Thursday, September 15, 2005

Game On

October 5th is almost three weeks away, but to Sergei Poporskiov it’s not enough time to get into shape before he faces the Edmonton Oilers. Coming off the heels of a sixteen-month vacation, which Sergei enjoyed by drinking beer, eating cheese-puffs, and watching televised poker. He has put on 35 pounds and has three weeks to drop it, lest the Oilers drop him.

Okay, so I made that up. But the NHL takes the ice on October 5th, and to call the upcoming season an uphill battle would be a violent understatement. The same goes for the effort to win back fans.

The NHL is the only North American professional sport to sacrifice an entire season due to labor disputes. Now, you’d have to be Jerry McGuire to understand all of the talk of “luxury taxes” and “salary caps,” and you’d have to be Lord Stanley himself to care. The important thing is that (apparently) an agreement has been worked out between the owners’ lawyers and the players’ lawyers. For the NHL, that’s the good news. The only good news.

ESPN, which has long been the home of the NHL, has declined the broadcast rights for the upcoming season. They found, during the strike, that poker, college basketball, celebrity bowling and toughman reruns all attract more viewers than hockey ever has. When you boil away the fat, it wasn’t worth the $60 million they were paying the NHL each season for the rights.

ESPN’s refusal forced the NHL to take the games elsewhere. It was then that they ran into a startling obstacle: no one wanted them. Eventually, Outdoor Life Network (OLN) picked up the broadcast rights to 58 regular season games. OLN will broadcast the games on Monday and Tuesday nights, between Survivor reruns and How to Hunt.

NBC picked up the network rights for six weeks of regular-season games starting in January. But they aren’t paying the broadcast rights—instead, they have worked out a profit-sharing agreement with the NHL, similar to the one they had with the short-lived Arena Football League.

It’s gonna be hard to reel in new fans with the games buried on their least-favorite cable-network they don’t even know they have. And new rule changes that take effect this season are designed to help the flow of the game, but will surely drive away longtime NHL fans.

In the new NHL, the neutral zone has been reduced, shootouts will decide tie games, goalies will wear lighter gear, and fighting will have stricter penalties. WHAT?!?

The columnist George Will once said, “Football combines two of the worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.” If this is true, then hockey is violence punctuated by figure skating, and, in my book, that’s worse.

In fact, violence is the only thing that makes hockey watch-able. If you want to increase ratings and draw in fans, the league should sharpen the sticks and make the rink the size of the penalty box. And allow steroids. Guys would be calling in sick to work to watch hockey. You wouldn’t have to worry about broadcast rights—each game could be pay-per-view.

October 5th. Mark it on your calendar. Hockey’s back. And it still sucks.

-From Pulse
September 15, 2005

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