from Dan Robson of Sportsnet,

It’s Tuesday evening, but in Silicon Valley, every night is hockey night. In the sunny centre of the tech universe, disposable wealth and a large population of transplants have created the perfect climate for a traditionally northern sport to thrive. Hockey is growing faster in California than anywhere else in North America, and the dividends of the sport’s spike in popularity are starting to arrive in the NHL, in the form of players like Matt Nieto, Beau Bennett and Kevan Miller. In just two decades, the Bay Area has transformed from empty ice and no competitive leagues into the home of one of the largest, most intense beer leagues in the United States. This is how hockey became Northern California’s game.

When Robert Savoie arrived in San Jose back in 1994, hockey was still very much a niche sport, played almost entirely by people who had moved from the northeastern U.S. or Canada. Savoie was a 30-year-old who’d grown up just outside of Quebec City and moved to California with his wife when she took a job as a microbiologist. As a kid, he’d played the game the way it was traditionally meant to be played—on frozen ponds and in frigid, poorly insulated rinks—and he had continued on into junior and college hockey. The San Jose Sharks had come to town just a few years before Savoie arrived, which gave the sport a boost, but very few people knew how to play. There weren’t any competitive leagues—games had to be organized with like-minded puck-heads at one of the few rinks in the area—and newcomers looking to learn the game in a meaningful way were pretty much out of luck.

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