I’m a Hockey fan… but I’m also a nerd. The curious kind that likes to figure out how things work. One day last month while watching a Blackhawks game, we scored an important goal and while the United Center went crazy, my curiosity kicked in when I noticed all the details that goes into celebrating a goal at a Blackhawks game. I had to wonder… How does that work?!

I replayed the goal in slow motion and I was stunned at how quickly spotlights appeared on the goal scorer and the goal horn goes off followed shortly by “Chelsea Dagger”. Mix in scoreboard messages throughout the arena and a spinning red light… and you have a lot of moving parts!

Amazingly, all this happens with very few errors, (except of course for those crazy Canucks-Skip to about 13:40) and all in less then a second or so. Pretty amazing given the speed and unpredictability of Hockey. Compared to sports like Baseball, Football and Basketball… scoring is few and far between and can happen unexpectedly.

So, I contacted the Blackhawks… and long story short: I’m getting a behind the scenes tour of what goes into all the game day presentation at the United Center!

If you have any questions you would like asked, leave a comment and I’ll do what i can to get answers. My questions include things like… How big is the staff? How do they communicate? If its by radio, can anyone listen in if they find the frequency? Who decides that a goal is scored? Are the spotlights manually operated? How do they determine who scored? If it’s automated, who makes the software that tracks players on the ice and aims the spotlights? How is the music/organ/scoreboard videos orchestrated? What does it take to get a job working on game production? What sort of turnover is there? Do they also work Bulls games? What computers and networks are in use? And how secure are they?

I hope that this is the beginning of a series of blog posts or a new website that explores the technology behind things we take for granted. Yes, I’m a nerd… but I’m betting that there are many others like me out there!

This morning at 10am, Blackhawks playoff tickets went on sale! For those of you that don’t follow Hockey or the Blackhawks… This is a relatively big deal as the Blackhawks have not made the Stanley Cup Playoffs since 2002 (when they were man-handled by the Saint Louis Blues in 5 games). They haven’t actually WON a playoff series since 1996 when they swept the Calgary Flames, only to be eliminated by Colorado in the second round.

Yes, its been a long time (not as long as its been for the Cubs though!) and Blackhawk fans finally have something to get excited about again! 

The United Center doesn’t quite have the same roar I remember from the Chicago Stadium, but I can’t tell you how excited I am about the return of playoff hockey to the West Loop.

I didn’t get to actually look for tickets until about 10:30am and was afraid that I’d missed my opprotunity. Sadly, TicketMaster’s website blows chunks when it comes to purchasing tickets. I had to continually search for tickets while hoping for some good luck. First, you can’t really select a price range without severely limiting yourself to a small subset of seats, so you end up having to look for “best available” and it kept offering me 200 level club seats for $150 a pop. No thanks, i wanted the $50 cheap seats! Also, you can’t search for multiple games at once as it gives up your previous tickets! (i lost out on some decent seats thanks to that!)

Finally, I pulled the trigger on 3 games for Standing Room tickets. $67 for a pair to each game with that crazy TicketMaster fees ($5.75 a ticket PLUS a per-order conveniece fee!? You HAVE to be kidding me! why hasn’t someone run them out of business yet?!) really isn’t that bad! Those are for Game C of the first series (3rd home game) and Game A and B of the second series. Obviously tickets for the second series are worthless if we don’t survive the first round. The 3rd home game in the first series would be game 5 if we lose home ice, or game 6 if we keep home ice. So even that isn’t guarenteed.

If I could script out how the first round of the playoffs were to go, I’d take home ice and hope the series goes a full seven games. Somehow along the way while I was looking for best available tickets, ticketmaster offered me seats ON THE GLASS right behind the goal for Game D in the first round! Obviously, if we lose home ice, we won’t get a 4th home game, and that 4th game won’t be played unless the first 6 games are split. I quickly made the purchase ($390 tickets, ouch!) after I realized that I’ll either get all that cash back, or I’ll be able to witness a MONSTER event from great seats! Plus, those silly TicketMaster fees don’t seem as bad with expensive tickets!

Definately going to make the playoffs more interesting! I’ll have to start finding out who wants to join me for the games as they draw closer. If you’re interested in going… Let me know!