Rough House Hockey

[I like Boobs]

Im surprised that he isn't talked about as much on these boards as he did have almost 200 career NHL fights, and seemed to score 40 goals every year. He wasn't a big guy, 5'10, 180 lbs but he was rugged. I don't remember him losing too often either... He was a guy that I was planning on doing a profile on, but I just don't have enough footage on him to do so... Is there a Sutter tape out there? Or are there Blues compiliations that have his fights? If anyone has any info with regards to Sutter fights, please get in contact with me...

Going over Sutter's card, he seemed to have ALOT of rivalries with other guys; He fought Terry Ruskowski 6 times, Wilf Paiement 5 times, Bob McGill 6 times, Pat Price 8 times, Garth Butcher 5 times - Thats 30 of his total NHL fights right there.

So what is out there on tape of Brian Sutter?

There are several others at 3 times a piece as well - Why no hype with Brian Sutter? I had no idea he had this many NHL fights although I knew he was a guy that fought, I didn't think he had this many FM's. Not to mention being a 35-40 goal scorer almost every year. Somebody must have some stuff on this guy.

[Corson27]

You know, I haven't seen very many Brian Sutter fights myself, at least not very many that I remember vividly. And I'm surprised that he had that many career fights, also. I don't think anyone would've ever made a compilation tape of Sutter, maybe because a lot of his fights aren't available, and also, I don't think his fights were very entertaining for the most part. I remember the fights I have seen of him, most of them later on in his career, were situations where he would be undersized, and would use his smarts and strength to get in tight and survive the fight, instead of taking the initiative. Mind you, these were fights against guys who were heavyweights, and Sutter was stepping up in class to fight them.

But no one had more heart than Sutter, and his fight card proves it. He seemed to fight anybody, no matter the size or reptuation, and he was completely fearless. He was the ultimate team player and he played his entire career with the Blues, so they wanted to keep a good thing when it was in their possession. To have that many career fights with the same team is not accomplished very often.

One fight I remember specifically was in Sutter's last year in the NHL and the Blues were playing the Flames in Calgary and the Blues were losing the game quite badly and Sutter was frustrated and he collided with Tim Hunter and fought him. Now, here was a guy who had played 10 years in the league and gone through all the wars, and he takes on Calgary's toughest guy and shows his team that he's not gonna go down without a fight. Sutter basically jsut held on, trying to survive the fight, as he was outmatched in size and fighting ability, but he held his own and attempted a few punches and showed how much of a warrior he was, even towards the bitter end of his career.
_________________
An inbred hunter is in the forest and he comes across this hot, naked chick laying on a blanket with her legs spread wide open. She says, "I'm game". So he shot her.

[Sittler]

Here are some Sutter brothers fight clips (all Brian in the first half) and a couple of articles.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=dmh5eAckpoA

I agree with Corson on his assessment of Brian Sutter as a fighter. You might call his style a combination of tenacious and unspectacular.

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SPORTS OF THE TIMES; THOSE SUTTER BROTHERS
By Dave Anderson. The New York Times. April 17, 1983.

Hockey has always been a game for brothers - the Richards, the Espositos, the Hulls, the Mahovliches, the Bentleys, the Plagers, the Potvins, the Maloneys, the Patricks, the Cooks, just to name a few. But in another season or so, there will be six Sutter brothers, yes, six, in the National Hockey League; already there are four. And as far as the Rangers are concerned in their Stanley Cup playoff with the Islanders that resumes in Madison Square Garden tonight, two Sutters are too many.

Judging by their medical report, the three-time Stanley Cup champion Islanders should have been vulnerable Friday night. Bryan Trottier and Dave Langevin had joined Clark Gillies in street clothes, each with a damaged knee.

But the Islanders responded with a virtually perfect game. They won, 5-0, for a 2-0 lead in the four-of-seven-game series. They strafed the Rangers with 47 shots as Duane Sutter scored three goals and Brent Sutter one. Of the Islanders' nine goals in the series, the Sutters have produced six, including four by Duane, who scored only 13 goals all season.

''You bear down a little bit more in the playoffs,'' Duane Sutter was saying now at his locker. ''October, November and December are important, but whatever you do, it doesn't mean much. In the playoffs in April and May, it means everything.''

