puckszone

[puckszone]

i made a win graphic

[puckszone]

😗

[puckszone]

hopeless time loop. the way out isn’t to save everyone. the way out isn’t to save even one person. the way out isn’t to change anything. the way out is accepting how it happened the first time is how it always will be. that’s how you acted, that’s how they acted, that’s how you would have acted every time if you weren’t given the curse of hindsight. the way out is accepting you can’t fix the past; you can only forgive yourself for it.

[puckszone]

btw. to everyone who's suffering because of sports right now: remember that you can't be so back if it isn't first so over. never forget

[puckszone]

I would die for her

[puckszone]

my favorite mashup emoji is this one and i wish it was real so bad

[puckszone]

U18 Women's World Championship 2025: What To Know

The U18 Women’s World Championship for the top division in women’s hockey starts today! Here is everything you need to know. 

WHO

The tournament is divided into Groups A and B. 

Group A consists of Finland, Japan, USA, and Sweden,

Group B consists of Czechia, Canada, Slovakia, and Switzerland. 

All rosters are here 

WHAT

A round-robin series in each group will rank each teams before all eight go to the quarterfinals in the following format: 1A vs. 4B, 1B vs. 4A, 2A vs. 3B and 2B vs. 3A. The two last placed teams will play a relegation round. Full rules here. 

WHEN

Schedule: January 4th to January 12th

Yes, like this morning. Some of these games will start before noon for you if you are in North America. 

WHERE

The games are in Vantaa, Finland. 

TSN will air all games that have USA and Canada, and NHL Network will air all games that have USA, but only using TSN’s broadcast. Winning gold in the previous year, unfortunately, does not constitute getting your own home broadcast for USA hockey. In Finland, matches will be on TV5 channel and Max streaming service. Unfortunately, I struggled to find broadcast information for the remaining countries. If anyone has more information, please add! 

WHY? 

The U18 Worlds fucking rules. We’ve had two major upsets (Czechia over Canada, Sweden over USA) in the semifinals in the last two years. This is your first chance to lay eyes on some of the future stars of women’s hockey. If you’re older than 18 you get to have a crisis about how old you are. It’s the best. 

I WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THESE TEAMS? 

I did a (very deep) dive into each and every team, complete with expectations for each team, standout player/storylines, and some highlights. If interested, you can read here

[puckszone]

love love love the hrpf wrapped post! super interesting data, and i can tell you really thought about how to collect & display it. were there any surprises to you when you looked at the data? anything that you almost included in the post but didn't, or anything you want to talk about further? -puckszone :)

YES!! thank you so much for asking this. i actually originally wanted to include a list of average word count per ship, sorted by descending, kind of to show which ships has the longest fics etc. but i did not end up including that information because out of like 20 of the ships with the longest fics, about ~18 of them where OC fic or other extremely rare pairs. a quick look on ao3 showed me it would be pretty easy to backtrack which fic was which data point, so i decided against including it. it was just so interesting to me that they were ALL rarepairs - and kind of heart warming. like these must really be people's babies.

if ur curious what some of the non-rare-pair ships were, mostly minor-side-pairings, with one notable exception - alex ovechkin/evgeni malkin. ain't that something

[puckszone]

year in review - hockey rpf on ao3

hello!! the annual ao3 year in review had some friends and i thinking - wouldn't it be cool if we had a hockey rpf specific version of that. so i went ahead and collated the data below!!

i start with a broad overview, then dive deeper into the 3 most popular ships this year (with one bonus!)

if any images appear blurry, click on them to expand and they should become clear!

₊˚⊹♡ . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁𐙚 ‧₊˚ ⋅. ݁

before we jump in, some key things to highlight: - CREDIT TO: the webscraping part of my code heavily utilized the ao3 wrapped google colab code, as lovingly created by @kyucultures on twitter, as the main skeleton. i tweaked a couple of things but having it as a reference saved me a LOT of time and effort as a first time web scraper!!! thank you stranger <3 - please do NOT, under ANY circumstances, share any part of this collation on any other website. please do not screenshot or repost to twitter, tiktok, or any other public social platform. thank u!!! T_T - but do feel free to send requests to my inbox! if you want more info on a specific ship, tag, or you have a cool idea or wanna see a correlation between two variables, reach out and i should be able to take a look. if you want to take a deeper dive into a specific trope not mentioned here/chapter count/word counts/fic tags/ship tags/ratings/etc, shoot me an ask!

˚　　. 　 ˚　.　　　　　 . ✦　　　 　˚　　　　 . ★⋆. ࿐࿔

with that all said and done... let's dive into hockey_rpf_2024_wrapped_insanity.ipynb

BIG PICTURE OVERVIEW

i scraped a total of 4266 fanfics that dated themselves as published or finished in the year 2024. of these 4000 odd fanfics, the most popular ships were:

Note: "Minor or Background Relationship(s)" clocked in at #9 with 91 fics, but I removed it as it was always a secondary tag and added no information to the chart. I did not discern between primary ship and secondary ship(s) either!

breaking down the 5 most popular ships over the course of the year, we see:

super interesting to see that HUGE jump for mattdrai in june/july for the stanley cup final. the general lull in the offseason is cool to see as well.

as for the most popular tags in all 2024 hockey rpf fic...

weee like our fluff. and our established relationships. and a little H/C never hurt no one.

i got curious here about which AUs were the most popular, so i filtered down for that. note that i only regex'd for tags that specifically start with "Alternate Universe - ", so A/B/O and some other stuff won't appear here!

idk it was cool to me.

also, here's a quick breakdown of the ratings % for works this year:

and as for the word counts, i pulled up a box plot of the top 20 most popular ships to see how the fic length distribution differed amongst ships:

mattdrai-ers you have some DEDICATION omg. respect

now for the ship by ship break down!!

