The "Down Goes Brown" History of the NHL

Hockey is great, the NHL though is amazingly dumb. If you've followed the league for any amount of time, you can't help but concur with McIndoe's gentle sarcasm about the decision makers in pro hockey.

What's interesting about the Down Goes Brown style is how McIndoe can be so precisely critical of jaw-dropping stupidity (Gil Stein's helmet rollback!) without wallowing in cynicism.

It's really easy to get turned off hockey due to the atavistic and incompetent nature of the pro culture. Before you give up on the game, read this book again to give you context for how the latest stupidity really isn't that big a deal relative to everything else the NHL has condoned.

@DownGoesBrown is one of my favorite Twitter follows, he's clever and quick to react to breaking stories in the NHL. So I bought this in part just as a way to support someone who's given me tons of free entertainment.

The book was good, but it didn't live up to what I expected from him. There are some neat stories here and a few good jokes, but nothing overly memorable.