Joost Blog

As excited as I was to watch Major League Baseball on Joost, as a Canadian I am much more interested in that other fall sports coverage – you know, the one that involves sticks and pucks, bone-crunching body checks and blistering slapshots, and where cold weather isn’t cursed but celebrated because it makes the ice faster? Make your jokes about Canada if you will, but we know our hockey.

Now, this might not seem too big a deal to the average fan – hockey games are widely available in North America, and fans in Scandinavia and Europe get to see some too. But I am an ex-pat Canadian living in Holland, and this is a big deal for me. In Holland, skating is very popular – but only if you want to go around in endless circles dressed in lycra. Pucks, sticks and skates that turn on a dime are nearly non-existent, and after nearly two years of living here, I was going through serious hockey withdrawal.

But last spring a light appeared in my otherwise hockey-less life – the NHL Stanley Cups Playoffs on Joost.  Full games from every series, with great quality video – no need for a blue-dot puck or slapshot-trails á la TV coverage of the early ‘90s, for those who remember that little experiment.  Not to mention a full slate of classic games from the ‘60s till now. Heaven! 

The 2007-2008 season has just kicked off, and we’ve just started to add a slate of these games on the NHL 2007-2008 Season channel – and we'll keep adding new games. Now if Joost could get Hockey Night in Canada games so I can watch Don Cherry rant about the Maple Leafs… then it will be just like I’m back home again.