And Here We Have The Holy Grail Of Hockey Talk Clichés
“They’re a good team”
“Just have to stick to our game”
“Have to play a full 60 minutes”
“Great work by [insert player nickname here]”
“Get pucks deep”
And that right there is Hockey Talk BINGO. I’ll be honest–I still don’t quite understand how this happens. You’d imagine that with so many guys having the exact same answers to the exact same questions during interviews that there would at least be some sort of class that teaches these responses to incoming NHL rookies. But to the best of my knowledge, those classes don’t exist. And it’s not even just guys in the NHL. I can guarantee you right now that if you go to any high school hockey game and ask a player how the first 2 periods went, his response would be something about not playing their game for the first 10 minutes but then they settled in, kept things simple, battled hard for those loose pucks in the corner, and the most important thing coming up here in the 3rd period would be to win those first 5 minutes. You wouldn’t even need to ask him a question, actually. You could just find a high school hockey player coming off the ice after the 2nd period, throw a microphone in front of his face and that would be the response.
Maybe it’s because hockey players have all watched the exact same interview throughout their entire playing career. Maybe it’s because every hockey coach who has ever existed has told his team the exact same thing since the beginning of time. But it doesn’t matter where you’re from or what language you speak. Because somehow, someway, whenever a microphone is put in front of a hockey player the only language they know how to speak is hockey. It’s just engrained into their DNA at a certain point. Every once in a while you’ll get somebody to go against the grain and give a beauty of an interview like Nail Yakupov at the World Juniors.
But unfortunately, those are few and far between. For the most part, hockey players just stick to their system. They’re going up against some good reporters over there so they have to just keep the answers simple, interview for a full 60 seconds, and just take it one question at a time.
P.S. – Top 10 underrated video.