Realignment Woes Grow

As most everyone has heard by now the NHLPA failed to approve the league's realignment plan by the set deadline. This lack of movement was essentially the Players' Association rejecting the realignment plan without actually rejecting it. It was a clever bit of maneuvering on the part of someone or someone else to do something that pretty much just pisses everyone off in one way or another.

A number of quality blogs have done a great job poking holes in the NHLPA's statement about why a plan popular amongst the league, owners, and fans (except, probably Florida and Tampa) would be unceremoniously rejected. The travel complaints from the NHLPA have been a target from the media, and with good reason, the claims are overall pretty silly in the face of the efforts of the league to add parity to travel schedules across the league, except for Florida and Tampa. But the area in which I'm more interested is that the Players' Association was given no say during the formative period of the new league structure. Just today Travis Hughes of SBNation and Broad Street Hockey reported that Flyers player rep Braydon Coburn said that the unbalanced conferences structure was the primary area of concern for the NHLPA. While this concern is certainly notable, the conference structure is far more agreeable than some of the other setups suggested by the owners and the league.

Playoff Predictions are Dead, Long Live Playoff Predictions: Round 1

First of all, some quick notes:  As you can see there are some new design elements to the blog.  I'm proud of how everything turned out, and I would love some feedback, especially if something doesn't look right to you.  You can e-mail any comments to puckandpunk [at] gmail [dot] com.  Also, the new Puck and Punk logo was created by forgivable Rangers and Flames enthusiast Cait over at HockeyN3rd.  So big thanks to her for the contribution.

At the start of every NHL season, bloggers and journalists bombard us with pointless predictions as to the performance of the teams in the league.  These predictions are then mostly ignored until they can be used to either deride someone or so that someone can talk about how awesome he or she was at predicting the final outcome of the regular season.  And then we hit the Stanley Cup Playoffs.  For the next week hockey fans are bombarded with predictions and analysis and outlines from every corner of the web.  After some time it just got annoying, but I still wanted to share my predictions and analysis of the first round of the 2011 Stanley Cup Playoffs

Coming Soon to Trusted Retailers of Nashville Predators Goods

I have always been deeply interested in the world of marketing, advertising, and branding. My undergraduate work often focused on those topics while I studied psychology and business marketing. Being a fan of hockey and the NHL I’m always eager to see the promotional campaigns and branding concepts developed both by the league and the individual teams. Recently I found myself browsing shop.nhl.com to do a little bit of pricing and also to what new items might be offered. One could say that I was surprised to see that the NHL introduced two new products for the Spring, a hammer and a tape measure branded with whatever team logo that you could ever want. It wasn’t just that I was surprised; one could say that was laughing my ass off until I fell out of my chair. While I have no doubt the league will sell thousands of those items, it strikes me as being as silly as the Nashville Predators toaster or anything with both a Predators logo and a Stanley Cup on it. 

I decide that I would take the time and see if I could get a sneak preview of some of the products that we can look forward to the NHL and Predators premiering over the summer. Fortunately for you I was able to get my hands on some of the distributors catalogues so that I could bring you a sneak peek of the some of the exciting items coming to shop.nhl.com and the Bridgestone Arena Pro Shop.  And sorry, no official prices as of yet, but I'll update this page if and when I can get my hands on them.