Archive for the ‘News’ Category

Tampa Bay home opener at renovated Times Forum… check out the Tesla coil!

Tuesday, October 18th, 2011

The Tampa Bay Lightning have cleaned up nicely. Not in terms of winning games this season (it’s still too early to tell), but literally: their newly renovated Times Forum has opened, and it’s amazing what some paint and new seats can do. That’s not the only thing new about the place – they’ve added a huge pipe organ, and most impressively, Tesla coils which, when operational, will shoot 20-foot bolts of manmade lightning.

Here’s a pic, via Reddit user randude, of one of the new coils:

The renovated Times Forum has lost around 500 seats due to the renovations, but the 19,204 seats remaining provide an even better view of Lightning hockey.

Check out our complete Tampa Bay Lightning schedule on our site if you’d like to see the team in their new venue for yourself!

Sharks ruin perfect Canucks preseason run

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

With a hotly contested 4-3 game Sunday night, the San Jose Sharks put an end to a perfect Canucks preseason and paid Vancouver back for putting an end to their Stanley Cup ambitions last year. It may have been the addition of Tommy Wingels (who scored two goals against Vancouver), or it may have been the Canucks’ inability to properly use their late-game advantage to catch up, but the Sharks put on a much better show than the last time the two teams crossed paths.

With this win, the Sharks continue their flawless preseason record. Expect a furious match when the Canucks and Sharks play for real on November 26.

Helmet-cam Hockey: The Future Is Awesome

Friday, July 29th, 2011

Here’s an amazing hockey video we stumbled across, of an amateur adult league hockey game between the Division 1 Thrashers and Ice Dogs. What’s so incredible about it is that the video is shot entirely from the point of view of one of the players, from a camera mounted on his helmet, making watching the video almost like being there.

It’s not hard to imagine this being incorporated into NHL broadcasts in future. The video was shot with the GoPro camera, a body-mountable consumer-level HD video camera for sports, which is available to anyone for under $300. It’s not chump change, but for a pro team like the Canucks, Leafs, or Flames, who sell tickets for several times that, putting one of these cameras into a helmet (once it gets small enough, of course) seems like an inevitability.