Hockey needs to change...

I love hockey and soccer and prefer to watch either of them over any sport. the NBA is boring to me. It always comes down to the last 2 minutes that even matter. Most people want the big play every moment. Thats why people love the NFL. Baseball…….dont even get me started…………BORING and LONG!

If you do not like hockey, that does not mean it “needs to” or should change in any way. You want the players to be more identifiable? Well, too bad, the helmets and gear are necessary because the game is incredibly fast-paced and dangerous. You want more scoring? You think most goals come down to luck? You’re grossly oversimplifying the complexities of the game. It is a defensive game and truly a team sport, players can rarely change the outcome of a game by individual will alone. You think hockey is in some desperate need of attracting new fans? I’d argue the need is much less than perceived. You think the NFL and NBA are better? Great, sounds like you’re perfectly content to return to ignoring hockey. Please do so.

In a 4 – 2 NHL game there are about 6 meaningful plays. You guessed it, all six goals.

And it is right here that you show why you can’t appreciate hockey and like basketball. You don’t find defense interesting of worthwhile. Unfortunately years and ESPN screaming at you that dunks are amazing while ignoring everything else has worked.

We don’t want you anyway.

we all have our likes and dislikes……..I hate basketball and baseball! enough said

I am a huge hockey, football, baseball and college lacrosse fan. I don’t care about basketball other than Syracuse and following what the Big East are doing so I know roughly what to expect when Cuse plays them and will adapt to the ACC as it approaches. I can’t stand soccer unless it’s a major world tournament, and after the US loses I’ll track Germany, and once they lose if it’s on and there’s nothing else I’ll watch.

Also, every sport has examples of bad games. If you say football is the most exciting sport, I say try dialing into a 6-3 field goal contest in a rain storm, or some other example like that. We all have our attachments to different games/teams/sports for whatever reason those attachments were made. I can watch a 2-1 baseball game and think it was unbelievable action with how a team pitched a lineup, got a couple slick plays in the field with a double play spiced in and someone thrown out to end an inning.

Scoring isn’t always great either, last night’s Sugar bowl had insane scoring but you can’t tell me that I have to believe that’s a great game.

I have seen hockey games that have a ton of goals because the play was sloppy to me and I hated it because it was a train wreck in my eyes, but you (global you) loved it because there was 15 goals.

So then we ask, could hockey appeal to more people? Maybe, but maybe it would just appeal to different people and they would trade 2 Jims who like the new but 3 Bobs who miss the old. No reasonable person would assume that hockey isn’t changing just for the sake of not changing, it is called sports business for a reason, and I am not saying that fans don’t frequently come up with better ideas than the people whose jobs are specifically to think up ways to improve the respective sports because history will show that they can.

So, I guess I can’t tell you what or who is right and which is the path that will bring you to your nirvana. What I can do is say look deeper, watch enough to see if you can pick up the nuances, see if you can take joy in seeing crisp passes to an open man only to be robbed by a flexible skinny man covered in armor, or a simple 2v1 on the boards where a player isolates an opponent and pops the puck out to where his teammate can make a clean exit. Think of the ways that someone like a Rubio can influence a basketball game without scoring or even without the ball altogether, and there is where you might find what your hockey is.

We tell you ways on how we find it exciting, and we ask you to reconsider the sport as it now exists. Your response is that we are either “wrong” and that we need to revert to an 80s style of play where scoring was higher than compared to now. To consider your scoring comparison, I wanted to look at NHL scoring over a longer period of time. Below is the average goals per game from 1917-2008, by decade:

1917-18 to ’26-27: 6.88
1927-28 to ’36-37: 4.81
1937-38 to ’46-47: 6.15
1947-48 to ’56-57: 5.24
1957-58 to ’66-67: 5.86
1967-68 to ’76-77: 6.30
1977-78 to ’86-87: 7.46
1987-88 to ’96-97: 6.71
1997-98 to ’07-08: 5.32

*All data from a 2007 NY Times article here.

As you can see, our number now is similar to the averages during the original 6 era. Overall, the average NHL scoring over this time period is 6.08 goals per game, which is 12% higher than the numbers we currently have. Would more scoring make the game more exciting? Maybe, but we could just consider the 80s as an unusually high scoring period (22.7% above average) due to talented forwards and average goaltending. Even if we use your number for the 80s decade, we get goal totals that are 34.4% greater than the average NHL score from 1917-2008.

Overall, I would consider the 80s as an abnormally high scoring period when compared to NHL history. To revert back to those scoring numbers, we would need to:

- make goalies wear smaller pads
- increase the size of the net
- call obstruction and more penalties in general
- expand the rink size to International size

These could be done, but they are massive changes to make in a sport that has been relatively well received since the lockout. I would welcome any new fans to this site, but your comments above seem to show that you are not really willing to listen to our point of view on the subject. As VFN FTW said before, you need to relate the nuances you find in the other sports you like to the nuances in hockey. If you do this, you may find more respect for the game as it is.

Go ride a fucking bike and stay the hell off of our boards. If we need to increase scoring to attract NBA fans like yourself who think Ricky Rubio is the second coming then I’d rather just leave it the way it is and to hell with your ilk. you’re the kind of super-american sports fan with no attention span who cannot appreciate the nuances of sport and can only enjoy the ethereal rush of goal or point scoring. the second you brought up the NBA I knew we were in for a doozy of a post. You’re probably also the kind of team participation-hating sports fan who prefers NBA basketball to college.