In a Glass Cage of Emotion

Last night, I attended my first National Hockey League game in about five years or so. The reason was that my employer was offering marked-down tickets and I asked my wife if it was something she wanted to do. Myself, I can really take hockey or leave it but my wife had some ice-skating lessons and had played some hockey and she decided she wanted to see the game.

And so I went.

The venue: The venue is Philips Arena in Atlanta, GA. I've been to about a zillion Atlanta Dream games and am very familiar with Philips - but never as a hockey venue. The hard part of Philips Arena is that it's in downtown Atlanta and if you've never been there it can be daunting. As for me, I only know one specific way to get there and one specific way to leave there. Whenever the Atlanta city government has to close a road, it's always daunting.

There are two cheap parking areas in the bowels of the stadium. One is uncovered and from what I year, you have a great chance of getting your car broken into if you park there. The other area is covered, and has a nice stairwell which leads you right into Philips at about the 200 level. Don't ask me how to give you directions; I couldn't tell you.

Seats: We were sitting in Section 312 - approximately six rows away from the back wall of the arena. The 300 sections are very high up and they are steep. My wife has a fear of heights and the steepness of the angle nearly gave her vertigo.

Incidentally, the face value of these tickets is $45. For Section 312, which is why I shall never attend a hockey game in Atlanta unless the seats are marked down to the $20s again. There is no reason why anyone but the most fanatic of sports fans should ever spend $45 for a sporting event unless you're virtually sitting in the front row. The experience of seeing a live sporting event is great - but not $45 great.

Truth be told, the view from Section 312 is fantastic. You're looking right over the ice. If you actually want to see the game, the 300s might be the best place from which to do it.

National Anthem: Everyone stood for the National Anthem, which they do at Atlanta Dream games. With a sample of n=1 majority white male audience vs. a sample of n => 50 majority black female audiences, the relationship to the anthem seemed to be different - positively reverent vs. merely respectful.

Furthermore, everyone shouted at the word NIGHT. I'm sure this is some part of Thrashers fan arcana that completely perplexes non-fans. The Atlanta Thrashers had a "teachable moment" they could have used to integrate first-time viewers into the complexities of the community of Thrashers fans - and they blew it. "At the National Anthem, we Thrashers fans shout on NIGHT because...." Put it up on the Jumbotron. Ten seconds.

Ambiance: Attendance was listed at 10,172 for the game. If you believe that there were actually 10,172 people at that game - you are either a liar, or you don't know that much about estimating attendance.

A sellout for the Atlanta Dream is about 9500 or so, at least an announced sellout. That usually translates into about 6000 living, breathing people, all of whom have been restricted to the lower two levels of Philips. Sitting from high up gave me a good chance to estimate attendance. If you had taken everyone at the arena and shoved them into the lower bowl, you would have had about as many seats filled as you'd have at a Dream sellout. There were entire rows on the lower arena with only one or two people sitting in them.

So the NHL is fibbing about its attendance. Big deal. Major league baseball does it. The WNBA does it. The NBA does it. I'm assuming that pretty much every sport out-and-out lies about its bodies-in-seats attendance. The multiplier seems to be about 0.65 to multiply the stated attendance by to get actual attendance, except at true, obvious sellouts.

It seems that most of the people choose to sit at the end of the rink, behind the goalies. Maybe they think it's cheaper that way. Sounds like a horrible place to watch a hockey game.

There is a lot of bombast at a NHL game. They were actually louder than Atlanta Dream games. Not in terms of fan shouting, but in terms of loudspeaker volume. In Dream games the overhead is on and you can hear it; in Thrashers games the volume is turned up to permanent shift of hearing levels.

Maybe I'm too used to the Atlanta Dream games, but the Atlanta Thrashers games seem to be rather inconsistent in attempts to movitate the crowd. The organ music - or pumped up rock songs - are just annoying, the music always seems to chime in during rather pedestrian seeming events. (Like a bunch of guys standing around for a minor face-off after some whistle that has brought action to a complete stop for about two minutes.) At Dream games, there is a better sense of musical direction, where the really loud stuff seems to kick in only after something really dramatic - like, say an Angel McCoughtry steal and fast-break resulting in a basket.

There's a lot of reliance on canned video - non-live video, that doesn't seem to motivate the crowd that much. The rest of the experience is quite similar to the Dream experience. Cam shots. Trivia quizzes for prizes. Silly games during intermissions. (But fewer - it seems that NHL fans are enthralled by the man driving the Zamboni.)

The Thrashers do have the Kiss Cam. How I feel about the Kiss Cam is another blog post. And of course, they ended their Kiss Cam exhortions by focusing the cam on two male Buffalo Sabres fans, har-de-har-har. I'll just add two comments and let it go:

a) they're too gutless to put the Kiss Cam up during an Atlanta Dream game, because everyone knows of course that even exposure to one loving lesbian kiss will turn your children instantly gay.
b) if I ever go to a sports game with a guy, I'm telling him, "you'd better make sure you're sitting one seat away from me, because if they put the two of us up on that kiss in that homophobic har-de-har-har, then buddy you're getting tongued." And I'm as straight as an arrow.
c) of course, it might not have been a homophobic har-de-har-har. It could have just been an older Buffalo Sabres fan and his older wife who kind of looks like a man now after passing seventy. You never know. Even so, my two previous points stand.

