Welcome to THN Detroit

Welcome. My name is Sam Stockton, and it is my pleasure to usher you into a new era of Detroit Red Wings coverage with The Hockey News. 

Beginning today, you can expect to find on this page daily writing, reporting, and general hypothesizing on the United States’ most successful and storied NHL franchise.  

I arrive on this beat after two seasons covering University of Michigan hockey for my Substack, Gulo Gulo Hockey.  Around this time two years ago, I decided I wanted to do something that I cared about with my time besides work. I guess you could call that a hobby, but I wouldn’t have used that word at the time. I didn’t just want to go for go rock climbing on the weekends or start fishing again; I wanted to make something.

Being an English major, practicality has never been my strong suit, so woodworking would have been much too functional. I guess pottery might have worked, but I settled on hockey blogging. 

It was the summer of 2021, I had just moved to Ann Arbor and would soon be teaching middle school in Detroit, and I knew U of M was bringing back a loaded roster. I deputized myself to the beat.

After a year as a blogger, last season I became a true beat writer—covering practices and home games, conducting interviews, expanding my coverage from just the men’s varsity team to include the women’s club team as well, and telling stories that I never could have gotten just from watching games from the bleachers at Yost or my couch. 

I covered a Big Ten Championship game win in Minnesota and then a Frozen Four run from Allentown to Tampa. My little newsletter grew in ways I never foresaw.

Across two seasons covering the Wolverines, I rediscovered what a delightfully slippery game to write about hockey can be.  The balance between the inherent chaos of the game's pace, playing surface, and peculiarly shaped centerpiece with the order coaches wish to impose.  The difficulty of providing adequate texture to summate a sixty-minute game determined by a small handful of shots, none of which will taken even a second to travel from a shooter's blade to the net's twine.  The euphoria of a championship celebration and the numbness of a season-ending defeat.

It will be bittersweet to leave the Michigan beat, but I am thrilled to begin covering the NHL with THN. It will be a bit of a change to go from America’s favorite Substack-based Michigan hockey newsletter to an established legacy media giant, but I look forward to the leap.  That this opportunity will come in Detroit and with the Red Wings is a delight. 

I get into this in more detail elsewhere on the site today, but I grew up with an awe for Detroit, the league’s unquestioned model franchise as I was discovering the world of professional hockey. The 2008 Stanley Cup Final is the first I can remember watching. 

Now, after a prolonged march through the wilderness, the Wings have entered the interesting part of a rebuild: When it’s time to power out of the mire and into championship contention.

I can’t wait to get started.