Studying Stempniak

"Lee's the type of kid that you want your daughter to marry," teammate Bill Guerin says, without laughing. "And I don't say that about a lot of hockey players. You almost wish sometimes that he would be a little cockier, just a little bit."

This comes from a great little feature on the St. Louis Blues' Lee Stempniak that ran in the National Post yesterday.

If you're not checking out Joe O'Connor's hockey features, you're simply missing out, as he's been producing great reads all season (there was one last week on Paul Coffey, the car salesman). Joe's got a magazine background (not that I ever held that against him), and his featurish writing style is refreshing to see amongst a crowd of guys who can just hammer out the game stories.

It's almost unfortunate we don't see more feature-type hockey writing in newspapers (and especially magazines), as I think that's a real untapped niche now that the internet has made the traditional game story redundant.