I can count 20 Yankees caps and perhaps five Mets caps in the time it takes me to write a first draft of this column. Still, with all these other sports distractions, there was a buzz in the cool pre-summer air. Unfortunately, that buzz was all about the NBA playoffs, with everyone walking around asking if either the Philadelphia 76ers or Milwaukee Bucks could win a game from the Los Angeles Lakers. Well, kind of. Outside of that, it's going to be tough getting motivated for these last couple of games.
Hockey is a minority sport in New Jersey, as it is in most places where sunscreen is used.
The majority of American sports fans just can't relate to a game played on ice where the season ends in mid-June. There's been much talk of a hockey boom in recent years, but there's not much evidence of it here, even with the Devils playing for their second Stanley Cup in a row. Well, as dumb as the people who run the league are, there certainly ought to be one. So now the people who kept the game alive, the ones who live and breathe it, lose out to a few pathetic NBA wannabes who bit into the devil's candy of national TV money that makes their sport slightly more profitable than monster truck racing. Myself, I'm too busy to follow hockey, but I have some friends to the north who set their calendar by it, and somehow it seems a lamentable waste that all the potential joy of a championship that ought to be lighting up some poor snowbilly's life is wasted down here where it's just another stop on the television.