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Dan Barnes
The Edmonton Journal
June 01, 2003
EDMONTON - Pity the hockey fan, for the game he loves has gone so obviously
wrong.
Pity the fan more, because those in a position to fix it have been beaten by
the challenge.
Pity the fan most, for she is still expected to support the home team next
season and in so doing, give tacit approval to a product that has been
losing entertainment value for a decade and is experiencing a harrowing
decline in viewership this spring.
The last two rounds of the Stanley Cup playoffs have produced some of the
least interesting hockey in recent memory. Once Ottawa was eliminated in the
Eastern Conference Final, Canadian fans tuned out by the hundreds of
thousands. CBC's ratings for the first two games of the Cup Final were
abysmal, each of them drawing about 700,000 fewer viewers than the first two
games of the Detroit-Carolina final series of 2002.
But there is an upside to this downturn. Because the action in these
playoffs has been so lame for so long, the simmering debate over rule
changes has boiled over. The deathly-dull Devils and Ducks have sparked a
continent-wide dialogue worthy of the fans' attention and the league powers'
immediate action. Fans want goals. They want excitement. And they want it
now.
So widen the nets. Expand the ice surface. Restrict the size of goaltenders'
equipment. Institute the no-touch icing rule. Legislate against the neutral
zone trap. Eliminate the two-line offside. Play four-on-four, not just in
overtime, but all the time.
None of these are new ideas and some of them aren't even good ideas. But
they are flooding the airwaves, the Internet and newspaper pages every day
as the Ducks and Devils dumb down a great game to its lowest common
denominator. The Ducks shoot it in, the Devils shoot it out. Both teams send
in one player as a forechecker and clog the neutral zone with four others so
completely that talent surrenders to systems and grinders become more
effective and just as prized as finesse players.
And that's just plain wrong.
But we can turn it to our advantage. The hockey world isn't watching the
final series, but it is nonetheless consumed by all that is wrong with the
game. Let the voices of the disenchanted grow. Let the masses rise up. It is
time for a fan revolution aimed at forcing the NHL to improve the product.
Phone the general manager of your home team and let him know you're sick and
tired of this garbage and won't tolerate it. Demand change.
Sure, the NHL has tweaked the rule book just about every season. The
hurry-up faceoff rule, which they borrowed from international hockey in the
wake of a successful Salt Lake City Olympics tournament, proved an
unqualified success. It reduced the post-whistle scrums and shortened games
by about 20 minutes.
But the NHL shouldn't stop there. They have merely succeeded in limiting our
exposure to bad hockey. But it's still really bad.
It seems nobody has a new answer. So use an old one. Go to four-on-four full
time.
"The players now are all big and strong and the rinks are too small,"
Jaromir Jagr said during the 1999-2000 season. "If I was going to make
hockey better, I'd either make the rinks bigger or play four-on-four all the
time."
Well, most of the NHL rinks can't accommodate the larger Olympic ice
surfaces, so the economics would suggest four-on-four hockey is a better
idea.
Hey, it was a good idea in the early 1980s when the talent-rich Edmonton
Oilers ate up their sluggish brethren whenever penalties forced the teams
into four-on-four situations. In 1985, jealous rivals of the Oilers
conspired to legislate four-on-four hockey out of the rule book. It took
almost 15 years, during which offence declined at an alarming rate, for the
NHL to realize the error of its ways and allow four-on-four hockey in
regular season overtime.
"The only criticism is that this new rule favours the skill teams, with the
offensive defencemen," said Mike Smith, who was the Leafs associate GM at
the time.
How myopic was that?
Skill must be allowed to save the NHL, because systems are killing it and
fewer fans are watching it. In the fall of 2002 the National Hockey League
Fans Association polled its membership on a variety of topics, including
rule changes. Seventy-five per cent of the 2,628 respondents were in favour
of four-on-four hockey in overtime.
Only slightly more people than that are watching this Stanley Cup Final.
dbarnes@thejournal.canwest.com
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