It was raining and dark, and there I was, standing outside of Joe Louis Arena in Detroit without a ticket.

I had driven in from Ann Arbor, where I played at the Ice Cube earlier in the day, since I really wanted to experience the cross-border rivalry between the Red Wings and the Maple Leafs.  My plan was to do as I’ve done for many past NHL games: buy a ticket off a scalper by the arena.  What I didn’t plan for was Detroit’s anti-scalping law, which seemed to be keeping the scalpers away in spite of being struck down by a federal judge last month.  There were none in sight.

I had been hanging around the arena entrance for about five minutes, trying to figure out what to do, when a lone scalper finally appeared.

“How many you lookin’ for?” he asked.

“Just one.  What have you got?”  I replied.

Before the scalper could respond, one of the fans streaming by me spoke up.

“You just need one?” said the man.

“Yeah.”

“Here you go,” and the man put a ticket in my hands, turned and kept walking.

I looked down.  It was lower-level, section 114, behind the goalie on the end the Wings attack twice.  Face value: $110.

“Wow, thanks!” I shouted.  The generous fan and his two companions looked back, smiled, and told me to enjoy the game.

In the Joe: Leafs versus Wings

It turned out that the fan was Dan Merrill, father of Jon Merrill.  Jon is a defenseman on the University of Michigan hockey team and was taken by New Jersey in the second round of the 2010 NHL draft. I chatted with Dan throughout the game, and as you might expect, he was quite knowledgeable about hockey in general and the Red Wings in particular.

Dan and me. Dan hooked me up with the excellent seat.

The game itself had decent, entertaining hockey.  About half of the fans seemed to be cheering for Toronto, and half for Detroit.  It was particularly amusing when the chants of “Go Leafs Go” and “Let’s go Red Wings” alternated in such a way as to fill each others pauses.

When the game finally ended in overtime on a Maple Leafs goal, half of the crowd jumped up in joy, and the other half jumped up to get the hell out of there.

I’ve now played in 27 spots on this trip, and a universal truth is emerging: people like goalies.

Several people have used the exact phrase, “We love goalies!”

Empty nets are no fun

Even when I don’t play very well, I often get asked if I’m going to make it to the next drop-in game scheduled on some coming night.  I don’t think they’re asking that so as to avoid the game themselves.  On the contrary, if an ice session starts to have a reputation of being devoid of goalies, its popularity will drop.

I was talking to a guy named Eric when I played in Springfield, Illinois.  He mentioned that I was the first goalie to show up to the rink’s Monday-evening drop-in game in about six weeks.  More than a month with two empty nets?  No wonder not many skaters showed up.

Over the course of the trip so far, I have been the sole goalie at six skates, and a bunch of other times, there would have been only one goalie had I not been there.

Players at a drop-in skate will never tell a goalie that he was a sieve.    The skaters will tell you if you did a great job, but if nobody talks to you after the game, that’s the sign you didn’t do so well.  Yes, a lousy goalie is better than no goalie, and goalies tend to be in such short supply that there’s no need to risk alienating them.

Funny how skaters like the challenge of shooting on a goalie.  It would be trivial to bury shots in the net without a goalie being in the way, but that isn’t nearly as satisfying as beating a goalie in the process.

Yes, people like goalies, and I like being one.

There is only one NCAA D-I men’s hockey team south of the Mason-Dixon line, and it’s the University of Alabama at Huntsville.  That alone should tip you off that Huntsville is no ordinary Southern town when it comes to hockey.

Me at a drop-in game in Huntsville, Alabama. Note the clock on the scoreboard: that's AM, not PM.

I went to an early-morning (5:30 a.m., ugh!) drop-in hockey game at one of Huntsville’s arenas on Friday.  I was pleasantly surprised to find enough players for two full lines and a few subs.  Even better, none of the skaters were total ankle-benders, and a few were quite good.  Apparently, at least two of the guys on the ice play currently play professionally at the minor-league level.  From the moves those rumored pros put on me, I can believe it.

It wasn’t just young hotshots; one of the other goalies (three total in attendance this time) was an elderly guy named Joe.  His pads looked like they were from the early 1980s, and he played with a classic stand-up style instead of the now-dominant butterfly style.

“How long have you been playing goalie?” I asked.

“Since 1955,” Joe replied.

I paused for a moment, debating whether to point out that he’s been stopping pucks as long as my parents have been alive and that his pads were older than me.  Nah, I didn’t want to rub in his age.

“Cool,” I said. “I hope my playing career lasts at least 56 years, too.”

When more than two goalies show up to a drop-in session, we work out a rotation based either on time or goals scored.  For this occasion, we rotated every 15 minutes.

During the times I was on the bench, I chatted with the skaters.  I asked one guy named Jasper about the history of hockey in Huntsville.  Why was Hunstville an oasis of ice in the football territory that is the Deep South?

