Remember back at the 2010-11 NHL All Star Game the NHL made the awful mistake of having shitrock band 3 Doors Down play during intermission? And remember how we wrote at length about how the NHL got this wrong?

Well, apparently they didn’t learn their lesson. It’s almost as if no one amongst the NHL decision-makers even reads this blog! There’s rumors afoot that Canadian disappointment Nickelback will help jumpstart the 2011-12 NHL season by playing in Winnipeg during “NHL FaceOff,” a season kick-off party just days before the actual season opens.

Much like we here at HockeyPunx took great exception to 3 Doors Down being able to sully the good name of hockey, Rob Williams and Bartley Kives at the Winnipeg Free Press aren’t too happy about Nickelback potentially doing the same.

So much so that they wrote an open letter to Gary Bettman and the NHL asking them to stop this madness. And how could we not agree? If 3 Doors Down was an affront to our sensibilities, then Nickelback certainly doesn’t offer any redemption for the NHL’s poor decision making.

From the column:

“Please, Person In Charge Of Booking This Event, do not bring Nickelback to Winnipeg that weekend. They can play the arena to their own fans — of which there are many — any time. But a free public performance? That would be tantamount to spitting on Bobby Hull’s toupee, burning Dale Hawerchuk’s jersey, leaving something wet on Thomas Steen’s city council seat or tripping Teemu Selanne on the ice during his final season in the NHL.”

And who do they suggest as possible replacements for Nickelback (aside from “Anyone but Nickelback or Bands That Sound Like Nickelback”)? Among others, they offer two altervative, equally Canadian bands that most HockeyPunx readers can get behind: Nomeansno or D.O.A.!

See, NHL? People are catching on. But those there at the league aren’t, no matter how much we spell it out. Punk Rock is the Soundtrack to Hockey. The Only Soundtrack.

Your average Nickelback fan.

Why not take this a step further, and instead of just allowing any Canadian punk band to play, pick punk bands that specifically come from the greater Winnipeg area? Who comes to mind? Obviously, Propagandhi, Comeback Kid, or The Weakerthans. Though, admittedly, The Weakerthans might be a little hard to land.

Like Williams and Kives do, we here at HockeyPunx will acknowledge that Nickelback sells. They’ve managed to convince a whole lot of idiots to buy their records. But think about the demographic Nickelback attracts. Does this really exemplify the type of person who gives two shits about hockey? The “dour, depressing” (as Williams and Kives aptly put it) stylings of this band will only serve to dampen the energy and intensity of the game, and of the game’s fans.

So to the NHL, we leave you with the same advice you have seemingly chosen to ignore after the 3 Doors Down debacle -  “next time (and every time); punk rock.”

UPDATE: League is now FULL. Sorry, Yahoo! maxed us out at 20 players.

This season’s league will combine fans, guest cohosts, writers, etc from both Up The Pucks and HockeyPunx all in one place. One large league for both entities. There are twenty different teams. We’ll posts occasional updates here on the blog.

Christian from Joystick Tuggers and New Game Network joins Brandon and Peter to discuss hockey video games (both new and old) and chiptune music.

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Article source: http://www.upthepucks.com

HockeyPunx has made us of other social networks to help promote our small niche community. As you know, we’re on both facebook and twitter (please go like/follow us on those networks!)

We decided to plunge deeper in the social networking world by joining tumblr a few days ago.

Click Here for HockeyPunx on Tumblr

Please follow along with us on tumblr. We’ll be using tumblr as a microblog. It will in no way replace this main site, but we will let you know on our tumblr microblog when we’ve updated back here on our mainpage. We’ll also be posting cool things we find around the web that might be of interest to hockey and punk fans, but that don’t merit a full writeup here on the mainpage. It’s worth following if you like what we do here.

Don’t forget the other social networks we have a small home on.

Nolan Whyte from Frozen Sheets Hockey has the ill fate of being on the saddest episode of UTP. Topics include the death of Rick Rypen, Peter’s reaction to local media’s coverage of a terrible event and Ben Weasel trying to do some spin control.

