What should the NHL do to boost sales?

Great Debates
1

NHL season is starting soon! Aren’t you excited?! (No? Me neither. :wink: )

The NHL, or the National Hockey League, will start its first season after last year’s season-closing strike. While I admit that I am not a diehard NHL fan (after all, my Buffalo Sabres were and will continue to be crap), I can assume there are many dissappointed fans who have lost their loyalty to their team and the league in general.

How should/could the NHL boost their popularity to their once high glory? The MLB has initially lost attendence for their games following the 1995 strike. Then, came the 98’ home run race… and the rest is history. Perhaps something similar could happen… like most goalie “saves” or “shutouts” in a season, or most points in a season. Or maybe just a simple ticket decrease and smart advertising will do the (hat) trick? :smiley:

Comment on my thoughts and share some of your own. Thanks! :cool:

2

REDUCE TICKET PRICES!!!

I’d go see the Stars play, but I’ll be damned if I can afford $50 or more a game for it.

I go to about 8 baseball games a year, and the total for tickets comes to ~$30.

I go to one football game a year (GO COWBOYS!) and drop ~$50 for that. There are only 8 available though, and this is my fav team-so I’ll pay a little more for that.

I go to one basketball game a year, and drop like $30 on a ticket for it. Reasonable I guess, but I’d go to more for a cheaper price.

I never go to Hockey games though because the tickets are outrageously expensive and it’s not a sport I’m real high on.

They need to offer $10 tickets, even once a week, and then you’ll win the likes of me. It’s not like football where thre are only 8 home games a year.

3

Fix the game itself.

Especially the ridiculous amount of holding and other play-impeding behaviour that stifles talented players and turns the game from a free-flowing spectacle into a boring wrestling match.

I’ve heard some people suggest allowing two-line passes. That wold certainly open the game up further, but it won’t sure the game’s more ingrained problems, which are mainly due to the issues described in the above paragraph, in my opinion.

And i don’t give a fuck if the reigning Stanley Cup holders happen to be paid to play in Tampa. The league needs at least six fewer teams, and some of those hot state teams should be first to go.

4

I think that word was supposed to be “solve.”

5

They should go back to the rules that were in play in the 1980’s. Do what you have to to eleminate ‘the trap’. Make sure the goalies are wearing small pads. Crack down on the holding and clutching. I used to be a big Oilers fan in the 80’s, and saw them live many times back then. God, that was entertaining hockey. And not just because they were a superstar team. It was just more offensive game, and more fun to watch.

6

I figured that one out but “wold” has defeated me.

7

I’ll just agree with everyone else. Cut the clutch and grab. Fewer teams would be nice. We could easily lose Columbus, Nashville, Florida (the Panthers, but I’m not sure we need the state either), and Anaheim (Mighty Ducks my ass. A sports team should not be a movie tie-in). The goalies could stand to lose a little width around the midsection as well. That’s right Giguere and Luongo. I’m talking about you. :mad:

The schedule needs work as well. Detroit and Toronto have a rivalry going all the way back to the original six and they hardly see each other. I think they only play once this season. However, the wings play Columbus every Tuesday. I know. They’re trying to let the little guys get some of the rivalry pie, but it’s crap. You can’t force a rivalry. Detroit and Colorado aren’t rivals because they never got time away from each other. Their rivals because of a cheap shot in the playoffs.

The absolute worst thing that the NHL could do to increase sales is to foucs solely on scoring. That’s not where the excitement is. Basketball has points by the bucket and I can’t watch it because it is boring as hell. The drama comes from the show of skill: the deke around two defenseman to get the scoring chance, the brilliant save, the poke check that strips the puck, the hits, and the fights (yeah, I said it).

This means that penalties for interference need to be called consistently all the way through the regular season and the playoffs. It also means that the penalties for diving need to get called consistently. It also means that we need to lose some of the less skilled players. I’ve heard it said that spreading the game to new markets will increase the pool of talented players in the long run, but we ain’t there yet. Some teams and players need to go for the good of the game.

8

Rescind the instigator rule.

9

Forget the pads and the trap. You had it right with your third comment.

Unless you enforce the rules against holding and hooking, nothing else they do will work. I am telling everyone right now that you can eliminate the red line, you can reduce the size of neutral ice, you can move the net around, blah blah blah. Unless hooking and holding are again enforced the game will still look crappy. Period, end of story.

I remember the Oilers of the 80s too. My God, what magnificent hockey it was. It’s hard to explain this to people who maybe think hockey today is the way it’s always been played, but hockey in the 80s (it wasn’t just the Oilers, but they were the true masters of the sport) was an amazingly fast, flowing, and elegant sport. The Oilers in some years would score 4, 5 goals a game. 7-4 games were common.

Harborwold has it right in terms of the fact that it’s not scoring that people like, it’s skill. You could increase scoring by simply making the net bigger, but that would not make the game more interesting; the scoring would mostly come from deflections and point shots, the way it tends to now. You’d have 4-3 games instead of 3-2, but the manner in which the game is played would not essentially change; it would still be a grab-fest that would go to whichever team got a lucky bounce off a skate.

The reason the gae used to be better is that in those days you were not allowed to hook or hold. If a forward got two steps past a defenceman, the defenceman was beaten, and the forward had a clean rush. Today he’ll just reach out with his stick and hook the guy, and for some reason it’s no longer called 95% of the time, called only if it’s that team’s turn to take a penalty and it’s really egregious.

You know that thing players do now where they fall on another player - usually a forward in the offensive zone - and hold him down until the play has moved on? That used to be called “holding.” Now it’s not called.

Getting rid of the red line is a neat idea; unfortunately, unless the rules are enforced, getting rid of the red line is as likely to reduce offense as it is to increase it. You wait and see; if defencemen are still allowed to interfere with forward, what will happen is that to guard against the two-line one or both defencemen will hang back even further than they do now in order to catch and hold rushing forwards. That will take them out of the offensive game, actually reducing offensive pressure, since they’d be better off in position to hook guys trying to catch two-line passes.

As to the issue of too many teams, I think most people agree that it’s kind of silly that we have a team in an industrial park in the middle of nowhere in Sunrise, Florida - which is literally a suburb of a suburb - where maybe 6,000 fans bother to show up to weekday games (I know, I’ve been there) but no team in Quebec City, where a shit team in a shit arena was pulling in, every night, 14,000 fans who were, shall we say… enthusiastic. But that’s really not why the game sucks; you could have a 50-team league playing in Nairobi, Bangalore and Tehran and it’d be fun hockey if you enforced the rules the way they were meant to be enforced.