Party Switch. Sorry Dad.

This is not about politics. It’s much more important. It’s about the NHL playoffs.

Last night, the Washington Capitals defeated the Philadelphia Flyers in a do-or-die game to grab the last wild card spot in the 2024 Stanley Cup Playoffs. It was an improbable result for a team that looked dead in the water two months ago and was a seller at the trade deadline. Outscored by their opponents more than any playoff team in the modern era, the Caps benefited from some incredible goaltending, improving young players, and a second-half resurgence of their aging superstar Alex Ovechkin. This weekend, they will begin a 7-game series against the best team in the league, the New York Rangers.

The Caps are the only sports team left I still yell at through the TV. Like a lot of people who hit my age (mid-40s), I’ve mellowed about sports. I still watch a lot of games and root for my favorite teams, but I don’t live and die by them the way I used to. Wins and losses are just wins and losses, no longer the direct source of my mood for hours or days. I don’t spend hours a day reading about my teams, or cease all other mental activities when they’re deep in the playoffs. I can’t remember the last time I completely lost it over a blown call in a football game.

Honestly, it’s probably healthier.

A lot of it, I suspect, is just the perspective of middle age. Maybe it’s having kids, maybe it’s the realization the people I’m watching play these sports are essentially kids, or maybe it’s just getting older. But it’s almost hard to remember what it felt like to have so much of my life tied to the ups and downs of a sports team. I’ve mostly outgrown it.

Except for hockey.

It’s the one sport where my spectator relationship to the game has barely changed at all. I still scream at the TV. I still get incredibly annoyed by the refereeing, and loudly let them know it when I’m at a game in-person. I still stew for hours when the Caps lose a game in a dumb way, and I get irrationally happy when they win 3 games in a row. I’m essentially still a teenager watching the games. It’s the one remaining window into what I was like at 15.

I watched the Flyers game with about a dozen people in my backyard, where we routinely project Caps game onto our big outdoor screen. It’s glorious.

Setting up for the best way to watch hockey

After the Caps won and we were done celebrating, everyone naturally started talking about the Rangers series, which starts (yikes!) in four days.

“Is that gonna be a little weird for you?” my friend Mike asked me, matter-of-factly.

Fair question. See, I didn’t grow up a Caps fan.

Until 2012, I was a Rangers fan.

Ok, Let Me Back Up

I grew up in a very sports-centric household. My dad watched sports on TV every single night, unless we went to a game, or my sister or I had a game. Or something else '“got in the way,” as he would say.

We were fans of the old-school New York sports teams—Yankees, Knicks, Football Giants, and Rangers. Dad had grown up in the city, and even though we lived way Upstate—easier to get to Montreal than Madison Square Garden—the rhythms of New York sports ran our lives. We listened to WFAN. Dad got the NY Post everyday at work. And we watched New York sports every night. As Dad would say, there are only two bad days a year: the day before and the day after the MLB All-Star game. Every other day, there’s a game on to watch.

And watch we did. Yankees in the summer. Giants in the Fall. Knicks and Rangers through the winter and into the spring.¹ If none of them were playing, we’d suffer and watch the Mets/Jets/Nets/Islanders, mostly to laugh at them. Dad had no tolerance for the “new” New York teams, and was utterly contemptuous of their fans.

Dad loved the Rangers and so did I. But honestly, I liked college hockey better. It was more immediately in my life. My parents had met at Boston University—can’t think of a team my dad hated more than BC hockey—so he was naturally a huge Cawlidge Hawkey fan. And it was hard for us to get to an NHL game. But we lived close to both RPI and Union. So we went to a ton of college games growing up. RPI won the national title when I was 7. That’ll do it. My first sports hero was Adam Oates—yes, the Adam Oates who later coached the Capitals—who was the star of the ‘85 RPI team. And live hockey is the best; no other sport has such a TV/Live difference.

But the thing I really loved was watching my dad watch a hockey game. He was a mild-mannered person, except when it came to sports. And when it came to sports, he was actually still pretty reserved. Except when it came to hockey. Just a lovable lunatic. He could barely sit still in front of the TV, directing the players on the ice second by second, calling for line changes, harassing the referees, all while keeping up a running commentary that rivaled the announcers.² It was impossible not to love. If only I had had a smartphone to take a video.