Duane Sutter, a right wing known to his teammates as Dog because he's always yapping, already has two Stanley Cup rings. Brent Sutter, a center known as Pup, already has one Stanley Cup ring. That should be enough for people to know how to pronounce their last name. Sutter, as in cutter. But the baseball pitcher Bruce Sutter pronounces his name Sooter, as in rooter. And that apparently has confused some people.

'' . . . the Soo-ter brothers,'' somebody said. ''The what?'' Duane Sutter said, annoyed. His family toughness had flashed only for a moment. But that was enough to understand why Brent and he were the Islanders' leaders in penalty minutes during the season, with 128 and 118 minutes, respectively. Enough to understand why he, like all his brothers, is known up there on the cold Alberta prairie as ''a Sutter,'' a member of hockey's first family -- 27-year-old Brian with the St. Louis Blues, 24-year-old Darryl with the Chicago Black Hawks, 23-year-old Duane and 20-year-old Brent with the Islanders, and the 19-year-old twins Ron and Rich with a Lethbridge, Alberta. junior team on assignment from the Philadelphia Flyers and Pittsburgh Penguins, respectively.

''Brian made the N.H.L. first,'' Brent Sutter explained. ''That made us younger brothers think, if he made it, I can make it, too, and I'm going to be better than him. It gave us some willpower.''

Duane Sutter remembered how the four younger brothers would play shinny on the pond when they weren't helping with the wheat, oats and barley, or the cattle, pigs and chicken on their father's 640-acre farm outside of Viking, Alberta., a town of about 1,500 people about 70 miles east of Edmonton.

''The things you'd dream of doing,'' he said. ''It was usually Rich and I against Ron and Brent, but the twins wouldn't play unless we pretended we had regular N.H.L. lineups, with me doing the broadcasting. But when you do things like that as a kid, you're really building your dreams.''

''We'd go out there on the slough when it was frozen,'' Brent Sutter said. ''And if there was a full moon, we'd play until 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning. The rest of the year, we'd go up in the hayloft in the barn. We'd clear out the hay and use the wooden floor like it was a rink.''

Every so often, of course, the brothers would be fighting. ''We had lots of scraps, lots of bloody noses, we drove our parents up the wall,'' Brent said, laughing. ''Sometimes they'd lock the hayloft on us, but we'd sneak back up there.''

Only the oldest of the seven Sutter brothers, Gary, has never signed an N.H.L. contract. ''Gary would've been the best of all of us, and he's coached around home,'' Brent said. ''But he wanted to finish his schooling, and he did. Now he's back helping dad on the farm. We're very proud of him.''

Brian and Darryl were established in the N.H.L. when Bill Torrey, the Islanders' president, chose Duane in the 1979 draft and Brent the next year. Each was the 17th player named in the first round.

''We considered the genes,'' Bill Torrey says. ''We took them in the under-age draft, so we knew they were a year or two away. But they were available because the teams at the bottom needed help right away.''

Not that the Islanders had to wait long for their Sutters to develop. Each was 19 when he joined the Islanders to stay.

''They work the corners and the boards, that's their game,'' Bill Torrey says. ''And now that Bob Bourne is their left wing, he gives them tremendous speed to work with.''

Bob Bourne, from the Saskatchewan prairies, understands the Sutters' style. ''They've got a western Canada style like I do,'' he said. ''Not fancy. Do the basics. If the man's open, pop it to him. In the East, junior hockey is higher-scoring and they're better with the puck. But out West, it's more dump it in and chase it. I like it that way.''

He must. In the two games of the Ranger series, Bob Bourne has had six assists, five on Sutter goals. ''It's a lot of fun playing like this, a lot of fun winning,'' Brent Sutter said. ''And if we're going to win the cup again, we've got to keep playing like this.''

But when Duane Sutter and Brent Sutter have returned to their family farm, they seldom wore their Stanley Cup rings. ''On special occasions, I might,'' Duane Sutter said, ''but I sure don't want to wear it when I'm out shoveling manure.'' ''I don't think it's right to wear it in front of your brothers,'' Brent Sutter said. ''It's too much like gloating.'' If the Islanders and the Chicago Black Hawks were to advance to the Stanley Cup final, Duane and Brent would be playing against Darryl; perhaps then their father would attend the series, but two years ago he returned to his farm after the semifinal round.

