I hate it when people say Hockey is not good TV. Hockey is awesome TV. Dare I say, better than baseball on TV. I kind of like that Hockey is still a fringe sport. The game has not been over commercialized and prostituted. If you don't watch hockey, or know anything about it, check it out. You might like it. It's a pretty cool (pun not intended) sport.
BUT hockey was good for the US in the 80's. Whats bad for hockey was EXPANSION! It killed the game...and I'll miss ESPN's coverage because Gary Thorne was awesome!!
How the buckeye would fix hockey. Forgive me for my football mindset, but first I would count each goal as 6 points. Then for the extra point, it would be one on one between the scorer and the goalie for one shot. Now that would be cool. Much more exciting. Imagine a hockey game with no nets. That's about as exciting as hockey is for most American sport fans. Kind of like soccer.
Buck, if you want to change the scoring, you haven't watched a game lately. They have reduced the size of the goalies gear, opened up the long passing game and the entire league has made a shift to younger, faster skill players. It is a very exciting up and down sport these days.
The only games on the television are the Red Wings and occasionly a game on OLN. I always have to watch it online or listen to it online if I want to watch/hear a different game. Only if television ratings would go up.
The game is making a little stride: A 27 percent increase of hits on NHL.com, plus an even more substantial growth in online voting for the All-Stars. There were nearly 27 million All-Star votes cast in six weeks this year, as opposed to 6 million in eight weeks for the last game in 2004. Now only if they changed the schedule: Oh the frustration. Tuesday, despite wide-spread optimism that they would see the light, those with the power to change the structure of the current NHL schedule -- owners and GMs -- voted to stand pat for next season. The scedule limits teams to one visit every three years to some cities. link: SportingNews.com - NHL - NHL unbalanced schedule not changing yet; All-Stars to Montreal in '09 and: CANOE -- SLAM! Sports - Columnists - Vance: NHL schedule needs to be fixed
Wasn't the NHL All-star game last night? No national broadcast on ABC, NBC, CBS or ESPN. Was it on OLN, a channel that everybody gets, but doesn't know it exists or where to find it? I was shocked last week when I heard that the Canadians had not been to the Joe in over 3 years. Is that true? With 78 games, every team should be able to visit each team in the league at least once a season. The Wings have already flown across the country twice this season to visit both the Ducks and the Kings, but the Canadians who are just about 400 hundred + miles up the St Lawrence River have not come into town to visit one of the original teams???
Blame the commisioner? If so, which one? Kind of a funny theory, but an interesting read. "As the conspiracy theory goes, Stern sensed the potential trouble in 1993 while the NHL was in search of a new commissioner. So he looked around his own office for someone so incompetent that if they got the job, the NHL would be marginalized by their mismanagement and never again be a threat to the NBA". Unhappy anniversary - NHL - Yahoo! Sports
