mastermario said:
Like I said, the USA already won a game against Canada in the tourney, so really the score is USA 1, Canada 1.
Except Canada's 1 came when it mattered most. The US just couldn't take the pressure I guess... :lol
That's what playoffs and elimination rounds are for. The only sport I know of that doesn't have playoffs, and just tallies wins, losses, and ties to determine the "best" team, is professional league soccer. But even then, there is the UEFA tournament, Euro Cup, and so forth.
CreepinDeth said:
There's 60 minutes of Football action always happening. Otherwise, games wouldn't last 3 hours. Don't know how that person came up with 12 minutes, but the clock only runs when theres a play going on.
Also, Hockey has plenty of frequent break intervals as well, not to mention 15 minutes between each period. That's 30 whole minutes of nothing. It's almost as bad as Soccer. The puck goes to one side, then the other. A body check here, some icing penalty there, not very exciting. The only thing exciting about Hockey is penalty shots.
In football, the clock keeps running unless its a first down, out of bounds, or turnover. Hence timeouts, audible play calls, and so forth. There are some stoppages in hockey, and soccer, but generally when the whistle blows often it's considered a bad game. Hockey fans don't enjoy a game where the flow of play keeps getting interrupted. But of course, that's sometimes unavoidable. In Baseball and Football, however, the games are purposefully set up to have long periods of nothing in between short bursts of action. So in that sense, a really bad hockey game may share the pace of a really good football game.
The back and forth play of hockey is also conducive to excitement more so than other sports. In basketball, for example, the prospect of scoring on every possession is good (or at least it ought to be). In soccer, the prospect of scoring on a given possession is fairly bad. But in hockey, the potential for every possession to result in a goal is much higher than in soccer without the expectation of scoring that exists in basketball, and the opposite is true on defense. This means that every possession by the team your cheering for could reasonably turn into a scoring opportunity, while every possession for the other team presents a very real threat to your team's success. Few other sports manage to make a "back and forth" game so exciting, but the sport of hockey manages to balance between the two quite nicely. And, in addition to that, the shift from offense to defense happens quickly and often, so one never feels too secure, nor too threatened, knowing those roles could shift in the blink of an eye.
Penalty shots are, in my opinion, kind of boring, because the prospect of scoring is quite high. That's not to say there aren't a number of shootouts that involve hot goalies stealing the show, but I've always found shootouts to be similar to free throws in basketball; a goal is expected, and not scoring usually means poor luck.
To each his own, of course. I play hockey and understand it better than most sports, so I can more readily appreciate its strategy, pace, and so forth. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but it certainly is mine.
Also, we (Canadians) are really really really good at it. I just wanted to make sure everyone here knew that. Because we sent that message to the world a few days ago.
It would have been another miracle on ice :lol