Hockey Prompt

Okay this might be a bit of an unusual response to this as I am not what one would consider a target market for hockey media as I am admittedly not a hockey fan. That said out of all the prompts I have access to I think this is the one that I can most easily embrace as someone who does read probably too much sports media relating to the sport that I do follow. However I do want to preface this that I have not really engaged heavily with hockey media, although I do occasionally look when things are talking about particularly interesting milestones and paces.

Now I do enjoy the hockey media I have seen as I genuinely enjoy seeing all the 'this player is on pace to pass Gretzky if they play to this level for 16 more years' and 'this player is the first to accomplish X thing in Y years' which are things that cross into my social media streams on occasion. I do not see enough to say whether that is common in regards to hockey media, but it is absolutely the kind of thing that I enjoy seeing as someone who has only rudimentary understanding of the game. Any time that you can put a performance into numbers and then compare those numbers to other things you can sell me on the media. Stats are my jam. All that said I would not be able to name a single hockey writer in existence.

My absolute favorite type of sports media content is the one that I engage with most as an admittedly abnormal fan and that is dream team designs. Gridiron football is my sport of choice and in that regard I would say the best article/article series of all time is the RSPWP4 which was a prompt of super advanced aliens have challenged the planet to game of gridiron football to determine the fate of humanity make your team. The types of conversation that spur are the exact things that I enjoy the most about sports media because it involves a lot of stats talk, but also a huge amount of talk about things that maybe don't make the stat sheet. Going with the sport I second most understand in basketball any article talking about 'this is the best starting five you could ever assemble according to this Hall of Famer' hooks me because I love to see what former players think about their peers, and again I love to see how other people would assemble their rosters. I confess at this point I think I am an unusual person in this regard in that I have a fully designed 46 man gameday roster and 90 man camp roster dream teams for gridiron football, and also a full starting lineup and bench dream team for basketball. All of which I occasionally get an itch to update and in fact I spent the majority of yesterday digging through snap counts on pro-football-reference to optimize my roster according to how my dream coaching staff used their rosters.

Now that is a huge tangent on other sports, but it brings me back to hockey in that if someone wanted to get me interested in hockey they would put that kind of media in front of me. Based on what little knowledge I have Gretzky is going to be on every team, but I imagine most people would have different defenders in mind which is where I would be sold on reading it. It also works wonders in my opinion in that it allows you to talk about a large amount of the game in relatively simpler fashion which worked well in my experience with the aforementioned RSPWP4 in terms of getting me to become knowledgeable about players I never got the opportunity to watch. By extension it also gave me an idea of what to look for when I am watching to see the kind of plays and players that you would call upon in a scenario where you are to come up with an ideal roster.

Now we move onto giving me a hockey media empire and here is where I change things up. Whereas before I looked at this from the perspective of news articles and the like; here I want to address media under the larger umbrella. You see the above is great for getting someone who knows something about the sport interested and someone who just has a love of stats, but it does not do as well I feel in getting someone completely green interested. In that regard the best experiences that I have had to sell me have been comics specifically manga in the form of Eyeshield 21 for gridiron football, Kuroko no Basuke for basketball, and Baby Steps for tennis. The time I was closest to hockey was probably around the time that The Mighty Ducks came out, but that was more a character driven story thing then an explanation of the sport. Therefore the goal is to combine the explanations of a rundown of the sport with the entertainment value of The Mighty Ducks to ideally form a fun series that can get people invested in the series itself and the sport at large.

Okay I need to go get something to drink so I am going to call it here. I hope enough of that rambling mess comes through to qualify me for this PT. Thank you for your time!