicably decides to stop, turn around, and attempt to pass to his teammate a few strides back. But the pass is intercepted by a defenseman from the other team, because OF COURSE it is. So they went from a guaranteed scoring chance (a breakaway shot) to nothing. Pretty much sums up their season, in one play.

Here it is:


Considering all that, I think the whole debacle was completely deserving of having a big dick drawn all over it.

The hockey puck glow was a bit weird, but actually pretty good for a few scenarios:

It is rather difficult for people who haven't seen much hockey to follow the puck. As you watch more of the sport, you figure out cues that help you track it, but I think that is a legitimate barrier that presents some difficulty in getting new fans of the sport. I think the blue glow helped a lot with that; would be nice if individual viewers could opt in our out of it on the fly. That would have been impossible (or prohibitively expensive) before, but with streaming video looking like the future rather than set channels it will be more workable.

When the puck travels close to the boards on the near side of the rink, it gets obscured and out of sight. The blue glow clipped right through that, so you could still figure out where the puck was. If two or more players were in a scrum for a puck stuck along the boards, you could see if it was moving and therefore know if a ref/linesman was going to whistle the play dead. That was quite a handy feature also.

Overall, the implementation / resolution of the puck highlighting in hockey was a bit non ideal, but it did have some real upsides. I don't think it deserved *quite* as much flak as it got...

You can see in that little clip the Hockey implementation was distractingly poor, the blue glow wasn't properly centered and the red streak was drawn on top of players in the foreground, it was all just way too bright and unnatural looking.

Plus I'm guessing is it's actually kind of fun as a hockey viewer to keep your eye on the puck and try to follow it. That's not really the case with the first down marker.

I wonder how well it would work today though. The glow was a bit... off... but more modern technology could perhaps make the puck stand out more, while ditching the trail when it goes super fast.

Those were both interesting to see and helped me establish some of the pros/cons of the goalie playing aggressively like that -- thanks!

It is quite similar in many ways to NHL goalies. In hockey, an aggressive goalie will skate relatively far out of their net to cut down the angle on shots from the periphery -- but that can go very wrong if the opposing team can sneak in behind them and get a shot on an essentially empty net. Like the hockey equivalent of the second video there.

And some hockey goalies pride themselves on being able to play the puck; accurately pass it up and out of their half of the ice, contributing to offense (but usually 2-3 or more passes removed from a shot attempt), etc. Some goalies *want* to be good at that, but end up just getting themselves into trouble. In that first video, Neuer looks like one of the NHL goalies that likes to play that way AND is actually good at it -- I'll think of him as the football equivalent of Martin Brodeur from the NHL, maybe.

Thanks again for going out of the way to enlighten me. I've got lots of friends here in Thailand (native Thais as well as Brits and Europeans) that are big into football while I'm usually pretty clueless. I tend to relate to football through the lens of hockey, as I'm sure you can tell. But it is good to get a bit better informed.

So, I know essentially nothing about football /soccer (a fact I am sure will become immediately obvious). Maybe sift football fans can relieve some of my ignorance:

When I saw the title, I assumed that the keeper was going to launch it the distance of the pitch and score, but I see he's up with the other players.

In hockey, a team can "pull" their goalie back to the bench, allowing them to put an additional skater out on the ice in order to try to score late game-tying desperation goals like this. I guess this is the football equivalent of that?

In hockey, you can replace your pulled goalie with any skater you want (generally, they will be replaced by players with the most offensive upside or "clutch" scoring abilities). But I guess in football, maybe it has to be the goalie/keeper?

And as a followup to that last question, in hockey a goalie is not allowed to carry/touch/control the puck beyond the red (center ice) line. That rule is *almost* never actually put into effect, because there is basically no good reason for a goalie to do that. ...Unless you are (one of the alltime greats) Patrick Roy, team down by many goals with a few minutes left, upset with the lackluster effort of the team playing in front of him, and wanting to light a bit of a fire under their asses:


...Clearly didn't work out in as positive way as the football goal here (Roy didn't even know that it was a penalty to carry the puck over center ice beforehand), but a really funny quirk that happened in a game that I actually remember watching live on TV.

@Fairbs

Doesn't seem to be the case. SFOguy posted this in the description:

"And here are hockey pucks being subjected to liquid nitrogen.
Good grief, what are they made of?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVBBdkM6-7c

So yeah, probably defective but also definitely crazy power in the shots that broke them.

Yep, it's official, balls of steel are for pussies. Real men have balls made of hockey pucks.
#fearCanada

Wow. Pretty badass.

