• As we arrive at the 2025-2026 regular season quarter pole, many hockey fans are asking HockeySpy.ca to comment on the always awful, laughable, substandard, inferior, second-rate, inadequate, unacceptable, dreadful, terrible, atrocious, disgraceful, hopeless, inept, woeful, godawful, pitiful, appalling, referees so far this fall…but we prefer not to take a stand. 😀
• Can’t think of another major sport (aside from the one where two humans are locked in a cage while trying to maim and/or kill each other with head-kicks, nose-crushing head-shots and choke-holds) that would include a lengthy family feature—complete with parent interviews—the way Hockey Night in Canada gushed over the Canadiens’ Xhekaj brothers recently. Both brothers are well know for their total lack of talent and their fierce desire to administer CTE-caliber blows to an opponent for next to no reason. Let’s just call it a rather odd segment.
• While the hockey “insiders” love to treat American Thanksgiving like some magical cutoff date when the full list of playoff-worthy teams is finalized by the hockey gods, the St. Louis Blues apparently missed the memo — twice. After all, this is the same franchise that was dead last in January 2019 before charging all the way to a Stanley Cup, but sure, let’s keep pretending the standings are set in stone by November. And just last year, when every expert with a microphone was gleefully shovelling dirt on their season before Christmas, the Blues politely declined the funeral and went ahead and grabbed a playoff spot anyway. Shocking, I know — almost as if the season doesn’t end in November.
• It’s only mildly hilarious that the Olympic hockey arena in Milan — a country where hockey ranks somewhere between bocce highlights and late-night infomercials — might not be ready in time, because who could’ve predicted construction delays in Italy, right? But don’t worry, it’s a soccer nation, so there is a Plan B option: They can always repurpose any one of the fifty zillion football pitches lying around, paint some lines on the grass, pray nobody notices the divots, and then toss a couple of nets down—allowing the world’s best hockey players to battle it out between espresso breaks. Of bigger concern is that Italians may not realize hockey players call a brutal giveaway pass a “pizza.” So don’t be shocked if a delivery guy wanders out to centre ice mid-game, proudly handing over a stack of large pepperoni-and-mushroom pies to the bewildered defenceman who just coughed one up.
• Lots of fans can’t stand the delay-of-game penalty for flipping the puck over the glass, but let’s be honest: without it, NHL players would be launching the thing into orbit every time they got tired, trapped, or mildly stressed in their own end. These guys will do absolutely anything to survive a long shift or kill momentum in a tight game, and if shooting pucks into the crowd were legal, we’d never see a completed shift again. So yes, the rule has to stay—unless the league is ready for a nightly spectacle of pucks whistling into the stands like T-shirt cannon ammo and fans showing up with baseball gloves to snag souvenirs like they’re waiting for a home run at Yankee Stadium.
