They Shoot, They Bore: the Nothing Happens League is back; 10 things I hate about the NHL
Feeling blah that ‘hockey is back’? Well, the NHL is a lumbering dinosaur on skates that beams late-stage capitalism for 9 months a year, but only because the players' bodies can't do it for all 12.
If the start of the National Hockey League season seems barely noticeable, that might just be you making a wellness decision.
You might call a business decision, though, to borrow a football-commentator term used when a player avoids a crunching collision in order to live to play the next play. One small offshoot of Living With Big ’Rona is that it has caused all of us to reevaluate our relationships to the sports worlds that made us, and what we get out of those. All this alone time led to drilling down to get to the elements of sport that are fun because they excite our curiosity, create space for analytics-defying surprises and also check the box marked ‘Bloodlust’ from time to time.
And the NHL, entering 2021-22, or Season 7 of Free Connor McDavid, is failing on those counts more often than not. At least until the playoffs. Hockey’s inherent conservatism that spills into being a salary-capped, overcoached, over-goaltended, oversized, and overanalyzed product is draining the life from it, even though there have never been more elite skaters and shooters in the sport.
A sport should offer a welcome distraction. Instead, the NHL is reflecting our late-stage capitalist society waking nightmare back at us from October till sometime in June, when either the Cap Circumventors or Randos With A Hot Goalie hoist the Stanley Cup. (Don’t worry, someone from the rights holder will be along to tell you Hockey Has Never Been Better.) In other words, you are right to redirect your interest to the sports that do a little better at off-setting this through actual excitement.
We are just now waking up to having everything driven by the market society, where profit and revenue stand in for quality. Sports are no different. The NHL, where the first and only thing you are expected to know about a player on your favourite team is “cap hit and term,” might simply be less talented than the NFL and NBA-WNBA are at covering up the awful truth.
The big ball and/or stick leagues might rate some benefit of the doubt for knowing the hard truths about using a 20th-century biz model in 2021. They weren’t built for fragmentation. They probably know that the leagues that are best poised to come through all this are the ones that have;
(a) figured out either how to protect revenues from digital-era disruption;
(b) fostered a culture where the fans feel a sense of ownership.
The NFL and NBA-WNBA are probably the best at (a). There is very little of (b) to be had in North America’s traditional big four. It exists a little in major-college football, and to varying degrees in European pro soccer, particularly with Germany’s 50+1 rule in the Bundesliga. The decade-old National Women’s Soccer League is still new and not institutionalized enough to have space for it. The community-ownership model has allowed a bit of it to stay in the Canadian Football League, for better (Winnipeg) or worse (hey there, Edmonton Elks).
Everyone else is just there to get as much profit out as they can and collect them retention bonuses. But I digress. The list could be longer and it should be shorter, but here are 10 things I hate about you, NHL. I hate…
How your sport is basically Soccer On Ice when we have so many ways to watch actual soccer now.
Two things get a hockey crowd going: goals and fights, whether it’s in expectation or realization. The latter has been phased out incrementally. Without goals, and goals that actually come from unscreened shots from outside the ‘home plate zone’1 in front of the net, 85 to 90 per cent of the game action is “foreplay,” to quote Ken Dryden.
The NHL does not have enough scoring.
Playoff games are less about skill and more about random swinging at pucks. Everyone plays fast, but the players’ speed, size and pattern recognition has overwhelmed the 200-by-85 ice sheet that has been the same dimensions since 1877.
The proof is in the production, or lack thereof. My go-to for evaluating offence are a team’s 5-on-5 goals-for per 60 minutes (GF/60) and expected goals-for per 60 minutes (xGF/60) at Natural Stat Trick, with the score/venue adjustments applied.
There have been 244 team-seasons since 2013-14, which was the first full season under the current collective bargaining agreement (CBA). How many teams have averaged 3.00 goals per 60 minutes at 5-a-side in that span?
Four.
The 2017-18 and ’18-19 Lightning, and the Maple Leafs and Capitals, also in ’18-19. That works out to 1.6 per cent of all the teams in the league. There have been far more teams that fell below 2.00 goals per 60 across a full season. There have only been two apiece in each of the last two seasons, so yay, the worst teams aren’t as bad.
