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For weeks people have been talking about a possible Dwight Schrute spinoff. No doubt the producers and agents involved are too blinded by dollar signs to take the time to examine the fates of previous spinoff shows based on “can’t miss” popular characters. We hereby submit 11 such shows that barely made it past the drawing board.

Asking me to explain why hockey is a real sport is a good way to get hazed when you consider my stellar credentials.

I’m originally from California, which is currently home to three teams:

The Los Angeles Kings, who haven’t managed to win a Cup for the 43 seasons of their existence, including 8 years when they had the best player in the history of the game scoring an average of 114.75 points per season for them.

The Anaheim Ducks, who will forever be known as the Mighty Ducks, who, yes, were originally owned by the Walt Disney Corporation. Who are, yes, named after that ice hockey-based Bad News Bears Disney movie. And, finally, yes, Emilio Estevez was in that movie, and yes, he played a hockey coach who clearly didn’t know how to skate. The Ducks have managed to win a Cup, and are no longer owned by Disney, but remain a hockey team named after cartoonish waterfowl.

The San Jose Sharks, whohave statistically been playing “good” hockey, placing 1st or 2nd in the Pacific Division every year since 2004, but until this last year have brilliantly and consistently choked during the playoffs against teams they’ve habitually beaten during the regular season as if they suddenly and inconveniently remember that they still hold the record for most losses in a single season.

Further eroding my hockey credibility is the fact that I am a product of the NHL’s 1990s expansion years, which brought hockey to the Sun Belt, stripped Canada of two franchises, and is the decade that brought us FoxTrax – technology designed to make hockey watchable on TV:

The arrival of FoxTrax coincided with a ratings slump that that NHL wouldn’t recover from until the NHL Winter Classic debuted in 2008. It sounds like the 90s were rough until you look at who was winning the Cup: Edmonton; Pittsburgh (twice); Montreal (their 24^th); my beloved New York Rangers (their 4th after 54 long years); and the New Jersey Devils’ dynasty began, followed by the transplanted Nordiques’ win in Colorado. The Red Wings (who suck) got it twice in row, and Dallas finished off the decade, establishing the Sun Belt as a legit home for the Stanley Cup.

It was a good decade for the sport, but mostly because it was the decade I understood why it was my sport.

Of the big four American sports leagues, the NHL has the smallest total fan base, the smallest revenue from television, and the least sponsorship. Big Three American sports fans like to look down at hockey fans because of these stats. They ask, “Is there even a medal for fourth place?”

Fact is, hockey sucks on television. The game moves fast and the center of the action, a small black puck, is easily lost visually as it zips around at speeds exceeding 80mph. This was the problem Fox was attempting to solve when they developed FoxTrax: they thought highlighting the puck would allow folks to keep up, but it just made it look like a video game. 

In hockey you watch the whole game, and you must go to the arena to actually see and appreciate the whole game. You can’t be a phone-it-in couch-based fan because you won’t appreciate a game where you can only see 1/3rd of the action at any given time. HD and big screens have helped the visibility situation a lot, but more than any other sport, you need to be at a game to understand and completely appreciate it.

Hockey requires constant and precise attention. It’s 60 minutes broken into three periods of singularly fluid motion. They don’t stop after each play to assess field position. They don’t pause after each pitch to pose for the camera. Hockey is a sport on the clock and that clock is relentless. Look away and you might miss the second that changes the course of the entire game.

All sports require commitment, but because full appreciation of hockey requires physical presence to grok it, I think hockey is better at drawing you in. The NHL estimates that fully half of its fan base roots for teams in outside markets. I’m guessing because folks continue to rabidly root for their home team once they’ve been transplanted from traditional hockey markets where it’s a) cold, and b) fucking cold.

If you let it in, hockey gets under your skin. It’s not a sport for the short attention span generation; it’s a commitment.  And that’s how I judge my sports: not by the size or shape of the ball, but by the quality and the commitment of the fan.

In March of 1999, my future bride treated me to a hockey game, in which my beloved Detroit Red Wings were taking on the San Jose Sharks. (My future bride’s willingness to take me to hockey games was not why I married her, but it was certainly an argument in her favor.) The game — a rather forgettable 2-0 defeat for the Forces of Good at the hands of those teal-wearing upstarts — is perhaps best remembered for this happening. But I choose to remember it for a different reason.

I was not the only Wings fan in attendance that night. Sitting behind us was a young lady who was especially… devoted in her support of the Red Wings in general and one player in particular.

