Day 117: Oh Good. I Can Fail To Watch Hockey Again.

The January portion of Sports Purgatory is extra weird this year. While the NFL Playoffs are in full swing and MLB is allegedly starting a full spring training next month, basketball and hockey are just getting started. This might come as a surprise to you, because casual sports people don’t watch either of them until after the Super Bowl. Some people might hear this news and think that the seasons are starting early. As a matter of fact, they’re late. They’re very, very late. The NHL season starts tonight and I cannot be more excited. They’re gonna…play games and stuff. That one guy is gonna be really good. Go Oilers. Okay, you got me dead to rights. I don’t actually watch hockey.

But that’s not to say that I don’t want to watch hockey. Everything about the sport is amazing. The ice, the speed, the fans, the hits, the pointy sticks, hockey has it all. Every year, I tell myself that this is going to be the year I get back into it. I even watch a game or two. But then every night I sit down with the mood to take in a game, there are no games on. The schedule is painfully sporadic. Every year I want to be gung ho about one specific team, they only play on nights that I can’t watch them. A few months pass, Spring Training starts and I forget that hockey exists for 8 months. This year, I only have [hopefully] one month to care about the NHL.

But damnit, I’m going to try. Kind of. I can’t watch it tonight. AEW is on. And tomorrow night, I gotta catch up on NXT. Smackdown is Friday, so I guess there better be a good game on Saturday night. My only two choices are…the Canucks vs the Flames and the Golden Nights vs the Ducks. And I guarantee neither of them are on TV. [Upon further research, it’s confirmed, I have no way of watching either of them.] There’s no late game on Sunday and Raw is Monday. Tuesday, the only late game is the Kings vs Avalanche…which is not available to me.

And this is how the cycle goes every single year. Even though there are a plethora of teams in the west, the NHL schedule is not friendly to people who get home at 10 every night. I could sign up for the NHL streaming package, but even in an abridged season, it’s a cool hundo. I’m sorry, but $100 is not worth a 56 game season. MLB.TV is $120 for triple the action. It’s just a really crappy deal that I can’t get behind. Instead, I’m most likely going to fork over the 999 Yen for NJPW World and take a brief trip down the Japanese Wrestling rabbit hole. At least they have live action at 3AM. You know, when I’m actually home, awake and ready to watch sports.

– TeeCoZee