Saturday Is Hockey

Saturday is many things to many people, but to it will always be a day for hockey when the snow hits the ground and temperatures begin to fall. I have played or will be participating in a total of five games today, and there's always that little CBC program known as Hockey Night In Canada. However, today became more of a headache for me. I'm writing this entry on my laptop since my hard drive and/or memory in my desktop PC basically decided that it was quitting time. However, my laptop is adequately filling in as I rebuild the hard drive, so I shouldn't be down much longer.

Being that it's Saturday and I promised the results of a certain quiz that I had posted over a week ago, James Huening, the creator of the quiz, sent along his findings to me. If you were a hockey fan anytime before 2000, you know that home teams used to wear white. James' quiz asked about which team's current white uniforms are the best, along with a few other basic questions. Here are your results.

James - It will probably come as no surprise to most of you that the six highest scores went to the Original Six. They were, in order:

1. Chicago Blackhawks
2. Montreal Canadiens
3. Detroit Red Wings
4. Boston Bruins
5. New York Rangers
6. Toronto Maple Leafs

Rounding out the top ten were:

7. New Jersey Devils
8. Philadelphia Flyers
9. Vancouver Canucks
10. Washington Capitals

Also, the Blackhawks were named most often as best uniform and the Canadiens did not receive a single vote for worst.

What about the other end of the spectrum? For the NFL surveys, Buffalo earned the dubious distinction of having the worst home AND road uniforms. Could the Sabres suffer a similar fate?

The bottom five looks like this:

26. Florida Panthers
27. Anaheim Ducks
28. Buffalo Sabres
29. Nashville Predators
30. Atlanta Thrashers

So the Buffalo three-peat was not to be.

The Thrashers collected the most nominations for worst uniform as well. The Ducks were not chosen by anyone as having the best.

One thing I noticed in these results was that there seemed to be a disproportionate number of Blackhawks fans that responded. It made me wonder if that skewed the results at all, so I threw out the votes from Hawks fans and recalculated the numbers to see if it made a difference. As it turns out, the results were virtually unchanged.

As for the burning question of whether white should be worn at home, a whopping 53% said yes, the home team should wear white. 29% felt that it should be the home team’s decision as to what color to wear. Only 14% felt that the home team should always wear dark jerseys. As for the remaining 4%, the general consensus is that white jerseys should be worn at home for half of the season and dark jerseys for the other half.

Once again, thanks to all of you who took the time to vote and thanks to Adam Walter for putting the data in a user-friendly PDF, which can be found here.

Also, if you’d like to see the raw data, you can download the file as either an Excel spreadsheet or comma-delimted text.

Well done, James, on an excellent poll! Personally, I prefer white at home, but I grew up watching Gretzky and Lemieux in the 1980s and 1990s. Your thoughts on where your team ranks or whether the NHL should return to white at home? Put them in the comments, folks!

Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!