According to Jasper, the hockey crazy started back in the 1950s when lots of rocket scientists and engineers moved to the area from the North to work on the space program.  One engineer built an ice arena for his daughter, and the other engineers figured that they should use it to teach their sons ice hockey.  The popularity of hockey grew from there, and more arenas were built.  In other words, hockey is big because of the space program.

Me in front of a full-scale Saturn V rocket model at the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, AL. I'm 6' tall. The rocket is 363' tall.

“How many people are from the area, and how many are transplants?” I asked, gesturing to the skaters on the ice.

“It’s a good mix,” said Jasper. “Lots of engineers.”

“Ah, neat.  My degrees are in engineering, too.  Are you an engineer?” I said.

“Oh no, I’m a pediatric ear, nose, and throat physician,” was Jasper’s reply.

“Impressive.”  Hockey might have been brought to Huntsville by Northern engineers, but its appeal has clearly expanded.

What does the future hold for hockey in Huntsville?  Hard to say.  The higher populations of nearby Nashville and Atlanta, and thus their deeper pools for talent, leave Huntsville disadvantaged at the youth level.  (Kind of like the “Iron Range versus Twin Cities” dynamic at play in Minnesota prep hockey.)  In addition, the D-I hockey program at UAH is fighting for its life.

The famous Alabama governor George Wallace declared the Rocket City to be the “Hockey Capital of the South” back in 1986.  This goalie is hoping that Huntsville continues to live up to that appellation.

I read an article the other day about the consensus first-round NHL draft picks for 2012.  Sadly, there were no goalies on the list.  That led me to wonder: how often are goalies drafted in the first round?  I posed the question on reddit but didn’t get a very satisfying answer.

Fortunately, the NHL offers an easy way to explore all of the draft results going back to 1963.

I looked at the data for the past 30 years (1982-2011) and found that in those three decades, 47 goalies have been taken in the first round.  Two even went as the overall #1 picks: DiPietro in 2000 and Fleury in 2003.

Here’s the distribution by year:

Number of goalies in first round of NHL draft by year

Keep in mind that the total number of first-round draft picks has increased over the years.  Thus, it might be more informative to see what percentage of first-round picks were goalies:

Percentage of first-round NHL draftees who were goalies, by year

One thing to notice is that some years were really good for goalies, but other years were really bad for goalies.  In fact, 9 out of those 30 years saw no goalies get selected in the first round.

What “should” the number of goalies be?  If we observe that the NHL maximum roster size is 23 men with 2 being goalies, and we assume that the same ratio should hold in the first-round draft picks, we’d expect to see 8.6% of the first-round picks used for goalies.  Instead, we see an average of 5.8% of picks used for goalies. (Yes, in case you’re wondering, that’s a statistically significant difference; p<0.001)

The question becomes, why aren’t more goalies selected in the first round?  Maybe they’re considered higher risk, and so not worth the “expense” of an early pick.  Maybe the fall-off in goalie quality through the rounds is less extreme than for the other positions, so it is easier to get a quality goalie in a later round than, say, getting a quality forward in an early round.  Not sure.

Idea for future study: where do goalie picks tend to fall in fantasy hockey drafts?

In an effort to better document my playing of hockey, I decided to start recording video of my sessions.  The question was: how should I accomplish that?

I could have put my Canon EOS 7D DSLR, which has excellent video capabilities, on a tripod next to the glass, but I wasn’t comfortable with leaving several thousand dollars of camera equipment sitting around basically unattended.  I also considered getting a GoPro Hero and strapping it to my mask, as other goalies have done, but I really wanted to see myself as an external observer so as to critique my technique.  What I really needed was a cheap, relatively robust video camera with decent dim-light performance.

Back at the Goalcrease in Minnesota, my goalie coaches occasionally used such a camera to document my sessions.  Their choice for video recording was a Flip mounted on a tabletop tripod.  Simple and effective — not to mention cheap to replace should an errant puck fly its way.

I saw that Best Buy was having a sale on the base model Flip UltraHD, so I picked one up, mated it to my Gorillapod, and went to the rink in Boise with it.

It was easy to mount the camera on a railing in the stands next to the glass, and the field of view was sufficient to pick up not only me but almost the entire defensive zone.  The only drawback to that setup was that the camera didn’t follow me when I switched nets — a minor inconvenience, since it still gave me about 45 minutes of footage of myself.

I seem to be a bit off on my angle here, but I make a save anyway during a drop-in game.

Video can be a great tool.  I saw many aspects of my play that I want to improve.  Video can also serve as a stark reminder that I am not playing in the NHL.

When I’m in the moment, on the ice, the action around me feels fast and my reactions quick.  When I watch the same play on video, it feels like everything is happening in slow motion.  Am I really skating that slow?  Am I really taking that long to start moving into the shot?  Why isn’t the puck going faster?  It’s almost embarrassing to watch how slow and sloppy everything is.

I have a new appreciation for the patience of those people who have come to watch my games in the past.