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Article source: http://www.upthepucks.com

So it appears that Greg Wyshynski and some of the other folks over at the Puck Daddy blog on Yahoo! Sports are undeclared allies to those of us who want to believe that there is an intimate connection between punk rock and hockey. In the fairly recent past, Puck Daddy has had an interview with Propagandhi, articles here and there that have the occasional punk reference sprinked in, and hey, remember that one time Ryan Lambert, Puck Daddy heel-writer, co-hosted Up The Pucks!?

On Sunday they added more fuel to the fire, posting an interview with Fox Tard, of Canadian  punk band The 3Tards, for their Hockey Guilty Pleasures feature. We’ve praised the Hockey Guilty Pleasures feature on twitter recently, and this gives us even more reason to love it.

With HockeyPunx’s literally tens of readers, I must admit that I am shocked, shocked I say, that my invitation to be interviewed has yet to come in the mail. I’ll continue to stand by my post office box waiting for it, but in the meantime we’re glad to see punk is being represented.

Go read the interview here, and hopefully we can convince Puck Daddy editor Wyshynski to keep the punk rock postings coming.

Jer from HockeyPunx and Link from Puck and Punk join us to discuss John K. Sampson’s newest issue with the Winnipeg Jets, Carbomb calling out the Canucks and why Green Day is not the best punk band of all time.

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Article source: http://www.upthepucks.com

We’ve certainly talked about John K. Samson before (here and here), and unless you’ve been living on Mars for the past decade, under a rock in a cave, with your eyes shut and your fingers in your ears, you know he is a former member of the beloved Propagandhi (who we’ve discussed here), and current memeber of the also-beloved Winnipeg-based band The Weakerthans. He’s also responsible for some amazing solo projects.

With Samson being a Winnipeg native, we were certainly interested in what he had to say about the return of the NHL in to his hometown, and now that the Jets have released their new logo design, we were once again wondering what his thoughts would be. Thankfully, he wrote a piece about it for The Winnipeg review. Definitely check out the full write-up, but here’s a quick, relevant excerpt:

“The new logo will imply that whoever wears it supports both the actions of the Canadian military and the politicians who deploy them. Where does that leave those hockey fans that feel varying degrees of otherwise? At the very least, putting such a weapon on a logo that every hockey-loving Winnipegger should feel enthusiastic to wear, both here at home and while traveling outside our city, a logo that children will draw and redraw with crayons innumerable times, is a decision we should ask some serious questions about. Hockey should be one of those rare and valuable activities we can all share and communicate through, no matter our beliefs or backgrounds. The new Jets logo will tell some of us that we simply aren’t welcome at the rink. “

Read more here.

Make yourself comfortable, sit back and relax as Peter and guest co-host Jay Newman aka @Curiouslybaked regale you with stories for the first part of this episode. Other topics include: The relevancy of the Islanders and Pennywise, Banner Pilot breaking down their new album by the numbers and why the Lightning installing Tesla Coil in the St. Pete Times Forum is awesome.

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Article source: http://www.upthepucks.com

It’s the offseason, so in lieu of watching hockey, I’ve taken up reading about hockey.

After finishing up another one of his books not too long ago, I just recently picked up Dave Bidini’s The Best Game You Can Name. Dave Bidini is a former founding member of the indie rock band Rheostatics (and currently in BidiniBand). And although he doesn’t do it with a punk slant as we might hope for here, he does do a great job of connecting music and hockey. And that is exactly why I thought I’d share this passage with you here on HockeyPunx:

“…Chris [Brown, ex-keyboardist for Barenaked Ladies,] told me that he realized how much professional hockey players in the 1960s and 1970s were like musicians: both took long bus rides, earned sparse incomes, spent endless time in bars, stayed in countless bland hotels, ingested a mountain of bad food, and played to half-full houses. All of a sudden, I felt closer to players who once seemed as unknowable as the cosmos.”

Replace “bus rides” with “van rides,” and “bland hotels” to “friends’ houses, sleeping on the couch,” and take “half-full houses” literally as opposed to using it as a theatre term for the audience section of a big venue, and you’ve definitely just described the link between punk bands on the road and 1960s-70s hockey players.

Is it October yet?