Once a year, Dad would take me up to Montreal for an NHL game. When I was really little, we would go when the Rangers were playing the Habs. That ended when I was 10. We were there and the Forum was rockin’ as usual. The Habs scored like two minutes into the first period and everyone was going bananas and Dad turned to me—remember, I’m 10—and said “I hate this fucking place. We’re not doing any more Rangers games here. No way.”

Now look, Dad didn’t hate the Forum. How could you? He just hated being a visiting fan there. After that, we’d just go once a year to a random game and root for the Habs. It was awesome.

June 14, 1994 - the happiest I ever saw my father

I don’t think I ever saw Dad happier than on June 14, 1994.³ The day the Rangers won game 7—after blowing a 3 games to 1 lead during the previous week—to claim the Stanley Cup for the first time in his life. He just stood there, arms raised over his head in front of the TV. Dad was an extremely fortunate sports fan. He was 45 and had a collective 16 championships among his favorite major sports teams. But this had been the White Whale. Since 1940. And an absolutely grueling playoffs. Part of it was just a relief for him. “I hope,” he said, “we never have to live through another Game 5 and Game 6 like that again.”

He didn’t. Dad died just three years later. He got one more title—the Yankees in 1996—but never saw the Rangers come particularly close again.⁴

What Would Dad Think About This

After Dad died, my entire relationship with hockey changed. I drifted away from the NHL and toward college hockey. I was living in college towns and sitting in great seats for cheap at college games. The college rules allowed for a better, more open game than the NHL in the 90s and early 2000s. And the Rangers missed the playoffs the first seven years after Dad died. Watching the comparatively-boring NHL on TV alone just wasn’t fun anymore. Yale-Cornell from the third row? Now that was fun.

Then I moved to DC in 2007. It’s not New York or Boston, but it’s not a terrible sports town. At least they have all the major sports. One thing they don’t have, however, is college hockey. I mean, none. So I sorta came back to the NHL. And it had gotten better. Getting rid of the two-line pass rule in 2005 almost single-handedly opened up the game. The neutral-zone trap defense was less effective. Stretch passes became the norm. There were breakaways all the time. It had turned into college hockey!

At the same time, the Capitals got Ovechkin and became a permanent contender in the playoffs. There was a buzz about hockey in DC, and the Caps got an influx of new fans, many of whom had never really paid attention to hockey before. Since I could watch all the Caps games on TV and I couldn’t watch any Rangers games, I naturally started rooting for the Caps in addition to the Rangers. I thought of them as my second favorite team. This went on for years. I was watching the Caps but thought of myself as a Rangers fan. first and foremost. I didn’t even own a single piece of Caps clothing.

I remember the moment it all changed. Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Semi-Finals in 2012. Caps vs. Rangers. The Rangers scored the first goal and I was viscerally annoyed. The Caps and Rangers had played twice previously in the playoffs since I moved to DC, and I had definitely been rooting for the Rangers both times. But after game 1 in 2012, it was over. I had—essentially involuntarily—become a Caps fan.

This is the only sports allegiance I've ever switched. It’s very disconcerting. I didn’t try to do it, and I never would have said it was happening. It just…happened. I now find it very odd to see the Rangers on TV when they aren’t playing the Caps. I still say I’m rooting for them—and I definitely am, on some level I still love them—but I don’t really care if they win or lose, and I definitely don’t viscerally react to them scoring a goal or getting scored on. Prior to this happening to me, I would not have told you it was possible for it to happen to me.

And when the Caps won the 2018 Cup for the first time in franchise history (they started in 1974, just another expansion team Dad dismissively hated), it absolutely felt like my team had won their first Cup. It didn’t feel like 1994—I wasn’t 16 and I wasn’t with Dad—but it did sorta feel like something I had been waiting for my whole life.

The first time I saw the Caps play the Rangers in-person post-switch was opening night in DC in 2021. It was surreal. TJ Oshie scored the first goal of the game (and the season) for the Caps and everyone is going crazy and all I could think about was that last Rangers-Montreal game Dad and I went to in Montreal when I was 10. I'm looking around Capital One arena and thinking how much I would have hated to be a Rangers fan at that moment, and how much Dad would have hated being there. And how happy I was to be a Caps fan.