''He told me it was time to plant the oats,'' Bill Torrey says. ''It's easy to see where the boys get their toughness from.'' But in another 10 days, Brian Sutter's wife, Judy, is expected to give birth. Her doctor has predicted that the child will be a daughter.

''Imagine that, a girl,'' Duane Sutter said, beaming. ''It would be the first girl in the family, a girl.'' And since she would be ''a Sutter,'' who's to say that in about 20 years she won't be the National Hockey League's first female player.

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HOCKEY'S BIG BROTHER ACT
By JOSHUA MILLS. The New York Times. March 29, 1987.

BASEBALL'S JOE, DOM AND VINCE DiMaggio, probably the best-known brothers in sports, never met in a World Series. But when the National Hockey League's playoffs for the Stanley Cup start in 10 days, the Sutter brothers will be there in force, taking on one another and all comers.

Last year, all six hockey-playing Sutters were in the playoffs; this season it is likely that four of them will play.

Outside of hockey and their native Alberta, Canada, Brian, Darryl, Duane, Brent, Rich and Ron Sutter are not well known, yet they must certainly rank as the most remarkable family in the history of American sports. Never before have as many as four brothers played in the top professional league of the same sport at the same time - six is unheard of. ''If they played baseball or football, they'd be known everywhere,'' says Philadelphia Flyers' goalkeeper Glenn Resch, a teammate of Ron Sutter. ''They would be the first family, the biggest family in the country.''

The Sutters have been together in the N.H.L. for four years. Brian, 30 years old, is captain of the St. Louis Blues, and in 11 seasons has scored 288 goals. Darryl, 28, is captain of the Chicago Blackhawks. Duane, 27, is in his eighth season with the New York Islanders, the team he helped lead to four consecutive Stanley Cup championships from 1980 to 1983. Brent, who will be 25 in June, is one of the Islanders' captains. The twins, Rich, now with the Vancouver Canucks, and Ron, of the Philadephia Flyers, are 23.

Four of their five teams - all except Vancouver - should qualify for the playoffs, which begin April 8. St. Louis, however, will be without Brian Sutter, who is out with a severe shoulder injury. Ron Sutter has also been sidelined, with a back injury, but the Flyers hope he will be back for the playoffs.

Perhaps more remarkable than their success rate is the way the Sutters have achieved it. Not one of them is naturally gifted, much less a superstar. Teammates and opponents can outskate and outshoot them. But no one outworks them. The Sutters are paradigms of the physical side of hockey, feisty bangers whose specialty is making contact, sometimes making trouble, always stirring things up.

Two cases in point:

* In a game with the Pittsburgh Penguins this season, Brian, who plays left wing for St. Louis, battled Randy Hillier of the Penguins for the puck, along the sideboards. Brian put his right shoulder into Hillier's armpit, dug in his skates and shoved; Hillier bounced away. Brian kicked the puck onto the blade of his stick and flicked a soft pass in front of the Pittsburgh net, and a teammate slammed in a goal. Nine seconds later, Brian was pushed in the face by Hillier, whose stick handle extended beyond his fist. Brian dropped his gloves and punched Hillier three times before the officials intervened.

* A few weeks earlier, during the first Islander-Flyer game of the season, Duane Sutter chased the puck into the Philadelphia end of the ice. He squeezed between two Flyers, dipped his shoulder into one of them, then pivoted and pushed him away with his hip. Holding the second defender away with his forearm, Duane took control of the puck with one hand on his stick. With a bit of skating room, he took two strides toward the net and shot. It was not a rocket, but Ron Hextall, the Philadelphia goalie, was not expecting Sutter to outmuscle two defenders. The puck hit his glove and skittered into the net.

Around the N.H.L., the Sutters' fearless style is widely admired because it often has a catalytic effect on teammates. Says Bob Bourne, a New York Islander for 12 years before joining the Los Angeles Kings last fall, ''I don't think I've ever played with more intense people in my life.''

IN PRO HOCKEY, THE FASTEST SKATERS achieve speeds of more than 40 miles an hour, lashing shots that sometimes exceed 100 m.p.h. Imagine a tennis player receiving a Boris Becker serve from 10 feet away and you have some idea of the reflexes a goalkeeper needs. To the speed, add contact. A player races into the corner to retrieve the puck and the defenseman guarding him slices across the ice and, using his shoulder or his hip, pins him against the sideboards with an audible crunch. A rush down the ice can offer dazzling passing and improvisation, and the transition from attack to defense can be split-second.

