In the past year or so, I started watching hockey again. It had been a sport I watched with friends in high school (and I played street hockey very badly with the same friends), but last season I started watching it again much more frequently and intensely. At a certain point, I realized that while I knew the basic rules of the game and had a pretty good idea of what was bad vs. what was good, I was missing a lot of the nuance. So I started listening to podcasts and reading articles on tactics and hockey stats, and that was how I heard about this book.
Greg Wyshynski is a hockey sportswriter, and his style is very much of the old school sportswriter genre--there's not a simile in the world he hasn't met and loved. But I found his book to be very well organized and provided a structure for understanding aspects of hockey that I had observed but hadn't necessarily understood just from watching games. I've found myself relying upon how he laid out various points when trying to explain rules or what have you to friends who are new to the sport, and I really like having that sort of vocabulary at hand instead of flailing around for how to describe a thing I understand instinctively but don't have the words for. He's also someone who grew up about thirty miles from where I did and is only a couple of years older than I am, so I get all of his cultural references and in general there's something about him that makes me feel home again in a way that few things have since My Chemical Romance or seeing Clerks for the first time. Most people probably won't have that sort of fondness for him baked in the way I do, but even without that, if you're a newish hockey fan (or even an old hand at hockey who wants a refresher course on certain topics), I really recommend his book.
Grade: A
Greg Wyshynski is a hockey sportswriter, and his style is very much of the old school sportswriter genre--there's not a simile in the world he hasn't met and loved. But I found his book to be very well organized and provided a structure for understanding aspects of hockey that I had observed but hadn't necessarily understood just from watching games. I've found myself relying upon how he laid out various points when trying to explain rules or what have you to friends who are new to the sport, and I really like having that sort of vocabulary at hand instead of flailing around for how to describe a thing I understand instinctively but don't have the words for. He's also someone who grew up about thirty miles from where I did and is only a couple of years older than I am, so I get all of his cultural references and in general there's something about him that makes me feel home again in a way that few things have since My Chemical Romance or seeing Clerks for the first time. Most people probably won't have that sort of fondness for him baked in the way I do, but even without that, if you're a newish hockey fan (or even an old hand at hockey who wants a refresher course on certain topics), I really recommend his book.
Grade: A
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