Wonder how much energy it takes to really eff up a hockey puck.

What hockey pucks are made of and how they are made https://youtu.be/Xg5NSKTPEZ4

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Pixels, retro, games, arcades, Pac Man, Puck Man, Donkey Kong, trailer, preview, attacks' to 'Pixels, Arcade, Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Trailer, Adam Sandler, Peter Dinklage' - edited by Sagemind

You almost never hear of an NHL player being upset (in a litigation sort of way) about injuries they got that resulted from fighting (drop the gloves and throw punches).

In general, the one major incident I am aware of that resulted in legal action being taken against a player was when Todd Bertuzzi checked Steve Moore down the the ice from behind and then drove his head/neck into the ice with his stick in some heavy followup hits. This is mentioned in the wikipedia article @eric3579 posted, and hinted at in the article @RedSky posted from the Economist.

In that incident, Steve Moore (a lower-level player on the Colorado Avalanche) had hit Marcus Naslund (a star level player of the Vancouver Canucks) in a previous game. That hit was a fairly normal hockey hit -- Naslund had the puck, Moore intentionally hit him to try to separate him from the puck, but arguably led with his elbow to Naslund's head. It was a dangerous play, that should have be penalized (it wasn't) -- although I don't think Moore intended to cause injury. It is a fast game, sometimes you can't react quick enough to avoid a dangerous collision like that. Still, I think that kind of play should be penalized to make it clear to players that they need to avoid dangerous plays if possible. Steve Moore didn't have a history of dirty or dangerous play, but still.

Anyway, all of that dovetails in pretty nicely with my previous post, specifically about what leads to a "spontaneous fight". Moore, a 3-4th line guy (lower ranks of skill/ability on the team) hit star player Naslund. In almost ANY hockey game where that kind of thing happens, you can expect that somebody from the star's team is going to go over to the offending player and push them around, probably with the intent to fight them. Usually it happens right at the time of the incident, but here it was delayed to a following game between the two teams.

In the next game between Colorado and Vancouver, Moore got challenged by a Vancouver player early in the first period and fought him. But I guess that the lag time and injury to Naslund (he ended up missing 3 games) had brewed up more bad blood than that so many Vancouver players hadn't gotten it fully out of their systems. Later in the game, Todd Bertuzzi skated up behind Moore when he didn't have the puck, grabbed him and tailed him for several seconds trying to get him into a second fight, and when he didn't respond just hauled back and punched him in the back of the head.

Moore fell to the ice, where Bertuzzi piled on him and drove his head into the ice. A big scrum/dogpile ensued, with Moore on the bottom. As a result of that, Moore fractured 3 vertebrae in his neck, stretched or tore some neck ligaments, got his face pretty cut up, etc. Pretty severe injuries.

So, in comparison:
Moore (lesser skill) hit Naslund (high skill) resulting in a minor(ish) injury, that could have ended up being much worse. But, it was a legitimate hockey play that just happened to occur at a time when Naslund was vulnerable -- arguably no intent to harm/injure.
Bertuzzi hit Moore in a following game, after he had already "answered" for his hit on Naslund by fighting a Vancouver player. Bertuzzi punched him from behind and followed up with further violence, driving his head into the ice and piling on him, initiating a dogpile. Not even close to a legitimate hockey play, well away from the puck, and with pretty clear intent to harm (maybe not to injure, but to harm).


Moore sued Bertuzzi, his team (the Canucks), and the NHL. Bertuzzi claimed that his coach had put a "bounty" on Moore, and that he hadn't intended to injure him -- just to get back at him for his hit on Naslund. Bertuzzi was suspended for a fairly long span of time, and his team was fined $250,000. The lawsuit was kind of on pause for a long time to gauge the long-term effects on Moore, but was eventually settled out of court (confidential terms).

All of this stuff is or course related to violence in hockey, but only loosely tied to fighting in hockey. Some would argue (with some merit in my opinion) that if the refs had called a penalty on Moore's hit on Naslund, and allowed a Vancouver player to challenge him to a fight at that time instead of the following game, it probably wouldn't have escalated to the level it did.

So, at least in my opinion, the league (NHL) needs to be careful, consistent, and fairly harsh in handing out penalties/suspensions to players who commit dangerous plays that can or do result in injuries -- especially repeat offenders. BUT, I think that allowing fighting can actually help mitigate that kind of stuff also -- as long as the league keeps it from getting out of hand and the enforcer type players continue to follow their "code".