That is pure hockey. But the tactics often used by many N.H.L. players are anything but pure. They hold, they hook, they slash with their sticks. If the referee sees them, it means two minutes or more in the penalty box, and their team plays a man short.

The Sutters have mastered every technique that might give them an edge against faster and more elusive skaters. ''They have a fine sense of the limits of the rules, and they love to aggravate you,'' says Resch, who in his 14 N.H.L. seasons has been a teammate of four Sutters.

Resch recalls an overtime game a few years ago against St. Louis: ''Brian was right in front of me, trying to block my view. One of the Blues took a shot, and Brian just lifted my stick and the puck went under it for the winning goal. Every goalie in the league could tell you a story like that.''

''The Sutters take advantage of there being only one referee,'' says Max McNab, vice president and general manager of the New Jersey Devils. ''They have a superb sense of what they can get away with. They'll antagonize you; they manufacture little things that distract you.''

The Islanders' Duane Sutter is rated as one of the league's best at ''yapping'' - keeping up an incessant repartee that drives opposing players to distraction, or to the penalty box. His nickname is Dog.

There can be a fine line between banging and fighting - one frequently leads to the other. But the Sutters, despite their physical play, are not known as goons or thugs. Rather than picking fights, they prefer to aggravate opponents, then skate away, their mission accomplished.

The brothers don't apologize for their aggressive methods. ''I always had to scratch and fight for whatever I got,'' Brian Sutter says, and he is surely speaking for the others. ''Too many guys are bigger; too many are faster. I'm not the type of guy who can go out and finesse his way around with the puck. So when you go against me you're going to get banged around a little bit. That's the only way I can play.''

OTHER FAMILIES HAVE produced hockey-playing sons in multiples. Bill, Bob, Frank and George Boucher played in the National Hockey League in the 1920's, though not all at the same time. Five Bentley brothers came out of Saskatchewan in the 1940's and early 50's; three of them made it to the N.H.L. and two, Doug and Max, eventually to the Hall of Fame; two others played in the minor leagues. Five Dineen brothers currently play: Gord, Kevin and Peter Dineen in the N.H.L., one older brother in a minor league and another at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. But in many hockey families - those of Wayne Gretzky and Bryan Trottier, for example - the younger brothers have not yet proved able to handle the pressure that comes with constant comparison to a talented big brother.

That can be a weight on children as well as siblings. Gordie Howe, the league's all-time scoring leader and a ferocious competitor, extended his career so that he could be the only man in the N.H.L. to play with his two sons. It took until he was 51, in his 26th season, with the Hartford Whalers in the 1979-80 season. One son, Mark, has emerged as one of the league's top defensemen, but the other, Marty, played only a few disappointing years.

Among the Sutters, however, the success of the older brothers has sustained the younger ones, perhaps because they never posted impossible-to-match records. ''None of us has that much ability,'' Darryl says. ''We just relied on effort. That helped all of us, because all we had to do was try as hard as we could. That wasn't pressure.''

The Sutters grew up on a farm outside Viking, Alberta, 90 miles east of Edmonton. The landscape is flat, the vast wheat fields fertile. Tall green grain elevators guard the town's southern exposure. In their shadow stands a modest billboard: Viking. The Crossroads Town With a Future. Home of the Sutters. Population: 1,227.

Louis and Grace Sutter met and were married in Viking. Grace's family, carpenters and farmers by trade, had moved from Saskatchewan when she was a child. Louis, one of 13 children, grew up on a farm north of Viking, where his family had moved in 1910. His grandfather's family moved from Ontario to homestead in Alberta.

Grace, now 51, and Louis, 55, settled on the Sutter homestead and had seven boys. Gary, the first-born, decided when he was 16 that he'd rather stay home than play professional hockey; he now farms about 15 miles away and works part-time for the Alberta Department of Highways. In 1967, when the twins were 3 and Gary was 12, the family moved closer to Viking, where the soil was richer and the schoolbus rides shorter. The modest white farmhouse had four bedrooms.