Sorry, Dad.

The Most Terrifying Thing You’ll Ever Love

There’s nothing quite like the NHL playoffs. It’s the best playoff in sports, by far.

Hockey is an intense game to watch, in general. The action is fast and continuous, the scoring chances come at a frenetic pace, but the actual amount of scoring is very low.⁵ That’s why there’s nothing quite like being at an arena for a hockey goal; that indoor explosion of energy after a goal is more or less unparalleled in sports. Some people have trouble watching hockey on TV because they can’t follow the puck,⁶ but as a live fan experience there’s very little that can compete with a sold-out hockey game.

The NHL playoffs, however, are almost too intense. The low-scoring nature of hockey, combined with the puck luck that figures into any hockey game, make for a seven-game series that feels totally precarious, all of the time.⁷ Two or three bad bounces of a rubber puck can make or break an entire season. It can be literally hard to watch when your team is playing. Double so when the other team has a power play. You feel like you are watching a 60-minute car crash.

No hockey fan ever wants to admit it, but the NHL playoffs are actually super fun once your team is eliminated. While they are still in? It feels more like a trial by combat. Exhilarating but fundamentally terrifying.

When the Caps played the Flyers last night, it was a playoff game in all but name. Win and move on, lose and go home for the season. I was absolutely not mentally prepared for it. And the fact that you have to mentally prepare yourself for the NHL playoffs it all you need to know about them. Buckle up.

The view from our seats at Capitol One Arena

Shortly after the game ended last night, my buddies and I started strategizing about tickets for games 3 and 4 against the Rangers, which will take place in DC sometime next week (as a group we have partial season tickets). And that’s when it really dawned on me: I’m going to go to an NHL playoff game and root against the Rangers.

That’s not something that will bother me at all in the moment—as I told Mike and as I’ve now told you, at an involuntary level I’m just a Caps fan now—but at an intellectual level it’s decidedly bizarre. All those years with Dad. And 1994. It’s just a lot of history.

I never went to a Rangers playoff game at Madison Square Garden, or anywhere else for that matter. Next week will be my first one.

I cannot wait to be glad I’m not a Rangers fan anymore.

1. We also watched a lot of college basketball. We lived less than a mile from Siena, and went to games there often.

2. The single instance of Dad yelling at the TV during an NHL game I remember best was the year the Rangers beat the Islanders 4-1 in the first round of the playoffs (I think it was 1990) and Islanders coach Al Arbour put his goon squad in to start a huge 5-man brawl at the very end of the final game, after the Rangers had won. Dad just stood in the middle of our family room screaming “FUCK YOU ARBOUR FUCK YOU ARBOUR!!!” over and over again. A decade of anger from all those Islanders’ Cups just spilling out. It was incredible. I’m sure my mother has blocked it from her memory.

3. An incredible moment in an incredible month for a 16-year old New York sports fan. I got my driver’s license on June 9th, I know that because it was the day the Rangers were supposed to win the Cup. game 5 up 3-1 and playing at home. The following week, of course, they did win the Cup, and there was also the epic Knicks-Rockets 7-game NBA finals (and the OJ Bronco chase). And to top it all off, the Yankees had the best team in baseball and the best record, for the first time in my life. Oh, and the World Cup was going on in the United States that month.

4. I have often wondered how my dad would have reacted to modern sports fandom. Would he have become an internet sports junkie, posting non-stop on message boards? What would he have thought of HD television? Would he be into fantasy football?

5. On these dimensions, it’s like a better version of soccer. In fact, that’s the old joke about soccer—it’d be perfect if they just put up walls, shrunk the field, and made the players wear ice skates.

6. When Fox tried to fix this by digitally making the puck glow in the mid-90’s, Dad hated it. He called it “hockey for idiots.”

7. Strangely, the one-loss-and-you’re-out NCAA Frozen Four doesn’t have this same level of precariousness. Everyone just sort of accepts that there’s a huge crapshoot aspect to it. The seven game series feels like you have enough control, as long as the luck isn’t too much against you. In the Frozen Four you just resign yourself to fate.