The problem of filling 32 NHL rosters, of course, means that there are barely any good teams. Of course, I have confirmation bias and want the stats to show there is stagnation. Here are the GF/60 of the 10th-best 5-on-5 team (source: Natural Stat Trick) in each of the last eight seasons:
2013-14: Jets, 2.35
2014-15: Kings, 2.33
2015-16: Blue Jackets, 2.26
2016-17: Predators, 2.42
2017-18: Panthers, 2.49
2018-19: Golden Knights, 2.57
2019-20: Penguins, 2.71
2020-21: Oilers, 2.52
There has been an uptick, but that does not reflect puck luck and goaltending. The 10th-best team in expected goal rates (xGF/60) during the ’20-21 season, or the most lower upper middle class team in the league, was slightly less productive than their counterpart from ’13-14:
2013-14: Senators, 2.25
2014-15: Penguins, 2.24
2015-16: Canadiens, 2.21
2016-17: Canadiens, 2.28
2017-18: Sharks, 2.38
2018-19: Blue Jackets, 2.37
2019-20: ’Hawks, 2.33
2020-21: Oilers, 2.20
That looks like stagnation. Or it could be confirmation bias talking, but at least it’s related to sports and not vaccines that will turn a virus from a pandemic to endemic once people stop being so bloody stubborn.
How you fail to create, or even care, about relatable narratives that pull people into caring about the outcome.
Sportspeople, like all of the materially wealthy, are sealed-off more from us rabble. That creates a challenge to make the rooting public feel like they know the players as people poured into tintypes in a reality show. Have you noticed the NFL is pretty much a reality show built around quarterbacks?
The rudiments of hockey — short shifts, faces hidden under helmets and visors, and a team-first culture — work against that. Those are all aspects that make the sport special, and no one would seriously suggest getting rid of them, but it indirectly distances the public from the performers, who are accultured to hide their personalities. What do you really know about Connor McDavid, or about Auston Matthews, other than that he seems to think that growing a greasy mustache passes as a personality?
… your Doug Ford approach to fostering growth of women’s hockey.
The Ontario Government for the Property Developers, and its figurehead failson frontman in the premier’s chair, has sadly perfected the Unsuccessful Shrimp Company approach to leadership. It is a slow jam of ignoring what needs to be done for an eternity even when there is a screaming need for it and wide-and-deep public support. You wait until the last possible moment, half-ass something that the media will trumpet. Then, voilà, everyone is exhausted, but they know who is in charge up in this B-word.
That loosely affixes to the NHL’s refusal to truly support a full-time, full-pay women’s league. There is no argument against it other than we don’t wanna, and it is hard to say with certainty what the audience is for Ponytail Puck Outside of the Olympics until there is a league in North America for Petra Niemenen and pals.
And how long will it be business-wise to be seen as less than supportive of sportswomen? The top European soccer teams are investing heavily in women’s teams. Nine of the 10 teams in Sweden’s women’s hockey league are affiliated with a men’s team. Even if the league structures differ, it seems like there is a greater allyship. The NHL, in the grand banal hockey tradition, is falling back on ‘when in doubt, go into a defensive shell.’ There is already a generation of hockey women who were pros, but not on salary.
The Great Quadrennial Hem-Haw over going to the Olympics.
Brevity — ha! — limits getting into the weeds of negotiations between the NHL, International Ice Hockey Federation and International Olympic Committee. But assurance that the NHL is always going to be in the Winter Games would be nice, eh?
The league has a point about having to assume all the risk, and less of the reward, when it takes an Olympic break every four years. But fans are probably tired of hearing it. Does no one realize that the soccer club-and-country concept boosts fan engagement?
How it has zero culture of fan ownership.
As mentioned up top, there might not be any idealized public spaces in Big Sport. Crikey, did you see who has been allowed to buy Newcastle United of the English Premier League? There is some aspect of the team-to-fan relationship, though, and it can force changes to the product.
The NHL does not have that, and it contributes to situations such as Eugene Melnyk still being the investor-operator of the Ottawa Senators, or execs with the Chicago ’Hawks escaping consequences covering up sexual assault in 2010.
How there cannot even be a conversation about how to properly right-size the league to promote greatness.
A flimsy fan theory: no league should have more than 20 teams, perhaps 24, before it has to adopt promotion-relegation.
The NHL having the same number of teams as the National Football League is patently absurd. It mostly reflects that Commissioner Gary Bettman and second-in-command Bill Daly dumb-down the sport’s culture by filtering everything through a football lens, in order to appeal to the Karens and Kevins who are put off by the NFL trying to be ‘woke’ and possibly by brain injuries (definitely in that order, and boy, do we have some news about the NHL’s science denial).
The NFL can legitimately have 32 teams. Its teams play 17 reg-season games, not 82, so it is easier to pay attention to several games in a week and feel current. The NFL talent pool comprises about 600 football-playing four-year schools in North America.
Hockey fishes in a much shallower sea. There are only 60 pro-track teams in the Canadian Hockey League and about the same number in the U.S. college system. Aside from Russia, the major European hockey-playing nations all have relatively small populations.