''You'd open the door and be in this small foyer,'' recalls John Chapman, now the general manager of the Calgary Wranglers, who coached the brothers in the minor leagues. ''You'd have rubber boots, coveralls, overalls, cowboy hats, the hockey skates, the sticks. Sometimes you couldn't see how you could get through. The house had a big kitchen and a very small living room. It was a crowded house. With the guys being as close as they were, age-wise and otherwise, it must have been especially competitive.'' He pauses and grins. ''Louie is very competitive, a very competitive guy, and Grace has a great deal of determination, a quiet competitiveness.''

Louie Sutter never played hockey; his sons have never even seen him on skates. Softball was his game, and he was known in the local leagues as a strong-armed shortstop with a fiery temper. He hated to lose. The boys would watch him play on weekends, then challenge him at home: Darryl remembers that ''he would come out and play road hockey and beat the hell out of us.''

Road hockey - no skates, and a ball for a puck - was played year-round, summers in the barn, winters in the yard. But the Sutter boys also skated through the fierce winters of Alberta, where cold snaps reach 40 below. ''We had an old truck, and Gary would drive them about a mile across the fields to a pond,'' Louie Sutter recalls, gazing out a window at the farmyard. ''They'd always stay too long, and the smaller ones would be crying to go home, and the older ones would be yelling that they didn't want to, and of course they'd all come home yelling at one another.'' Fistfights and bloody noses were common.

On winter schooldays the boys were spared the morning chores so they could concentrate on catching the bus, which came in the dark, about 10 minutes to 8. Five, six, seven young boys would head down the long lane to the road. The bus returned about 4, often without one or two of them, who had a game in town that evening. The 6- and 7-year-olds played in the Mites, graduating to Peewee, then Bantam, then Midget, the games played at the Carena, an enclosed rink with the town of Viking's firehouse built into one end. It got its name from cars' being raffled off to help pay for its construction, in 1949.

There was sometimes more action at home. ''If four of us were coming home on the bus, a couple would help with the chores, and a couple would clean off the road-hockey rink or the pond,'' Duane Sutter recalls. ''Then you could get in an hour of hockey before it got too dark. And maybe four or five fights. When the moon was full, you could play all night.''

THE PATH TO THE N.H.L. is rarely easy.

At each level of play -midget, junior, major junior - only the best players move on. In the Western Hockey League, in which the Sutters played, each of the 14 teams has more than 20 players on its roster. Last year, 33 of the league's players - about 10 percent - were drafted by N.H.L. teams, and some of those will fail to earn a spot on a big-league team. The numbers are comparable in hockey's other minor leagues, and additional competition comes from American college hockey players and from Europe. (About 77 percent of the current N.H.L. players are Canadian, 13 percent from the United States and 10 percent are European.) As the Sutters advanced through the minors, they encountered ever more talented athletes. If the brothers were reliable workhorses, coaches found they skated like workhorses, too. Luckily, Cecil Swanson, the former sheriff of Red Deer and coach of the Red Deer Rustlers, and later John Chapman, who coached Red Deer and the Lethbridge Broncos, were willing to mold the talent available.

''Cec knew I wasn't going to make it as a big scorer,'' Brian, the first Sutter to turn pro, says. ''He always talked about playing good defense and good positional hockey. He was probably the biggest influence on me getting to the N.H.L.''

And the Sutters always received support from one another. Once, when St. Louis had a game in Edmonton, Brian drove 100 miles to Red Deer to visit the 15-year-old twins. ''The twins' eyes were like saucers as he talked to them,'' Chapman remembers. ''And Brian told them: 'You have to keep working and banging and working.' That's the type of attitude they had, the whole family.''

Gary Sutter, the oldest, worked and played with his younger brothers, and helped teach them to skate. When he had to decide about a career in hockey, he didn't think he was good enough. His brothers, however, remember Gary as the best skater among them. But Gary was in love, soon to be married. More than a decade later, long after that marriage failed - he subsequently remarried - Gary Sutter is not certain he made the wrong choice about hockey. ''Hockey isn't everything,'' he says, edging his car along the icy streets of Viking, past the Carena, the school, the community center and the town's most modern facility, a curling rink. ''Even if it's most everything.''

Gary stayed home. Brian went to play at Lethbridge. Darryl was not as lucky. In the amateur draft in 1978, he was only the 179th player picked, by the Chicago Blackhawks, who did not offer him a contract. (Brian, two years earlier, had been the 20th player chosen.) Distraught, Darryl took an offer passed on by a Japanese businessman in Lethbridge and went to Sapporo, on Japan's north island of Hokkaido. After a six-month season, he brought home the leading-scorer and most-valuable-player trophies and the benefits of strenuous Japanese conditioning. Chicago sent him to its Moncton, New Brunswick, farm team, where he was rookie of the year in the American Hockey League. Respect for the family grew: The four younger brothers were first-round draft picks.

