Eight Ways the Kentucky Derby is Like the Stanley Cup Playoffs
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Horse racing and hockey have more than a few things in common. (Photo by Penelope P. Miller/America's Best Racing)
One of the great things about hockey and horse racing for fans of both the sports is that every spring is like an extended holiday. Three-year-old racehorses are gearing up for the Kentucky Derby while NHL teams are making their final pushes to the Stanley Cup playoffs, and hopefully the Final. But that isn’t the only thing the two sports have in common. Here are eight other reasons you should watch horse racing if you love the Stanley Cup playoffs.
1. Longshots can win – Upsets are the name of the game in both horse racing and the Stanley Cup playoffs. While favorites do win and the last three Kentucky Derbys were won by the horse who went off as the favorite, before that all but one of the four winners from 2009 to 2012 went off at odds above 10-to-1. In all, eight of the 15 Kentucky Derby winners since 2000 have not been favorites.
2. Horse racing has bath photos, hockey has practice photos – While seeing bath and practice photos throughout the year, during Triple Crown and Stanley Cup season you start to wonder if something is wrong if you don’t see multiple tweets about the same horse or team with videos and photos from all angles.
Bales putting Fleury thru a fast-(re)action drill just before Penguins practice begins. pic.twitter.com/dZ0aZdxheL
— Bill West (@BWest_Trib) April 15, 2016
Nyquist getting a bath after going to the track pic.twitter.com/e7ZXUlLUBq
— alan cutler (@cutler18) April 23, 2016
3. Each region has its own little playoff – In the NHL a team has to get through their assigned region before they can advance to the later stages of the playoffs and ultimately the final. While horses aren’t required to only run in a certain track’s prep series, most of the time you see a horse stay at one track and run in its set of races unless he’s trying to avoid someone or grab a few more points at the end of the prep season.
4. There’s always a team no one can see getting beat before the playoffs heat up – It doesn’t matter if you’re a hockey or horse racing fan, you can’t escape talk about a big favorite or two even if there are still nine months left before the final games of the season. It never fails that during that time, there will be a flurry of “future bet” tickets posted all over social media so people can prove they were on the bandwagon before the horse or team became the official favorite.
5. There are penalties for getting a bit too eager – Race riding and playing hard is all a part of the game but if players/jockeys toe the line too much, they go into the “sin bin.” In hockey, this means putting your team a player down for a few minutes (or getting ejected if you decide to really jump over the line) and in racing it means getting disqualified. In the playoffs, every win matters so going too far can cost a team, horse or hockey, a chance at the ultimate trophy.
6. Both sports have that hard-to-say names – Mubtaahij? Bobrovsky? They may seem fairly easy to say in casual conversations but in the heat of the moment, it can sound like you’re speaking gibberish when you’re screaming it in the final seconds of a race or game.
7. Both get some shiny hardware at the end of the journey – The Stanley Cup and the Kentucky Derby trophy are two of the most coveted trophies in their respective sport. There are other trophies that come with steps in the journey but the engraving on those trophies isn’t as sweet as the ones at the end of the road.
8. Hockey playoffs and horse racing go hand-in-hand – Stanley Cup-winning Chicago Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville can be seen at the track and even co-owned a horse on the Kentucky Derby trail a few years ago. This year’s Kentucky Derby favorite Nyquist is named after the Detroit Red Wings player Gustav Nyquist. The equine Nyquist’s owner Paul Reddam is a huge Red Wings fan, and is probably hoping Nyquist can cheer him up by winning the Kentucky Derby a week after the Red Wings were eliminated from the first round of the NHL playoffs.