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3/21/2004
What's wrong with the NHL
I'm a hockey fan. Have been most of my life. I spent my early years in Canada - Winnipeg and Mississauga specifically - and spent many hours chasing tennis balls around with a stick too long for my arms.
Now that I live in Texas, I'm hockey-starved. I don't have cable - I'm living off student loans, after all. And ABC runs what, like three games a year? Oooh. Games 1 and 4 of the Cup finals, and some dreary midseason matchup between the Detroit Red Wings and Who-The-Hell-Cares. It's depressing.
I've always wondered why I couldn't even get Stars games on broadcast, since Dallas is right up the interstate. And then the Todd Bertuzzi incident, which I won't rehash, got me to thinking about the state of the NHL right now, and why most people don't give a damn.
Depending on who you believe, NHL teams are running anywhere from $123 million (Forbes Magazine) to $300 million in debt (the owners). See http://www.sportsline.com/nhl/story/6869325. The owners think player salaries are out of control - and they might be right - but wherever the truth lies, players probably face a lockout when the current labor agreement expires. So this is at least a league on the brink of some unpleasantness, if not major financial hardship.
I think there's a deeper problem, though, that owners have yet to seriously consider. One of the most remarkable things about the Bertuzzi fiasco is how quickly the general public moved on. Horrible hit, bad hockey goon, we write you off permanently. Just like that. And why? Because the vast majority of the American public doesn't know Todd Bertuzzi from Tony Soprano's shoe-shine boy. Most people know two things about him - he hit the guy, and he cried about it on TV afterwards. Neither episode exactly made you want to root for the guy.
This hints at the NHL's real problem. They've been trying - mostly unsuccessfully - to sell a game that Americans in many parts of the country didn't grow up playing. It's an uphill grind. Hockey's not the easiest thing to follow on TV - though I assure you as a Canadian that I personally have no problems - and many people in "nontraditional" hockey markets care a lot more about other sports. To paraphrase Homer Simpson, they are trying to cram one more sport down America's already bloated gamehole. And I think this effort to export the game to balmier climes has failed.
I'm not suggesting that the NHL give up. Far from it. I want hockey to flourish. But while it tries to sell the game, it might also try selling some of the personalities. They've been sorely lacking, especially in the post-Gretzky, post-Mario (hopefully), post-Roy era. We're not emotionally invested in the sport, because we don't know the players. If Allen Iverson does something ghoulish on the court, you can bet that, if nothing else, people will argue about it passionately the next day. I am not a basketball fan per se, but if I turn on a basketball game and he's playing, I might watch him for a quarter and subconciously absorb the buy-buy-buy impulse that the beer ads attempt to instill.
Now that I live in Texas, I'm hockey-starved. I don't have cable - I'm living off student loans, after all. And ABC runs what, like three games a year? Oooh. Games 1 and 4 of the Cup finals, and some dreary midseason matchup between the Detroit Red Wings and Who-The-Hell-Cares. It's depressing.
I've always wondered why I couldn't even get Stars games on broadcast, since Dallas is right up the interstate. And then the Todd Bertuzzi incident, which I won't rehash, got me to thinking about the state of the NHL right now, and why most people don't give a damn.
Depending on who you believe, NHL teams are running anywhere from $123 million (Forbes Magazine) to $300 million in debt (the owners). See http://www.sportsline.com/nhl/story/6869325. The owners think player salaries are out of control - and they might be right - but wherever the truth lies, players probably face a lockout when the current labor agreement expires. So this is at least a league on the brink of some unpleasantness, if not major financial hardship.
I think there's a deeper problem, though, that owners have yet to seriously consider. One of the most remarkable things about the Bertuzzi fiasco is how quickly the general public moved on. Horrible hit, bad hockey goon, we write you off permanently. Just like that. And why? Because the vast majority of the American public doesn't know Todd Bertuzzi from Tony Soprano's shoe-shine boy. Most people know two things about him - he hit the guy, and he cried about it on TV afterwards. Neither episode exactly made you want to root for the guy.
This hints at the NHL's real problem. They've been trying - mostly unsuccessfully - to sell a game that Americans in many parts of the country didn't grow up playing. It's an uphill grind. Hockey's not the easiest thing to follow on TV - though I assure you as a Canadian that I personally have no problems - and many people in "nontraditional" hockey markets care a lot more about other sports. To paraphrase Homer Simpson, they are trying to cram one more sport down America's already bloated gamehole. And I think this effort to export the game to balmier climes has failed.
I'm not suggesting that the NHL give up. Far from it. I want hockey to flourish. But while it tries to sell the game, it might also try selling some of the personalities. They've been sorely lacking, especially in the post-Gretzky, post-Mario (hopefully), post-Roy era. We're not emotionally invested in the sport, because we don't know the players. If Allen Iverson does something ghoulish on the court, you can bet that, if nothing else, people will argue about it passionately the next day. I am not a basketball fan per se, but if I turn on a basketball game and he's playing, I might watch him for a quarter and subconciously absorb the buy-buy-buy impulse that the beer ads attempt to instill.
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by Chris @ 5:51 PM
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