AS CLOSE AS ALL the brothers are, the twins are closer still, and they had always played on the same team until separated by the draft. In the first trade involving a Sutter, they were reunited when Philadelphia acquired Rich from Pittsburgh in 1983. But the pairing lasted only three seasons. Ron was recognized as a budding star, runner-up last season in voting for the league's top defensive forward. Rich occasionally distinguished himself, but more often was relegated to the bench and was traded again last summer, to Vancouver. Under a coach willing to give him more time on the ice, he's had his best season.

But the trade created more Sutter vs. Sutter situations, which none of the brothers like. ''I hate it,'' Darryl says. ''You find yourself watching your brother maybe more than you should.'' It's hard for them to reconcile their burning will to win, their do-whatever-it-takes attitude, with their feelings for a brother, whatever uniform he's wearing. ''I still get a big thrill out of playing against my brothers,'' Ron Sutter said earlier this season. ''When I'm sitting on the bench, I'll watch them come up the ice, even when they don't have the puck. But of course I bang them when I have to.''

In the first game between Sutters, in 1980, Brian and Duane had repeated collisions, as both sought to prove they would not be distracted or intimidated. They almost came to blows, and Duane came away bleeding, nicked by Brian's stick. But they had dinner together that evening, a tradition the brothers try to maintain after each match.

The Sutters still bang into one another without hesitation and have occasional yelling matches, though none of them can imagine fighting. The fiercest rivalry is between Brent and Ron, both of whom play center and frequently guard each other when the Islanders and Flyers meet. ''You're very conscious that you have a job to do,'' Ron said earlier this season, shortly before one of their confrontations. ''You try to take him out, but you wouldn't take a run at him, or use your stick on him like you would on someone else.'' When the two squared off for the opening face-off, Brent controlled the puck, and as he wheeled away, Ron whacked his stick across his brother's back.

SCATTERED ACROSS North America during the season, the Sutters return to Alberta each summer. Duane farms across the road from his parents, Darryl a few miles away, Gary in Holden, Brian and Brent near Red Deer. Most of them are involved in farming enterprises with their father or their fathers-in-law. Six of the brothers married Alberta women and Ron plans to do the same this summer.

Hoping to become better known outside their province, they recently hired Frank Scott, an agent in the New York area, to seek commercial endorsements. He dreams of six brothers in hockey jerseys, climbing off their tractors, scooping up children and wives and heading for a family restau-rant. The Sutters feel some pressure to move quickly on this front: chronic knee problems have slowed Darryl for several seasons; Brian suffered a major shoulder injury for the second year in a row; in late December, Ron suffered a stress fracture in his back. Given the severity of the injuries, this could be the last year that six Sutters play in the National Hockey League.

When the twins left home, Grace and Louie Sutter changed their farming habits. ''No more milking cows, no more feeding pigs, no more chickens,'' says Grace, who has taken a part-time job in the IGA grocery in Viking. ''I don't know what she'd do if she didn't have the job,'' Darryl says with a laugh. ''She still plants a garden big enough to feed the county, and at 11 at night she'll be out in the yard cleaning up around the trees.'' Her husband, with only grain and beef cattle to look after, says he can do the chores in an hour, except for the spring planting and the September harvest. Then some of the boys come by to help.

The couple have adapted to life alone. They now have more money for themselves and last summer built a new home, right next to the old one. They now have a satellite dish - a gift from the Lethbridge Broncos -that sits in the farmyard, scanning the sky.

Night after night, Grace and Louie Sutter sit in the living room, watching their sons carefully on television: how they play, what the announcers say about them, how the coaches treat them. Ron gets accolades for his defensive work but is not being given enough chances to score, they say; and Darryl, with his sore knees, has trouble going full speed for two games in a row. During the three dozen or so times a season when her sons' teams play each other, Grace roots for a tie. If the Islanders, Flyers, Blackhawks, Blues or Canucks are not on television, they try to find one of their games on the radio. If that fails, they retune the dish and watch whatever hockey they can find.