Welcome to another edition of “Friday 4”, where I talk about the four things I’ve been thinking about the last week and the upcoming weekend in sports and the world.
ONE
As they do every couple of seasons, NCAA hockey is looking at some potential rule changes. One of the ones that caught my eye was the NCAA returning to the NHL rule of a goal being scored on a delayed penalty wiping out the power play. Currently, in college hockey if a goal is scored during a delayed penalty call the penalty is still enforced, and the team that was fouled still gets their powerplay.
There are many who think instead of the NCAA moving to the NHL rule, it should be the other way and the NHL should adopt what the NCAA is doing. I vehemently disagree with those folks. I think the NHL rule of a goal on a delayed penalty eliminating a power play is a good one, and that’s what the rule should be for all levels of hockey.
But I also think any penalized player should serve their entire penalty.
It should be if a player is called for a minor penalty, they serve the entire two minutes no matter what their opponent does. Under that rule when a power play goal is scored with a skater in the penalty box, the shorthanded team gets their skater back on the ice, but it can’t be the player serving the penalty. Why not? Because they still have to serve the remainder of their two minutes. That also means they’re stuck in the penalty box until the next whistle after the two minutes expire.
Oh, and that next whistle is icing on your team, or another penalty called against your team? You don’t get your player back until the next whistle after that.
The Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) has a rule that also makes sense and should be the rule everywhere: if a team scores a shorthanded goal they get their skater back and the power play is over. Now again, using my proposed rule the player would stay in the box for their entire penalty, but the team would no longer be shorthanded.
I think both of those rules would be great additions.
One other rule change that some fans have suggested has me intrigued. It would be to lengthen the game by the time remaining on any penalty that impacts the number of skaters a team has on the ice. In the NFL, a penalty on the defense can’t end the game, and the offense gets an untimed down. Using that logic, any team that commits a penalty in the final two (or five) minutes that impacts the number of skaters on the ice would cause the game to extend until the power play is over. It would prevent a team that’s winning from fouling players because now the penalty would need to be served in its entirely as opposed to just a handful of seconds.
Traditionalists will hate all of these proposals. That’s fine. I want the game to be better and more exciting.
Just don’t penalize me for it.
TWO
I’ve become pretty good at avoiding spoilers.
As someone who watches a lot of stuff on DVR or on streaming services, I’m often days behind the chatter on the internet of things that have happened in shows, so I know that it’s on me to avoid sites and blog posts about shows I watch until I’m caught up to the point of the time the post was written. I don’t blame others when I accidentally stumble into spoilers, nor do I give too much crap to people who talk about the shows when I’m around.
Unless I ask nicely that they don’t talk about the show and they decide to throw out spoilers just to spite me, in which case I’ll make sure to spoil everything for them that I possibly can.
I’m not sure what the internet etiquette is for how long people should be complaining about something being revealed to them, but I figure it’s at least a couple days of days at a minimum. Now I’m talking about casual conversations, of course. If you head to a Facebook group about a show and then get angry they’re talking about the show, it’s you who’s the problem and not them. Same for if you go to entertainment sites and see spoilers. That’s all on you.
I say all of this and still managed to have something spoiled for me recently, even if logic says I should have known the show was going to do the thing that was spoiled for me anyway.
The show in question was NCIS: Hawaii, which had its series finale air a couple weeks ago. Now pretty much every procedural on TV ends its season with a cliffhanger, so it wasn’t shocking that NCIS: Hawaii ended with one because it wasn’t known when they filmed it that the show was going to be canceled. Unfortunately, I found out what that cliffhanger was before I got a chance to watch it. It wasn’t really that big of a deal because with the show being over finding out what the cliffhanger would have been didn’t really spoil the show.
Only after I saw the show, I got a little angry about it all.
You see, without giving away anything from the show despite it having aired more than ten days ago, the scene before the cliffhanger was revealed would have been the best point at which to end the show. Sure a few side plots would still be left open, but the main plots were all tied up nicely and there was no need for anything more to be shown. They could have faded to black right there and all would have finished well.
But they didn’t do that.
For some unknown reason, CBS decided to show the last 20 seconds or so that was originally the end of the episode instead of just editing it out. They broadcasted a cliffhanger they didn’t need to. All it would have taken was an editor to lengthen other scenes by a couple seconds each to fill the time the spoiler would have taken up. Now CBS has fans who are angry both that the show was canceled and that the final episode was a cliffhanger.
Fans have launched a petition effort to get CBS to change their minds and have threatened to boycott the latest addition to the CBS franchise, NCIS: Origins. I don’t think either will work, because in the long run fans of the NCISverse aren’t really going to boycott a new show, and unless there is a significant amount of people signing these petitions CBS isn’t likely to even take notice.
