High def hockey jams

February has to be the worst sports month of the year. The period between the football and baseball seasons just doesn't have a lot going on unless you're either a basketball or hockey fan.

Even though I wrote about the 1975 NBA Championship last week, I'm not much of a basketball fan. I'm only interested in college hoops during that one year each decade when my alma mater makes the NCAA tournament, and have less than zero interest in the NBA because of their thug mentality and the perpetual crappiness of our local side.

And interest in hockey usually waxes and wanes through the course of a season, waxing during the Stanley Cup playoffs and waning during most of the regular season, but since I got HDTV and started getting Sharks games in high def, I've been catching every period of every game.

Hockey is a sport that doesn't televise well on regular TV: everything moves so fast, it's hard to follow the puck, and the center-ice camera misses most of the action. In high definition, it's like being right there at rinkside. You can follow the puck and the action away from the puck, and there are all sorts of interesting angles to keep you interested. Ice hockey was invented for HDTV.

This week our San Jose Sharks had back to back home & home games with their main Pacific Division rivals, the Anaheim (no longer Mighty) Ducks. These teams have been 1-2 in the division for the past few years, and entered the NHL around the same time, and the two cities (San Jose and Anaheim) are mirror images of each other -- second cities in a large metro area that are derided as faceless suburbs by their famous northern neighbors. As a NoCal-SoCal rivalry, Sharks-Ducks is right up there with Giants-Dodgers and A's-Angels.

The two games this week were a split, with the Ducks winning 7-4 in San Jose and the Sharks winning 3-2 in Anaheim. I watched nearly every period, except the final period on Tuesday after the Sharks fell behind 6-1. I can't remember ever watching an entire regular season game in the pre-HDTV era, but HD hockey vs. non-HD hockey is like day vs. night.

Almost everything is better on HDTV. I saw the New York Dolls on PBS Soundstage last weekend, and the Dolls (esp. Johansen and Sylvain) were not better in HD. Every rule has an exception.