Why hockey rules

... And other sports suck

Andrew Coyne, National Post
Published: Wednesday, June 21, 2006

The game. There is more action in five minutes of hockey than in your average 90-minute game of soccer, whose fans live for the moment when, by some mischance, the ball strays within 50 yards of the net. Basketball suffers from the opposite affliction: As the comedian David Brenner argues, they should start both teams at 100 and make the games two minutes long, since that's what every basketball game comes down to. Only hockey combines frequency of scoring chances with difficulty of actually scoring: Fans, especially at playoff time, are kept in a state of near-permanent hysteria, the prospect of a game-altering goal ever present.
Hockey is fluid, where baseball and football are static. It has been calculated that a 60-minute football game, though it takes nearly three hours to complete, adds up to no more than about 10 minutes of actual playing time. The rest is huddles, signal-calling, etc. Baseball players spend half of every game sitting around on the bench, chewing tobacco. The rest is spent standing around in the field, chewing tobacco. But oh, the geometry.


Thanks KK for the pointer