| Parise and Elias looking as clean-shaven as they were as mites. (Getty Images) |
Like most athletes, hockey players are a superstitous bunch. For the most part, they put their socks on starting with the same foot every time, tape the same number of a sticks before a game the same exact way.
Find something a player does on a daily basis and you're likely to find some ritual that players adhere to like dogma.
The most obvious (and visible) example shows up every year at this time: the playoff beard. Ever since the Islanders won four straight Stanley Cups and refused to shave the ritual (and tradition) was born. Almost every player's postseason suitcase is one item lighter: a razor. To shave is nearly sacrilege.
So I guess it's appropriate that Zach Parise is the captain of the New Jersey Devils because he's not going by the hockey bible. Neither are some of his teammates like Patrik Elias and Martin Brodeur. They're all electing to scrap the scruff, keeping their faces in the buff.
So far so good, their baby faces haven't upset the hockey gods too much as the Devils are preparing for Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals.
"Every year, the playoff beard, everybody talks about it," rookie Adam Henrique told the Star-Ledger's Mike Vorkunov. “It’s something fun besides the game. There’s always interesting ones every playoffs.”
Because of a few off days waiting for the Rangers to finish the Capitals off -- hey, sometimes you need off-beat stories like this -- there's been some talk about the beards in New Jersey too. Just the lack of them.
Of course, this is the part where I point out how silly this tradition ends up looking. Nowadays, every team does this. Some players like Alex Ovechkin will shave all but the goatee or Jaromir Jagr will cut the gray out, but there's some facial hair on almost every single player in the postseason.
Naturally, only one team wins. So for players on 15 of the 16 teams, the beard isn't so lucky after all. The ratio of lucky beards to unlucky isn't strong.
But that's superstition for you. It's not based in any sort of logic. As somebody who was incredibly superstitious when I played sports, I can tell you I knew the things I was doing were stupid and had little impact on the game, but if I didn't do something in my normal ritual I would blame my shortcomings on that.
I'm curious to see what you think: Are guys like Parise tempting fate by shaving in the postseason?
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