Take Your Eye Off the Puck
How to Watch Hockey by Knowing Where to Look
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Narrated by:
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Barry Abrams
A guide for sports fans on how to watch and appreciate the game of hockey
More and more fans are watching the NHL each week, but many of them don't know exactly what they should be watching. How does an offense create shooting lanes for its best sniper? When a center breaks through and splits between two defensemen, which defender is to blame? Why does a goalie look like a Hall of Famer one week and a candidate for the minor leagues the next? This guide for sports fans on how to watch and appreciate the game of hockey takes you inside a coach's mind as he builds a roster or constructs a game plan, to the chaos of the goalie's crease, and deep into the perpetual chess match between offense and defense.
Discussing topics such as what to look for when a team goes on the power play and why playing center might be the most grueling job in sports, Take Your Eye Off the Puck tells fans how to get the most out of watching their favorite sport.
©2015 Greg Wyshynski (P)2018 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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Well wrote and easy to follow.
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While I really didn’t get tips for watching the game, it did offer insight into various parts of the game. This, in turn will help the fan, especially those new to the game, know where to look at other parts of the rink or players away from the puck. Most of these I already do, such as looking at battles in front of the net. I always love to see that battle between an offensive center, a defensive defenseman and at times the goalie as well.
Descriptions like this are sprinkled through the first third or so of the books as Whyshynski explains all of the positions and what their main roles are, what it means to be on the first line, fourth line and others in between. The same goes for describing the roles of defensemen and why there are “offensive” and “defensive” defensemen. These chapters still help new fans decipher what they are seeing on the ice.
However, the book then starts talking about coaching, running a team as the general manager and the nuances negotiating the NHL salary cap. While the information is great here, even for long-time fans like me, I wondered what it had to do with watching a game. Here, this is where I was glad I listened to the audio version of this book as Abrams was an excellent narrator. That was especially the case when he was narrating some of the many humorous quips throughout the book. I’ll end this review with this explanation of why marquee matchups of star players like Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin rarely result in the two of them on the ice at the same time.
“Hockey isn't like basketball, where you see stars going head-to-head off the dribble. The Crosby vs. Ovechkin banner headlines on NHL.com are fun and all, but if you tallied up the time the two are actually on the ice together, it's roughly smaller than the Wicked Witch of the East's screen time before Dorothy dropped a house on her.”
The nuances of hockey explained
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Great read
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Entertaining and Insightful
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