hi!! I was wondering where or how you do you research for players and teams, and just hockey in general? do you have any favorite blogs or other resources? thank you~
okay picking thru web rot for the sharks primer has prepared me for this one lmao here's the quick answer because i really need to eat some pie and go to bed. Hockey is my all-consuming interest at the moment and I haven't watched actual television or films; or read anything non-academic that isn't about hockey in.... 9 months? If it seems like I am taking in a LOT of information in a short amount of time it's because I am. I listen to hockey things at 2-5x speed depending on if its a video on youtube (locked to 2x), a podcast (3.5x is my ideal speed), or my screenreader (5x) and often take notes, save articles as pdfs to go back to, and transcribe things for fun (only recently am putting my transcriptions as addendums to gifs... very rewarding <3). When not studying for my actual degree, I am reading about hockey or listening to something hockey related or watching hockey or writing about hockey or learning how to play hockey. i am so serious. please don't assume that this is normal, optimal, or even something I would wish upon other people. I am in Love with her in thee most wretched and irrevocable way. She's my hobby in the sense that shes my sun and im building my wax wings and looking directly at her light and thanking her for blinding me. amen.
more seriously, if I'm going down a player rabbit hole I will try many of these things - though not necessarily all of them, and not in this order (and i'm sure i've forgotten one or two things I usually try... lordy):
I go to spotify/apple podcasts and throw in player names just to see what comes up and listen to basically everything.
if they are on an NHL team, there are likely MULTIPLE podcasts dedicated to that team. trawl through their podcast archives, especially post-game podcasts where discussion is happening about their performance. sometimes there are even interviews <3
i do the same with youtube if I can...!
throw their name into reddit, tumblr, twitter and scroll. endlessly. just trawl through everything that I can possibly get my hands on. The more obscure the player the easier this is, because there really aren't that many things to find out about them and not many people are talking about them at all. <- this is how I make contact with people who are the only person that knows about this one (1) guy and then we hold fins forever. <3
find out who the teams beat reporters are. if youre looking into prospects, even juniors teams have people covering them. the writing might not be the highest quality but you WILL eventually find fun details if you go digging.
check: elite prospects articles, the hockey writers articles, find out the player's home town and see if their local paper has anything on them (basically, check any and all databases that use a tagging system or have a functional search engine)
helpful things to tack onto the end of google/youtube/database searches: "media availability" "post-game" "interview" "feature" "profile" "scouting report" "draft" "debut" "review" "highlight" "tournament"
if they're a player from a non-english speaking country it's worth throwing their non-romanized name into google to see what you can get. google translate the website // chatgpt translation are two options - not ideal and not to be trusted 100% over actual translation done by a fluent human speaker.
Instagram stories are the bane of my existence because they're so ephemeral
tiktok is a parallel universe to me. I do not have the app. any browsing I do on it is solely via googling "[team name] tiktok official" and clicking around on my desktop PC. I've only ever done this for M.Chrona's gf (who is much more famous than him) but if you're really doing down the rabbit hole of player research, some of their WAGs will post about them. <- as always, be respectful/not weird.
facebook for older stuff... genuinely makes my skin crawl so I avoid it and its a last resort LMAO but yeah teams used to post on facebook and everything!!! <- again. dont be weird and stalk peoples families or friends asjklakjl
Substack is good for general hockey stuff if you can stomach the dreaded idea of subscribing via email or getting the app <3 I like: Jack Han (hockey tactics newsletter), Sean Shapiro (shap shots), Adam Gretz (adam's sports stuff), Thibaud Chatel <- for the analytics nerds, Alex MacLean <- his Scouting The Scouts series is what got me into substack in the first place, Greg Revak (hockey IQ newsletter) <- this is the one that's got me on development stuff atm SUPER rec because there's gifs and charts and many many hyperlinks included for citations <3
i should do a book rec at some point but uhhhh its getting late and im hungry <3 thank you for asking + reading if you got this far, I hope it was a helpful peek into my process?
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“It is winter. Your hockey team is bad. In October, you had imagined that they were going to be better this year. Cup contenders, perhaps not. If you're being completely honest with yourselves, they weren't particularly likely to make the playoffs. But they were going to play meaningful games down the stretch, they were gonna be in-and-amongst-it. Instead, they are Bad; again. With a familiar feeling of sadness, you slowly turn the ship of fandom towards hoping that your team will instead lose games, cheering when the other guys score, slowly ratcheting up the lottery odds as you idly contemplate getting back into clove cigarettes. You've set a notification for that one prospect twitter account you really like and you already wonder if that's maybe a bit excessive. There is, always, next year, and to make next year any good, this year has to be bad, as bad as possible, so scavenge some funny ascii-art tanks for the silly tweets and try to make the best of the rest of whatever this season still is. How many more games? Twenty-five? Oh God.
A solution to this worryingly-familiar-for-me-personally miasma is to completely remove the incentive for teams to ever lose games. The simplest way to do so was first isolated by Adam Gold in his 2012 Sloan paper: instead of giving the best draft picks to the teams who have the fewest points, give them to the teams who have the most points—but start the clock for each team when it is no longer possible for them to make the playoffs. When this season is a lost cause, the focus naturally shifts to next season, for which securing the best possible new players is obviously important. This scheme, so easily and pleasantly named after a man with a great last name, is known commonly as "Gold drafting", and the standings points that teams obtain after they are eliminated are called "Gold points". The team with the most Gold points gets the first overall pick, next-most the second overall pick, and so on. There is no more lottery; on-ice results determine the picks completely.”
Research shouldn’t stop you from writing. This post breaks down how writers can gather sources sustainably — without overwhelm, endless tabs, or burnout. Practical research skills that respect your energy and keep the work moving.
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trying to write a proposal for a travel grant, to go to Japan.
but I dont want to go to learn a technique, or to do some something. I don't want that distraction, I just want to immerse and absorb. There's so much.
but the things that are truest are the things an unsympathetic institution can devalue and use against me.
"three major themes of my art: the world intersecting w me, me alone within, and personal history." >> isn't that everybody
"three major locations and their narrative reasons: Tokyo: Japan and the world, my grandfather's countryside: Japan alone within, my father and his art: familial history" >> sounds like 'pay for me to be a tourist and to visit familiy'
my art practice is my navigation of my personal life. duh. so yea, something that's important to my personal life is 'related to my studio practice.'
should not be allowed to contain over 25 sources when it's my responsibility to gather them all. Especially when I have 32 other footnotes to "source gather".
