I Still Give a Puck

Everything that was right and wrong about hockey you can see from the most recent playoffs. What's that? You erased the games from your TiVo already? Well, allow me to recap briefly.

I watched every game in the finals between Tampa Bay and Calgary. If you didn't watch it, or really aren't a fan of the game, that first sentence alone should set off some bells. A team from Tampa Bay, Florida not only made it to the finals, but has stood for over a year now as the world champions of hockey. Give that a minute.

Tampa Bay.

In Florida.

There's no ice in Florida.

This is problem number one. Up there in Calgary, which hosted a winter Olympics in the not-too-distant past, they love their hockey. They've known it their whole lives. They got their first pair of skates before they got their first pair of shoes. So if there's professional hockey in that town, there'll be fans. It's a no-brainer.

But the NHL wasn't content staying in hockey towns (read: where it's cold), so they expanded. This wasn't a bad idea, and I'm not going to argue that it was. They're trying to make money by expanding into other markets. It's a business. And at first, they did fine. In the late 1980's, they put the biggest star in the history of the sport in Los Angeles, and it paid off. Big time. Gretzky was a god. He could score goals, he could sell products, he married a model. Hell, he even hosted SNL.

But the game evolved in the mid 1990's. Guys like Gretzky and Lemieux were aging fast, and teams with lesser talent figured out how to slow the game down to their advantage, neutralizing offenses and stifling the goals per game average. In 1992-93, two players tied for the league lead in goals with 76. One was a rookie, playing for a huge hockey town in Winnipeg. Ten years later, three guys tied for the lead-- with 41. Goaltenders aside, the stars had vanished.

The league also faced a debilitating case of salary envy around that time. This wasn't necessarily the players fault (in fact, I still maintain that the players did nothing wrong here). You can't put the onus on any one party, but hockey players were making baseball salaries, and owners couldn't hack it. They were forced to drive up ticket prices, and when you're putting hockey into a new market like Nashville, you can't do that. You're not going to hook the casual fan onto a game (a slower game, no less) by charging his family $150 a night when they can go to a local football game, a game they already know, for a fraction of that. So when the owners finally stood their ground and demanded a salary cap, I took their side. There wasn't any other option. Period. The game needs to be more appealing financially, and nobody was getting that the way things were going. Sure, you can sell out the Garden and Joe Louis Arena three times a week, but you're not going to reproduce those results in the Arizona desert no matter how competitive your team is.

But there's still hope for the NHL. It's got a lot of good things going for it already, things that it can build on (if it's smart). Going back to the most recent playoffs, it's all right there. First off, they have a guy named Jerome Iginla. He's a scorer, he's a leader, he's black, and you're being naive if you think that last point doesn't matter (and I want to take this time to mention how badly I wanted some dumbass announcer to screw up and call him "African-American." To my knowledge they didn't, but they did have to awkwardly call him "of African descent," which was lame in its own right). So not only is he a young rising star who speaks English (another underrated x-factor), he also appeals to a wider segment of the population. Then there's guys like Martin St. Louis, scrappy guys who do everything right. Hockey's version of David Eckstein. And everybody loves an underdog. If the NHL had any clue how to market these guys, they'd already have a headstart.

The last playoffs also featured two high-potency offenses, something all too rare around the league, but something the GMs and owners are desperately pushing for. They're even forming a more aggressive "competition committee" to spark the offenses by implementing some creative rule changes. They've got a kid named Sidney Crosby who's hailed as the next Gretzky. And unlike Eric Lindros, the last player to wear that title, he's not a complete asshole. He's actually, from what I've heard, a lot like Wayne himself-- and that'll be huge in the rebuilding effort, especially since there's a decent chance that a large market team could land him.

The NHL is already doing so many things right, it's a complete shame they have no idea what to do with them. The league has an unexplainable tendency to get the media focused on all the crap, and that should be change #1 for them. "It's a whole new game" is the line they're feeding us, but that's going too far. They don't need a new game. They already had everything right, they just lost sight of it amidst the dollar signs. Let's get back to the high scorers, the stars, the playoff commercials on ESPN that had everybody in stitches (remember those? Where did those go?), the fun, the jerseys as fashion statements, the fans who cared. Let's get that game back.

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