Hockey Players are Cheap and Easy

The internet has a new toy!

Everyone's getting in on the fun of Hockey-Reference.com, which is home to not only more hockey stats than you could ever need, but also a kind of internet whorehouse where you can "sponsor" different players and use the ad space to enhance or deface their profiles as you see fit. Of course, anywhere you get to pimp your website and be silly at the same time is like a blogger's paradise, so the internets have been abuzz lately as everybody's been plunking down the (PayPal) dough and snatching up their favorite players.

Alas, Yo-Yo was already taken by the time I caught on to this whole trend. After I'd finished rending my clothing and tearing out my hair, I picked up the pieces of my broken heart and bought Marty instead. The reasons were fourfold: 1. I didn't want any Flyers fans getting to him first, 2. The tagline of my blog fits in well on the profile of a notorious chatterbox, 3. I realized during the Versus intermission piece on him that his accent has more Buffalo than Quebec, and that's just wicked, 4. I love him. Of course, then I felt bad about putting up $10 for a Flyer, even if it is Marty, and none for my boys in Blue and Gold, so I went and got Official Second Favorite Sabre Adam Mair as well. The reasons here were pretty much onefold: he kicks ass. All in all $20 well spent, I think.

Aside from the fun of the sponsorships, I'm absolutely fascinated by the broad scope of statistics available on that site, and regardless of the fact that I don't really understand stats, nor do I have any real use for them, I can see myself wasting a lot of time there. Hey, maybe I'll accidentally learn something while I'm at it!

By the way, while trying to learn more about this Felix Schutz character I'm bound to fall in love with someday (despite the fact that he looks astoundingly like a chubbier version of my cousin), I came across this tidbit in his Q & A session on Sabres.com:

Jochen Hecht is German and he came over the first day of camp and said hi and said if I needed any help that I could ask him. Some of the younger guys helped me out too, but pretty much everyone was really great, a bunch of good guys.

I did keep in touch [with Hecht]. And there is another guy, [Phillipe] Gogulla, and we were hanging around and talking German at camp.

First of all, how cute is Yo-Yo, being all helpful and stuff? What a sweetie! But more importantly, I'm just going to say right now that if I ever hear Jochen Hecht speaking German, I may just faint dead away. Just saying.