“We love you, Chris Osgood,” this lady would shriek loudly, proudly, repeatedly, whenever the puck arrived in the vicinity of the Detroit netminder. 

It was a curious expression of devotion, and not just because Osgood wasn’t in goal for that particular game. (Norm Maracle got the start instead.) No — this display of passion struck me as odd because if there’s one person who seemingly never generated much in the way of passionate outbursts during his 17-year career, it would be Chris Osgood.

I’m not saying Red Wing fans didn’t feel a certain amount of fondess for the goalie. “He was known in Detroit by his nicknames ‘Ozzie,’ chanted by the crowd after a big save,” his Wikipedia entry reads, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my time, it’s never to dispute anything Wikipedia says. But jot down a list of the best goalies in hockey from when Osgood entered the league in 1993 to when he retired this past Tuesday, and I bet it will take you some time before you remember to put Chris Osgood’s name on the list.

Certainly, the Red Wings seemingly had a hard time remembering just how good Chris Osgood was. Here’s a partial list of goaltenders that team management thought would handle the job better than Osgood during his 14 seasons in Detroit: Tim Cheveldae, Bob Essensa, Mike Vernon, Bill Ranford, Manny Legace, Dominik Hasek, Ty Conklin, and Jimmy Howard. So far as I can tell, Osgood was only a finalist for the Veznia Trophy once—the 1995-96 season when he lost to Jim Carrey, doubtlessly on the strength of the latter’s performance in Batman Forever. He was named to the All-Star team three times — not bad, but certainly not far short of the resumé you’d expect from a Martin Brodeur or a Patrick Roy. Osgood played in an era when NHL players competed in the Olympics; Team Canada never really gave him a sniff for a spot on the squad. Even his gear was nondescript — in an era where goalies put on customized masks depicting everything from cartoon mascots to recreations of Picasso’s Guernica, Osgood wore what looked like a standard hockey helmet with a faceguard that appeared to have been fastened on five minutes before the puck dropped.

And yet… Chris Osgood retires with 401 career wins. Only nine other goalkeepers won more than 400 games, and the only one who isn’t enshrined in the Hall of Fame — that’d be Brodeur — isn’t eligible yet. Osgood’s name has been carved onto the Stanley Cup three times, and only once was he an innocent bystander. He played in every postseason game in the Wings’ 1998 run to the Cup, and he took over for an inconsistent Hasek in the 2008 playoffs. If Sidney Crosby’s Pittsburgh Penguins teammates hadn’t of bailed out their over-rated pretty-boy captain in 2009, Osgood might have had another Stanley Cup triumph to his name.

We’d all like to be Martin Brodeur — indisputably the best at what we choose to do in life. More often than not, we fall far short of our dreams. And at the end of the day, maybe the best we can hope for is to put in our best effort, to maybe rise above the level of our talent on our best day, and — when it’s time to finally leave the stage— to be able to look back at what we’ve done with no small measure of pride. Chris Osgood can do that. He wasn’t the best of his era, but he was pretty damn good.

And if nothing else, Detroit Red Wings fans can appreciate him for this.

The Red Wings and the Colorado Avalanche squared off in a particularly nasty playoff series in 1996, sparking off a rivalry for the next few years that occasionally veered into madness. In the mid-to-late ’90s, I’m not sure that there was anything — hell, ignorance, certain ex-girlfriends — that I hated more than Colorado Avalanche. And the sight of Chris Osgood pummeling Patrick Roy like a Montreal steak always brings a smile to my face.

Frankly, I think the city of Detroit should erect a statue commemorating that moment. Put it right next to the one of Joe Louis’ fist.

[Image courtesy of Dan4th Nicolas]

Client: Can you change it to say “Continue” instead of “Skip?”

Me: Of course!  It’s funny, that’s actually what I originally put there but you asked me to change it. It’s nice to be right once in a -

Client: NO! YOU WERE NOT RIGHT! I WAS RIGHT! TWICE!

You might have learned that a certain upcoming version of Mac OS X may have scrolling that is “bass-ackwards”.

That is, when you push up on your trackpad or mouse scroller, the page content moves up too, just like on iOS devices.

I made a very minimal little app that lets you reverse your scrolling on 10.5 and above too. It’s a pure usermode app, no drivers or kexts to install. Uninstallation is a simple drag-to-trash.

Download Scroll Reverser (zip file, 0.2Mb; Mac OS X 10.5 and above, Universal binary)

The Scroll Reverser homepage is at: http://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser.