All The Streit Moves

by Brenna Solop

Another lousy hockey night, another story to get my mind off of it…

As I was in my kitchen yesterday frying latkes for a holiday party that was inevitably canceled thanks to the Great Blizzard of ’09, I took a good look at my box of Streit’s Matzo Meal. I started thinking about my favorite current player – I know, no relation to the company nor a lighter of the menorah – but I started pondering his and the team’s current struggles. The daydreaming brought me back to a game I attended in October, Carolina vs. New York, with my dad.

He didn’t even know Carolina had a team. “Guess their name,” I said.

“The Panthers?”

“No, that’s the football team,” I said. “But there is a hockey team called the Panthers. They’re in Florida. Carolina is the Hurricanes.”

“The Hurricanes? That’s impossible,” said dad. “Now they play in Florida. Everyone knows that.”

All right, my dad’s not that schmucky. He was partially joking – he doesn’t know much about hockey and Carolina Panthers was a real guess, but the rest of the conversation was him determined to get on my nerves as we sat in traffic on the Meadowbrook. I really threw him for a loop when I explained the Hurricanes used to be the Whalers. I don’t think he knew Connecticut ever had an NHL team. But again, don’t judge dad as uninformed. He can name every man who suited up for the Brooklyn Dodgers in his lifetime, even the guys who came up for a cup of coffee (pronounced “cawfee” for the sake of this article).

For that game, I was fortunate to have stumbled onto a couple of really good seats online and sit seven rows from the ice. I had a prime chance to evaluate the physical skills of the players and body language. Hockey is like magic, you have to stare at the hand that’s not moving to catch what’s really going on. By sitting close, I can see what the guys without the puck are doing.

Mostly, I concentrated on Mark Streit. I watched his every move, trying to see all the little things that make him one of the most complete players in the game. He’s ubiquitous thanks to his loads of ice time. From what I could see, his secret is pure instinct. Seems like he just twists his body a few inches to avoid a big hit, but stays in position. He plays smart, and while he’s no youngster, I think we’ve been seeing his very best. But lately his judgment has become fuzzy. Passing is not as crisp, and he’s not playing with as high a level of confidence.

I asked my Dad, who is watching with unbiased eyes, which player he was the most impressed by. “That Streit guy. Every time I looked up he was on the ice.” That’s key. Presence. I know I mentioned the ice time as being an obvious measurement, but it’s also being involved while you’re on. It’s hard to evaluate a hockey player’s presence – the intangibles, the things you can’t turn into a statistic. My trick is (was) listening to the radio announcers – if your team happens to have them, ahem. Listen to what names you constantly hear. Radio guys have to be so quick yet descriptive that’s it’s easy to figure out which players are playing their hearts out. Streit was all over the map that night, not that I heard the radio broadcast nor could I have, ahem. Okay, I’ll stop – slowly getting used to the natural sounds of the TV feed.

The last couple of games have seen Streit take penalties that led to goals. He’s certainly far from being the only culprit, but it bothers me simply because I know he’s better than that. He’s a gritty yet classy player on a team that can’t buy a goal (even on an empty net!) and his penalties are the result of desperation. You can’t blame a captain – or in this case the future captain, I hope – for desperately trying to save his sinking ship.