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Welcome to The TSN Hockey Bobcast - where TSN Hockey Insider Bob McKenzie addresses your questions on hockey...and just about anything else.

Subscribe and listen to the full podcast here: iTunes / SoundCloud / Google Play / tsn.ca/bobcast

Send your questions to bobcast@bellmedia.ca and our TSN Hockey Insider might just answer them in future episodes.

Here are a few topics from this week's edition that stood out:

 

Taking It Outdoors?

Bob: "I'm not a big outdoor game guy to begin with. Anybody who knows me knows that. But I do know why they do them in the National Hockey League. They're big money, big events - wherever they're being held, it's kind of got a buzz in the marketplace - so I've got no issue with any of that. Me personally, I don't like going to outdoor games, I don't like covering them outdoors. If it was playing in an outdoor game - out on a pond - that's awesome, love it. I just don't love the whole outdoor concept.  

But the whole World Junior thing (in Buffalo next year) is fascinating because it's already been announced for a long time now. Canada and the U.S. will play a game on Dec. 29 at the Buffalo Bills' stadium. People were going crazy because Canada and the U.S. were in the gold medal final this year and that means they should be in different groups next year - what's going to happen to the outdoor game...?"

 

 

What happens when he retires

Bob: "When I'm no longer required to watch hockey, how much hockey will I watch? What I will do is go back to watching games the way I used to watch them. That is, if there's a game on, I'll want to watch that game and I won't get the iPad and get the Twitter feed going to worry about what's going on in another game. If it's going to be a compelling enough game for me to sit down and watch it, then I'm actually going to sit down and watch that game. If it's boring and I want to turn it off, I'll find another game or watch something on Netflix. Speaking of Netflix, PEAKY BLINDERS - what a great show that is..."

 

  
Bob actually did this once...twice, actually 

Bob: "I've called not one, but two stick measurements in a Minor Atom AAA game. This is well-documented in my book 'Hockey Dad: True Confessions Of A (Crazy?) Hockey Parent' and when people hear this story they're going to take the question mark away from the word 'Crazy.' They'll say, 'Yeah, you're crazy for calling stick measurements in a Minor Atom game.' 

I was the assistant coach on the Whitby Wildcats...we were playing Barrie in the ETA playoffs - what you played if you got knocked out in the first round of the playoffs. It was the third and deciding game of a best-of-three consolation championship. Early in the series, I saw the sticks from Barrie's team as we were standing by their bench - which was right next to ours - before a game. And I happened to notice that a number of them were wildly illegal. I mean, huge, huge, huge curves. I didn't really think much of it. 

So, now we're in this consolation championship and we were losing by a number of goals and there were five or six minutes left in the game. I went to my friend Stu and said, 'Hey, all these kids are using illegal sticks - let me challenge one.' He kind of looked at me crazily and said, 'Yeah, go ahead.' So we got the referee to measure a kid's stick. It was illegal and he called a penalty for it. Well, the result was predictable. I'm a personality and I'm on television. I wasn't as well known then as I am now, but people knew who I was. And suffice to say, a lot of the Barrie parents didn't think that was cool to be doing such a cheesy thing in a Minor Atom hockey game..."