Addressing The Real Issues In The NHL

***CONTRIBUTING WRITER: NEWMAN WELLSTONE***The NHL is back and it’s all fun and games for the time being. Unfortunately Sidney Crosby isn’t a panacea for all that ails the NHL. The NHL’s biggest problem is its own size. Thirty teams are far too many to produce a consistently appealing product. A hockey team has four lines of forwards that see ice time every game. That is twelve forwards. Multiply this number by thirty and you get 360. Given the unspecified positional nature of hockey at the forward positions, there are quite a few similarities between wing and center play. So essentially the league is demanding over 360 players to perform comparable tasks. It has become clear since the most recent expansions that the market of the professional hockey forward is under-supplied. This is reflected in the low scoring of the last decade. There are simply too many positions for not enough talent. Have you watched some of the clowns the NHL bottom-feeders trot out there as 3rd and 4th line forwards? No, of course you haven’t because you don’t watch OLN and you know that the shitty teams aren’t worth watching. (Professional baseball is experiencing a similar problem with starting pitching. Such a long season calls for a 5 man rotation with at least two alternates. This is a minimum of over 200 starting pitchers needed for just one season. There just aren’t enough guys out there.) The answer to this problem is for the NHL to suck in its gut and drastically tighten the belt. The excess teams need to be trimmed away and the talent needs to be re-concentrated in cities where we can be sure the game will flourish. From there the league can grow and expand. Yes; it would take time. We’re a culture of instant gratification and we don’t want to see a league shrink. But this concept of addition by subtraction would be necessary to produce an appealing brand of hockey. Here’s the league:

Canada Conference East:

Montreal
Toronto
Quebec
Ottawa

West:

Edmonton
Vancouver
Calgary
Winnipeg

America Conference East:

Hartford
New York
Philadelphia
Boston

West:

Chicago
Minneapolis
Detroit
Denver


I know some of these cities had teams that were forced to move. This can be avoided in a new look NHL if the ownership understood their audience. We all know hockey can survive in Canada. The teams just need to not fear the competition of the money markets of the American cities that have recently lured in teams. If the Canadian cities and ownership can be guarenteed a grace period in which they will be allowed to grow with out fear of being bought up by someone looking to make a buck, they can certainly establish a fan base. Of course cities like Los Angeles, St. Louis, Dallas, and others can be slated for expansion.

This new NHL would have a shorter schedule so we aren’t watching hockey players with dead legs because they’ve played four times in a week. A team will play each team in its division eight times. This is 24 games. They will play the other four teams in the conference six times. This is another 24 games. They will play each team in the other conference four times. The total is 64 games. An attractive number. Also a reasonable number that is plenty of games but not so many that it becomes wearing. Can you imagine the quality of the hockey that would occur with such a concentration of talent? There would be so many good players on every team that it would be a lot harder to pass over a game on TV even if it wasn’t your squad that was playing.

Playing the other teams in your division so frequently would be a plus because it promote the type of intense rivalries that develop in baseball. Amplifying the importance of divisional play is good for sports. It gives more teams a change to be "in it" near the end of the year which in turn causes more people to watch as the season progresses. A Canadian team versus an American team for Lord Stanley's Cup every year would add a sense of national pride to games that would be good for both countries. I think more people would be inclined to watch the Stanley Cup if America's pride was on the line rather than just one city's pride.

Obviously this league is an unlikely dream. Possibly the only way it could happen would be if one very very rich man or woman bought the entire league and just started making wholesale changes with an almost megalomaniac like heavy-handedness. All of this is unlikely but it is nice to talk about.

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