The Holiday season can be unforgiving. After limping your way through Christmas dinner’s with in-laws, family and co-workers you’d never normally have dinner with, you are subjected to Best Of and Year In Review Specials for nearly two weeks – All of which declaring something you probably already knew: Sidney Crosby isn’t bad at hockey and Jonathan Toews had a pretty good year.
Because you haven’t suffered enough, and because a ton of cool stuff happened in the online hockey world this year, here’s our (kind of, but not fully) complete retrospective look at 2010 in the hockey blogosphere:
(Please note this is a list of things that happened online on Twitter, blogs and more. Just because it happened in the NHL world or on TV, doesn’t mean it applies to this online list. Thanks!)
February
The O-Leon-MPICS
Washington Capitals owner Ted Leonsis ripped the Olympics for how little they catered to the NHL and NHL owners on his blog, TedsTake.com. It’s only kind of ironic that a Billionaire is balking at jersey prices.
April
#ThrowTheSnake
One of the top Coyotes hockey stories of the year. #ThrowTheSnake started on Twitter but soon became bigger than all of us. Jeff Marek even broke it down on Hockey Night in Canada’s iDesk. That, and the insane buzz that collected, forced the ‘Yotes to issue warnings to fans not to throw any snakes. Good thing someone didn’t listen. I don’t use “epic” lightly… but this campaign was epicly epic. It’s all your fault (read: nice job) @TravisHair and @Chemmy.
Kyle Wellwood & Shane O’Brien’s Pizza Crawl Hoax
HockeyIndependent.com ran a great satire detailing plans for a Chicago Pizza Crawl with several NHL players including (at the time) Vancouver Canucks teammates Kyle Wellwood and Shane O’Brien. Because fact checking is overrated and kind of a pain, NBC Chicago ran the story not understanding it wasn’t real. They’ve since admitted they fell for the joke. Nice.
June
Bob McKenzie Actually Gave Credit To Eklund
In the same month the Chicago Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup, they were forced to trade nearly a third of their roster to fit under the 2010-2011 salary cap. Rumours were swirling about trades the Blackhawks were going to make. One of the 300,000 trade predictions Eklund made actually came true and saw the Blackhawks pull the trigger on a 9-player trade with the Atlanta Thrashers. Bob McKenzie then credited Eklund with reporting the trade first. Great. That acknowledgment alone means we’re stuck with Eklund for at least another year.
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