Hanging from the roof of the arena are two gigantic plastic Thrasher heads in profile. During player introductions, Thrashers goals and other high points of the game, these heads breathe fire. Since it can be cold in a hockey arena, and since 312 puts us close to the threads, goals meant one could warm one's self by the fire. My wife suggested sticks and marshmallows.

The fans: Hard to tell. They're really just like Atlanta Dream fans with better jerseys. Mostly white and male.

I hated going to baseball games in Florida because after a few drinks, the crowd gets really obnoxious. The Atlanta crowd seemed to be okay, except for one guy at the lower level who kept screaming at the top of his lungs, "BUFFALO SUCKS!" Then again, in the 300 levels I was removed from most human contact.

There was, however, a very large group of loud, vocal fans who cheered on the glories of their team. Unfortunately, they were Buffalo Sabres fans. In the WNBA, you don't see a lot of enemy jerseys because the league has only been around for 15 years and there's not a lot of expatriate loyalty to outside teams. I suspect that's different in the NHL - at times, it seemed like Atlanta fans were getting out-shouted by transplanted upper New Yorkers.

The game: I know virtually nothing about hockey, except a few facts:

a) it is a sport played on ice,
b) if you do something bad, they put you in the box - and then, you feel shame
c) putting the puck in the net is one point.

The rest I was able to surmise, along with some help from my wife who has actually played the sport. Unlike basketball, I figured it was a sport much like football in that the more you held the ball - or controlled the puck - the more likely it was for you to score.

Buffalo proved that right at the beginning. In the first period, Buffalo's goalie could have brought out an Ottoman, propped his feet up and read a magazine because all of the action was taking place near the Atlanta goal. Sooner or later, probability would shift in favor of the Sabres and they went up 1-0.

Atlanta managed to score a goal halfway into the first, but had it taken away due to a boarding penalty by the Thrashers' Nik Antropov. "Boarding", I guess, is when you slam someone into the boards in a way that betrays a lack of common decency. Maybe you break wind on someone, I don't know, but Antropov was put in the box and made to feel shame, and Jordan Leopld scored on the power play to make it 2-0 Buffalo.

Among the various incomprehensible random facts flashed on the screen, one was very interesting - that Buffalo was among the worst teams in the league in "penalty killing". Penalty killing is what you do when one of your players has been made to feel shame - down one player, you try to randomly twiddle the puck around and keep it away from anyone who could score with it. I think that the Sabres had two players feeling shame when Atlanta scored their first goal in the second period. Four minutes later, Alexander Burmistrov added another goal and the score was tied 2-2 after the second. For the 19-year old Burmistrov, it was his very first NHL goal.

As for the quality of play - it was lacking. My wife kept complaining about how everyone seemed to be out of position and that the puck-handling skills weren't good. According to Ruth, passes should go right onto the end of the other player's stick, not in the general direction of the other player. There seemed to be a lot of chasing the puck around after an errant pass, which reminded me of the essentially random nature of hockey. Unlike basketball, where the ball is pretty much in your control at all times and if you make a crappy pass it goes out of bounds (and if you don't score within 24 seconds, you lose the ball), in hockey the action might be randomly determined by whenever this little black rock slides off to and whichever players happen to catch up with it. (In a way, the NHL is much like quidditch.)

To a neophyte, it looked rather sloppy - a bunch of guys wearing plastic futilely swatting at the puck. It could even be a little bit dull sometimes, but the night was lightened up by the hostility between the two teams which really didn't seem to like each other that much. In the first period, Bryan Little got checked into the boards by the Sabres' Shaone Morrisonn. (Correct spelling.) Morrisonn received no penalty while Little ended up on the ice holding his bloody face, and was taken out of the game with a concussion. There were no riots, but you could tell that Atlanta was sensitive about the whole thing.

Buffalo kept racking up the penalties. A roughing penalty tacked on to the end of the second quarter put Atlanta in the power play (Buffalo down a player) to start the third - and fifty seconds later, the Thrashers scored again, 3-2. There were still 19 minutes of hockey to play. So we waited and waited and waited. With three minutes or so left in the game, we thought the chances of Buffalo scoring again were pretty slim, so we left.

Mistake. With eight seconds left in regulation, Derek Roy managed to shove the puck into Atlanta's net from close range to tie the game 3-3 and send it into overtime. We tuned over to 680 The Fan to verify Atlanta's victory over the radio, and was surprised to hear that the game was still in progress. The game went into a five minute overtime period and could have ended in a tie, but Dustin Byfuglien hit a goal with just 29 seconds remaining in overtime to give Atlanta the 4-3 victory as the first team scoring in overtime is given the victory.

"I'm in a glass cage of emotion right now!" was Thrasher announcer Dan Kamal's cry. My wife and I chuckled at the profoundness and incomprehensibility of that.

Overall assessment: Better than average, but not by much. The seats are way too expensive for us to see hockey regularly in person. No one really famous out there on the ice. The hockey was very sloppy at times. It cost $5.50 for a Coke, but you could refill it infinite times and make use of the Philips Arena bathrooms.

The sight lines were very good. Crowd was sparse. I don't know enough about hockey to truly appreciated it and missed all of its subtleties. Bryan Little disappeared from the ice and we never learned what happened to him during the game. People got to ride the Zamboni. Not a bad way to kill a few hours, if you don't mind paying $20 a ticket. We might do it again, but we're not in a hurry to do so.