it's kind of crazy climate change has occurred at such a remarkable pace that I and everyone else around my age can remember a completely different climate in our childhoods. I truly watched winter gradually disappear in my life.
"You're too young to remember this, but there used to be so many insects outside that you would have to clean them off the windshield after a long car ride" is the kind of sentence that would have been in a cheesy scifi short story earlier in my life, perhaps submitted to a literary magazine and accepted to show support for its environmentalist message - now it's something I've said in earnest.
haven't been to a mooseheads game in person for over a year and apparently they made some changes to the arena.... the main one being a gigantic moose bust that flashes red eyes and shoots smoke out it's nose when we score
:((( it would have been so cool for Switzerland to win it's first iihf gold at home, they had such a good 3rd period after Finland dominated the 1st, had a couple of good chances in OT, but alas
I was at work for Can/Nor bronze medal game but I checked the score when they had 5min left it was 2-0 I thought Oh this is over, then I check again and it's 2-2 fjdks many such cases
I got to log in the stream 5min into OT just in time to see the end of it, no medal for Canada in the end, makes one wonder whether their entire defense was Bouchard. Very happy Norwegian bench 🏒☀️ They had a good run this iihf, that's really nice for Norwegian ice hockey
high level ice hockey leagues that stream free on youtube
wanted to compile a list into a post for people to reference.
PWHL - Professional Women's Hockey League, top pro women's league in USA/Canada, streams free everywhere outside Canada (sorry, Canada) (Proton VPN is a great free option), 12 teams, November - May, website - eliteprospects - wikipedia
SDHL - Swedish Women's Hockey League, top pro women's league, lotta players going back and forth between here and the PWHL, 10 teams, September - March, website - eliteprospects - wikipedia
EWHL/AWHL* - European Women's Hockey League & Austrian Women's Hockey League, this is sorta two leagues intertwined. i need to research more to understand, but they both stream on this channel, don't ask me how many teams, MANY countries which is pretty cool,September - March, website (shared) - eliteprospects (EWHL / AWHL) - wikipedia (shared)
*for some reason it's not letting me link the channel, but going on youtube and searching either ewhl or awhl will get you there
AWIHL - Australian Women's Ice Hockey League, top Australian women's league, 6 teams, November - March, website - eliteprospects - wikipedia
NZWIHL - New Zealand Women's Ice Hockey League, top women's Aotearoa hockey league, 4 teams, May - August, website - eliteprospects - wikipedia
NZIHL - New Zealand Men's Ice Hockey League, top men's Aotearoa hockey league, 5 teams, May - August, website - eliteprospects - wikipedia
Special Mention: the ЖХЛ/ZhHL, the Russian Women's Hockey League, used to stream free on youtube but hasn't the past couple years due to a youtube ban. You can still find their old game streams on the channel.
Note that some leagues are going to have streaming services outside youtube that they use, which may or may not be free and/or require a VPN, but in this post I wanted to focus on youtube since that's what most people are going to default to.
Also note that there are lots of other ways to watch hockey on youtube. There's country-specific youtube channels that stream multiple leagues and/or international matchups (Ukraine as an example), there are individual teams that host their own channels (multiple Federal Prospects Hockey League teams stream their own games), there's some random beer leagues that stream their own games (there's an Australian 4v4 league called the Kondos Ice Hockey League), FloHockey youtube channel has random free game streams from their collection of leagues, and lots of channels post whatever games from various leagues, including full NHL games. None of these are what I was focusing on in this post. Perhaps I can create a follow-up with further links to all of that, idk.
Let me know if there's any you've found that I can add here!
