Books and literature

Much has been written about the 2026 Stanley Cup champion Carolina Hurricanes and their unusual front office. General manager Eric Tulsky is an old hockey blogger, as is assistant general manager Tyler Dellow. Several people who were 20 years ago called basement-dwelling hacks will now receive Stanley Cup rings. Three of them, Dellow and scouts Dennis King and Ellen Etchingham, are familiar names to old Edmonton Oilers bloggers like me. Of all their achievements, getting Oilers fans to cheer for Literally the Carolina Hurricanes may have been the most improbable.

If you want to read about this winning combination of big-brained analytics and big-bodied athletic excellence, Greg Wyshynski has written that article. The statistics revolution that came out of hockey blogs in the beginning of the century, a disproportionate number of whom were fans of the Oilers, is worth a book more than an article, but that can probably only be written once they are no longer working for pro hockey front offices and may again shoot their mouths off. To be an Oilers fan active online in the 2000s was more like the stereotype of attending a great university than any university I've been to: it was surrounded by people who, as a matter of course, without making a big deal about it, were changing how the hockey world thought and operated. Even for those of us who were not really contributors, it is in hindsight amazing to have been part of it: like going down to the pub with the mates and discovering 20 years later that you were hanging around the Inklings.

Setting aside the revolutionary concepts, there is now a new record for the best writer, in fact the best few writers, to win a Stanley Cup. Sadly, if you weren't there you have to take my word for this, because these great writers wrote excellent prose on blogs that are now, by and large, offline. You can dig through the Internet Archive for bits of it, but there is no corpus, no The Hot Oil Hockey Abstract for $5 at the used bookstore. But do take my word: the reason these men and women attained a following with nothing more than their keyboards was that they made complicated, controversial concepts understandable, readable, and eventually inevitable to anybody who could approach them with a slightly open mind. They write well. That your Tulskys, your Dellows, your Kings, your Etchinghams (to name only a few of the Hurricanes) are successful in the NHL is fantastic in every way except that now we civilians no longer see what they can do. Only the bad things on the Internet last forever; good ones vanish within the lifetimes of the people who made them.

The previous, and probably still the canonical, Best Stanley Cup Champion Writer is Ken Dryden, whose The Game has been in print for more than thirty years and is still hallowed among the sort of person who hallows that sort of thing. Dryden was, in every way, more of what you expect a hockey writer to be. He did not get into the game because of his writing; he got into the game and afterwards he wrote about it. The Game stands out because, up until the blog revolution, most hockey writing was fairly bad. You had a dichotomy between journalists, who were sometimes decent writers but obviously never won, and athletes, who could be winners but when it came time to write dictated their memoirs over a few bottles of wine to one of the journalists. Such mailed-in memoirs can rise to the level of "pretty good." Dryden was distinguished by the fact that he cared about writing himself, and had a talent for it.