₊ . ݁ ݁ . ⊹ ࣪ ˖͙͘͡★ ⊹ .

#1 MATTDRAI

most popular ship this year. peaked in june/july with the scf. so what do u people like to write about?

fun fun fun. i love that the scf is tagged there like yes actually she is also a main character

₊ . ݁ ݁ . ⊹ ࣪ ˖͙͘͡★ ⊹ .

#2 SIDGENO

(my babies) top tags for this ship are:

folks, we are a/b/o fiends and we cannot lie. thank you to all the selfless authors for feeding us good a/b/o fic this year. i hope to join your ranks soon.

(also: MPREG. omega sidney crosby. alpha geno. listen, the people have spoken, and like, i am listening.)

₊ . ݁ ݁ . ⊹ ࣪ ˖͙͘͡★ ⊹ .

#3 NICOJACK

top tags!!

it seems nice and cozy over there... room for one more?

₊ . ݁ ݁ . ⊹ ࣪ ˖͙͘͡★ ⊹ .

BONUS: JDTZ.

i wasnt gonna plot this but @marcandreyuri asked me if i could take a look and the results are so compelling i must include it. are yall ok. do u need a hug

top tags being h/c, angst, angst, TRADES, pining, open endings... T_T katie said its a "torture vortex" and i must concurr

₊ . ݁ ݁ . ⊹ ࣪ ˖͙͘͡★ ⊹ .

BONUS BONUS: ALPHA/BETA/OMEGA

as an a/b/o enthusiast myself i got curious as to what the most popular ships were within that tag. if you want me to take a look about this for any other tag lmk, but for a/b/o, as expected, SID GENO ON TOP BABY!:

thats all for now!!! if you have anything else you are interested in seeing the data for, send me an ask and i'll see if i can get it to ya!

[puckszone]

✨🦈sharkudablr valentines day gift exchange 🦈✨

happy January to those who celebrate and more importantly, who in sharkudablr/sharks lb/cuda lb/sharks fandom would like to participate in a little gift exchange for valentines day!!

what this is:

each person who signs up will receive one blog in sharkudablr to create a gift for. this can be gifs, art, shrimers and slide decks, hype reels and fancams, fanfic (opt-in only) and anything else you can think of!

there is strict maximum length! all works need to follow these MAXIMUM lengths or an equivalent effort/amount in your medium: writing - 2000 words; art/gifs - 2 hours of effort; hype reels/vids/fancams - 2 minutes; slide decks/shrimers/zines - 8 pages or 2 hours of effort, whichever comes first

who can participate:

you have a tumblr

you like the san jose sharks

if both of those apply to you, you're welcome to join!!

calendar:

signs up open: now! sign ups close: january 15 assignments go out: january 17 last day to drop out: february 4 gifts due: february 8-february 14

questions can be directed to kas @pacific-coast-hockey and/or @moregraceful  on tumblr. dm preferred but anon is on!

sign up here

more rules under the cut ⬇️

all gifts must be posted on tumblr between february 8-february 14. you can choose anytime in that period to post! but do not post earlier and DEFINITELY do not post later. fanfic can/should be posted to the ao3 collection and does not have to posted publicly, but you must send a link to your recipient between february 8 and february 14.

the final day to drop out is february 4. if you find you are unable to complete a gift by february 14, get in touch with @moregraceful/@pacific-coast-hockey no later than february 4.

you must create at least one gift in the medium of your choice, but if you are inspired to create more, you absolutely can! just follow the length rules for each work

and finally! i will almost certainly need people to create more gifts if/when creators drop out so if you think you'll have the time and energy between jan 4-14 (at least, if not earlier) to create a second gift, please please sign up to pinch hit. thank you!!

[puckszone]

1/01/2025 - NJD @ LAK

another helmet group photo has hit lak lb (ft. kevin fiala as a chew toy)

[ID: The LA Kings in their dressing room after a win. They sit along the stalls and on the floor celebrating the Driver of the Match.

Top row left to right: Phillip Danault sitting on Samuel Helenius’ knee, Akil Thomas in his game day suit; and Quinton Byfield, who is shirtless as usual and also chewing on Kevin Fiala’s hat. Fiala is sprawled across three people’s laps including: Byfield, Alex Turcotte, and Jordan Spence.

Bottom row left to right: Andre Lee in the Driver of the Match helmet holding his first NHL goal puck up, Alex Laferriere, and Jacob Moverare. Laferriere has his arms flung across his teammates shoulders, pulling them in. /. End ID.]

[puckszone]

[puckszone]

latvia wins it against canada in a shootout | LAT vs. CAN | WJC 2025 | 27 Dec. 2024

[puckszone]

2024-2025 whimsy cup playoffs! 🏆

I just had an idea for another series of polls! some very fun teams are unlikely to make the actual playoffs…but they would probably do well in a hypothetical, whimsy-based playoff series where they could move to the next round without winning hockey games.

I think I’ll set up four polls where you can vote on which team in each division is the most whimsical. once those polls end, the most whimsical teams in each division will make it to the next round. the final poll (or whimsy cup finals) will be between the most whimsical teams in each conference.

round one polls:

metro division

atlantic division

pacific division

central division

[puckszone]

BREAKING NEWS: two time Stanley Cup Champion, Jonathan Quick, poops pants

[puckszone]

Via Instagram

Kaapo Kakko has as many points in 5 games with the Kraken as he did with his last 13 with the Rangers 🥹

[puckszone]

chacha and the lead equipment manager :3