NCIS: Hawaii was a top-20 show but is incredibly expensive to produce. Even if CBS brought it back it would likely be with a smaller budget, so you would probably see some cast members go and some storylines cut back to reduce costs. It would stop being the show fans loved and would instead become a shell of what it once was. Which would once again make fans unhappy.
And, spoiler alert, you can never make everyone happy.
THREE
I’ve been blogging on one site or another for a long time–certainly long enough for many people to argue I should be better at it, but that’s a story for another post–and it still amazes me when someone comments on one of my missives or contacts me through social media with information that they apparently think I’ll take at face value and not look into before using this “fact” in a post.
How can you tell when someone is full of crap? It’s really pretty easy. First off, when someone tells me something I ask myself “if this is true, how could this person possibly know this information?”. Nine times out of ten it stops right there. But that one time when it is possible this person could know that tidbit, I ask myself another question, “Why are they telling me?”. If I can’t figure that one out, or if they can’t answer that question when I ask, it’s a sign that perhaps this isn’t something that should be reported without further investigation.
It shouldn’t be a secret that I ignore about three-quarters of the stuff people tell me, no matter how good a source that person claims to have. If you’re someone I don’t know and you give me information that sounds utterly impossible, I don’t even waste my time jotting it down. Heck, even if I know them, odds are I’m not noting it either. But lots still try to show how connected they are by spouting rumors that have no basis in reality.
One of those occasions happened on last Friday’s post when a commenter using a fake name and email address submitted a comment saying the Railers lied to me about how they determined their attendance number. They claimed the team throws away hundreds of tickets and counts those as people attending the game.
I decided to do my due diligence and ask Railers Director of Ticket Sales Connor Haynes about it. OK, so it wasn’t really “due diligence”, it was more to get his reaction to how dumb that comment was. And trust me, it’s a dumb comment.
His answer was nothing short of hilarious, saying completely deadpan “Yeah, that’s not true. We don’t print tickets anymore.”
The truth is there are hardly any printed tickets used with the new digital ticketing system. Plus, there’d be no need to actually print tickets and throw them away, the Railers could just mark them in the system as sold, a fact that seemed to escape Mr. Commenter.
Counting just ASM Global (the people who run the DCU Center), the City of Worcester, the ECHL, and owner Cliff Rucker, far too many organizations and people need to know the ticket number that faking it by a huge amount like that would only come back to bite the front office in the rear end.
You know, the same place many internet commenters talk out of.
FOUR
Once hockey season is over for Worcester, something that continuously happens far too early, every Sunday morning I use a different album as background noise as I get the previous week’s paperwork done. OK, so they’re not albums I play anymore but instead, it’s digital through my computer, but if I had room for a turntable and to bring my records out of storage I would, so that counts for something, I guess.
Last week I went with an old favorite, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. by The Monkees. It’s one of my favorite albums and contains, for my money, one of the greatest songs ever written, Pleasant Valley Sunday, penned by Gerry Goffin and Carole King. As I played the song for a second time a question that had popped into my head more than a few times jumped out again:
Why haven’t The Monkees been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? And, perhaps even more shocking, why have they never been nominated?
Well, it turns out a lot of people with bigger readerships than this have asked that same question, and after perusing many articles it seems to come down to a guy named Jann Wenner. I wasn’t really sure who he was, but after a trip to Wikipedia, I saw he is the co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine and also of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Being a Monkees fan for a long time there is one thing I know about them and Rolling Stone. The magazine hates the band and its music.
There’s no need for me to reinvent the wheel here, so I’ll instead point folks toward a great posting on Ultimate Guitar by Justin Beckner asking “Should The Monkees Be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame?” which answers a lot of questions about why the band isn’t in.
Luckily Wenner was removed from the board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame late last year because he said something stupid, so hopefully now that he’s no longer involved the Hall can finally enshrine some of the groups like The Monkees that Wenner and Rolling Stone were not big fans of. If it were to happen, unfortunately only Micky Dolenz is left to be honored, and with him approaching 80, the Monkees induction should be sooner rather than later.
—
Do you have something you loved (or hated) about the post? Head on over to the 210Sports Facebook page and leave a comment. You could comment on this post too, but fair warning, the spam filter catches lots of stuff it shouldn’t and it might be weeks before we see your comment. While you’re there, please give the page a like and a follow.
You can also follow along and comment on the following sites:
Twitter/X (210Darryl), Twitter/X (210Sports), Post.news, Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon.
-30-
210Sports 