That 20-to-24 figure also comes back to relatability. It is hard to keep that many teams straight in one’s head. It cannot be for nothing that the most devoutly followed leagues in the anglo, western world, the EPL (20 teams in the top flight), and Power 5 college football’s Southeastern Conference (to be 16 teams come 2025), are much smaller.
As Wayne would say in Letterkenny, figure it out, NHL.
How Bettman’s cap reduced the sport to corporate accounting on skates.
See the earlier point about how the first and only thing you are expected to know about a player on your favourite team is “cap hit and term”. The salary cap system has not made the NHL better. It has just made it a frustrating watch, like the last few seasons of a TV series after all the writers moved on to other projects, and the ones who remained are high on praise from The New York Times.
It all contributes to The Cult of the General Manager. Who needs it?
The way NHL treats Canadianness as a bug, rather than as a feature.
This is where a Xennial struggles. In our youth, one-third of the NHL’s franchises were based in Canada. That was in the early 1990s, when Canada’s population was 28 million people.
Three decades later, the population is about 37 million, with almost all of the growth occurring in urbanized areas. Yet there are still only seven teams, comprising barely one-fifth of the 32-team league. There is clearly the population base to support another team or two — just do not ask Nate Silver where to put ’em — and there is zero chance of it happening. It is right and just to resurrect the Québec Nordiques, and install a second team in Southern Ontario, but ain’t happening.
Even calling the outdoor games that are held in Canada periodically the ‘Heritage Classic’ smacks of condescension. It implies Canada is part of the league’s past, but not necessarily a larger one down the line. The population trends suggest otherwise.
However, what if I were to tell you it’s not Bettman, or Americanization, that keeps the complement of Canadian-based franchises low?
Segueing to:
How you have monopolies in Montreal and Toronto… and how Torontonians do not get that le fer aiguise le fer, and yeah, I wrote that en français to be extra irascible.
Ask anyone looped into hockey about a second team in Southern Ontario and you get the same rote ‘The Leafs’ll never allow it’ answer. That is true, but what kind of answer is that if your line of work is anything other than a member of the board of directors of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, Ltd.? When did we all become corporate communications drones?
It is not changing, because Canada, but it is also unacceptable. The territory was claimed by MLSE, but was never negotiated. The same goes for the Montréal Canadiens having Québec to themselves.
There are two-team markets in the United States, Japan and Europe, and no team has become insolvent yet because of direct competition in the marketplace. The monopolies exist to inflate the price-point for tickets in Toronto and, whoa, how is that working out for MLSE at this writing as it stages its first real game where it is allowed a capacity crowd?
That good, eh?
The late and lamented Canadiens-Nordiques rivalry, the big city vs. little city for the hearts, minds and the palates of beer drinkers across the province,2 proved that iron sharpens iron. One did not have to be a francophone, or even speak passable French, to get into it. Being next to each other made the teams work that much harder to draft and develop Québécois players, and they had layoff series that are still being rehashed today.
And that ended, because while it benefited the Canadiens competitively, their corporate parent, Molson, hated-hated-hated it. The Carling O’Keefe brewery was the investor-operator of the Nordiques, and was also the presenting sponsor of a Friday night game of the week that aired on the Canadian Television Network (CTV) for a spell in the mid-’80s. Molson worked through back channels to weaken the package, and it died. O’Keefe sold the Nordiques soon thereafter and the franchise’s days there were numbered it was relocated to Denver in 1995.
No Canadian club has won they Stanley Cup since the Nordiques were around as the Canadiens’ yappy younger brother. That is not why they have not, but it is telling.
Changer d’avis. (Change my mind.)
Last, if not least, how Hockey Twitter never unplugs.
Two words: Go. Outside.
Some active critical distancing from the sport is needed, in order to avoid being part of the problem by being glued to it. Hell, I doubt anything I have said here is particularly original, or unlikely to also come out of the minds of devoted fans. They know the sport blew a tire as some point, but have bought into much of the NHL’s messaging.
The NHL has never existed in any idealized form, not even during your or my childhoods, but you should consume a lot less of it. People tuning out is the only thing that creates the desperation for Big Sport to change.
Watch pro-track puck in the Ontario Hockey League. Go watch U Sports teams; they deserve the support. One should only go for a NHL fix on Saturday nights once baseball’s World Series and college football wrap for the winter. And then come back in for the playoffs, although even then, you’ll need to duck out in the second or third round to get away from the monotony of random swinging.
That is more than enough for today. Please stay safe, and be kind.
AKA The Underpants Zone.
Molson owned the Canadiens at that time, and the Carling O’Keefe Brewery owned the Nordiques until 1988.
Great writing Neate! If you could change one thing about the NHL for the better whaaaat would it be?