How to Fix the National Hockey League

By: Tom Powers
Posted In: Sports

ST. PAUL, Minn.- The good news is that, eventually, the NHL will solve its labor problems, and the players will return to the ice. The bad news is that, eventually, the NHL will solve its labor problems, and the players will return to the ice- and the same old boring, tired brand of hockey will take up right where it left off.

“We used to tell people, ‘Go to a game, and you’ll be hooked,’ ” said Darren Pang, a hockey commentator for ESPN. “But we’ve taken some of the entertainment out of hockey.”

What happened? How did such a powerful, graceful game become so dreary?

“It’s not about scoring chances. It’s about flow,” said Bob Kurtz, the radio voice of the Wild. “They’ve got to make the flow of the game better.”

“You don’t see the end-to-end rushes anymore,” said Kurtz’s broadcast partner, Tom Reid. “I can still see Guy Lafleur and Bobby Hull, their hair blowing in the breeze . . . “

There’s no flow. There’s no scoring. There’s precious little aggressiveness. The big hits have dwindled. And dropping the gloves, instead of being an unprompted release of emotion, has become as calculated and choreographed as a Broadway musical.

Where has all the spontaneity gone?

“You’re right,” said Mario Tremblay, an assistant coach with the Wild. “A couple of good, clean body checks, a couple of good fights, there you go!”

When hockey returns, let’s bring it back properly. The game is not beyond repair. It can be fixed. Below, you will see how.

The league ought to listen. It is on the wrong path. It’s turning into soccer- all tactical defense with no tempo, no physical play and precious few scoring chances. And everyone knows what an impossible sell professional soccer has been in this country.

Here’s what needs to be done:

DUMP THE RED LINE

Don’t confuse goal scoring with excitement. A 1-0 game can be very entertaining if both teams have opportunities to put the puck in the net. The key is getting those scoring chances.

All teams now play some version of the trap. It’s easy to see why. The players are much bigger and faster, yet the dimensions of the ice surface remain the same. So why shouldn’t smart coaches take advantage of the natural congestion?

The ice size isn’t going to change. No owner is going to yank choice seats in order to build a larger skating surface.

OK, fine. Yank the red line.

Open up play by allowing long passes up the middle. Give a skater room to sneak behind the defensemen. Stretch the trap.

If that’s considered sacrilege, so be it. Other professional team sports have made adjustments when necessary. When so many baseball games became 1-0, 2-1 affairs in the late 1960s, they lowered the pitcher’s mound. In football, they moved the hash marks closer to the middle so the offense had more room.

ONE REFEREE

Everybody, and I mean everybody, hates the two-referee system. Players, coaches, fans all despise it. Since being adopted full time in 2000, the two-referee system has done nothing but hurt hockey.

First, there is no consistency. A penalty at one end of the ice often is not a penalty at the other end. It’s as if two games are going on at the same time.

Second, it becomes a contest. “Well, my partner has called four penalties, so I better call one.” Yuck.

Third, with two sets of eyes competing, every little ticky-tacky infraction is called. Talk about altering the flow. Plus, guys are afraid to breathe on each other because someone might blow a whistle.

Fourth, players no longer police themselves as they did when there was one referee. Instead, with every little thing being called, they try to draw penalties. They grab their wrist and keel over at the slightest touch. They dive. They fake injury.

It’s like watching a bad acting class.

Get rid of one referee. The NHL brain trust needs to understand that we don’t want every little thing called. This is supposed to be a physical game.

REAL LUMBER

How many of these new composite sticks shatter during the course of a game? Five? Nine? Some players spend more time heading to the bench for new sticks than they do joining the rush.

The lightweight, high-tech sticks of today shatter at the worst possible times_on breakaways, while shooting, while battling for position in front of the net. Half the time there are so many broken sticks on the ice it looks as if someone is having a yard sale.

But there is a more insidious problem with these sticks.

Except for the occasional poke check, hockey is meant to be played with two hands on the stick. With the old one-piece wooden sticks, that wasn’t much of a problem. They were heavier, and skaters needed to keep two hands on them.

Composite sticks, made of various materials including graphite, weigh virtually nothing. They can be whipped around like toothpicks, or machetes. Someone sees a check coming and, boom, up comes the stick.

This isn’t golf. Go back to the wood.

MORE NET, LESS GOALIE

As Kurtz says, we either need to make the nets larger or the goalies smaller.

Or both.

The removal of the red line would ease some of the congestion, but a breakaway shooter still is going to be faced with a goaltender who is wider than the net.

“I’d make the net a little bigger,” Tremblay said. “In the ’70s, the game was open, and the goaltenders were not as good. Times have changed. We have to do something else.

“All the teams are playing the same now. Making the net a little bigger would give them more of a chance.”

A few inches all the way around would at least give a forward some open space at which to shoot. All he sees now is the heavily padded goaltender.

LET ‘EM SCRAP

In today’s politically correct NHL, fighting is discouraged. Referees heap on extra penalties whenever they can. It doesn’t take much to get suspended, either.

This stance has been adopted to appease American critics who have, for whatever reason, yelped about hockey violence for decades. Why the more traditionalist Canadian fans haven’t been vocal in their outrage to this approach is a mystery.

A good scrap is entertaining. At least it used to be. Now it’s practically scripted. One tough guy lumbers over the boards and fights another tough guy. There is no more spontaneous combustion. And the code of honor among hockey players is gone.

“It’s part of the game,” said Tremblay. “Again, in the ’70s, three quarters of the players didn’t have helmets. You never saw the elbow or the stick near the face. Now you’ve got the face shields and every other thing.”

More cheap shots and fewer scraps. This is an improvement?

MORE FLOW II

Hockey should not be geared toward television. It should be geared toward the 18,000 fans who walk through the turnstiles.

Says Pang: “We should improve the in-house game before we worry about television or anything else. We have to improve the game for the fans in the building.”

That’s a bold statement for someone who works in TV, but Pang has the game’s best interests at heart. And he is absolutely right. All the TV timeouts can slow the game to a crawl. And they suck the life out of a crowd.

BAD CHECKING RULE

The rule about checking from behind hasn’t worked. That’s mostly because players now turn their backs on 80 percent of the hits they receive, trying to draw a checking-from-behind penalty.

Furthermore, defensemen now can pursue a dumped-in puck without having to worry about getting splattered against the end boards. A lot of goals used to be generated by pressuring that defenseman into a turnover. Now he knows that, even if someone is breathing down his neck, he isn’t going to get hit.

Why should a forward waste his energy? The answer is: most don’t. Instead, they peel off the defenseman and get into “trap position.” This is a bad thing.

IT WILL WORK

There you have it: flow, scoring, physical play. How much fun would that be?

Will the NHL smarten up, or will it turn into soccer?

Of course, some aspects of the NHL are beyond repair. The owners’ money grab _ flooding the Sun Belt with teams _ will be a financial drag on the league for years. Surely they were smart enough to know that as soon as the novelty wore off, those teams would struggle financially.

Still, there is hope as the game again could become exciting. This was one blueprint. No doubt there are others.

Perhaps someday under Commissioner Wayne Gretzky, these things will come to pass.

Why not Gretzky? He would bring instant credibility. And the game couldn’t be any duller than it is now under the current administration.

___

c 2004, St. Paul Pioneer Press (St. Paul, Minn.).

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