NHL.com strikes again

Wow Pascal Dupuis is starting to look a lot like Mike Zigomanis nowadays..

The great visor debate

It seems like every time there is a facial injury that could have been avoidable, a cry for mandating visors comes out. This time, Eric McErlain has a solid chronicling at the Fan House of Braydon Coburn's situation where he makes a good point: players modify their equipment in several ways to straddle the line of safety vs. performance. Greg Wyshynski! has a pretty comprehensive round up of all the cries for change if you'd like to see a lot of different opinions.

Our opinion is it should be the players choice. Sure a visor does offer more protection, but it's kinda like carry a small fire extinguisher into a fully involved house fire: it might do you some good but it's not going to get the job done. If the NHL was serious about this they would mandate the "cages", full wire protection that will stop all errant sticks/pucks from hitting the eyes and face. Maybe factor in throat protectors too. But where is the line drawn? Injuries are an unfortunate but unavoidable result of the sport of hockey. Sure you could put players in protective little bubbles and everyone would be 100% at the end of the game, but then that game would no longer be hockey.

We played in leagues that mandated cages (most under 18 leagues do nowadays for legal and insurance reasons). The amount of careless stickwork that goes on in those leagues, from our experience, was terrible. It was sloppy and pretty dangerous.

Visors fog, cages hinder vision so players will resist. The peer pressure aspect that McErlain hits on we don't think is as prominent now as it may have been 10-15 years ago. You look around the league and see most of the best young players with visors (Crosby, Ovechkin, Malkin, Kovalchuk, Heatley, etc) and even tough guys like Dion Phaneuf, Jarome Iginla and NHL hits leader Dustin Brown don the shield.

In the end, we just found visors/cages to cumbersome and worth the risk of ditching for more comfortable play. Would it be the end of the world to us if the NHL mandated it? No, not really, unlike so many others this issue doesn't really seem to touch off a strong emotion. And, though we don't have exact numbers, it seems like every year more and more young players are wearing visors so this is probably more than a trend.

Dear Bettman: Status Quo is unacceptable

A lot of time as a hockey fan, sports fans will approach you and say something along the lines of: "yeah the NHL is fun to watch, I haven't kept up with it in a while since the strike, when are they coming back to ESPN?"

Through biting your lip about the whole labor dispute mis-classification, we find the common sports fan would like to watch a little more hockey in a casual setting, but can't seem to find it on the dial.

Whispers floated around the internets last summer that perhaps the NHL and the "World-Wide Leader" would reunite, which by all accounts would inherently give the NHL more exposure, publicity and recognition from the un-ending hype machine of the 4 letter network (see poker). But Little Gary has other plans:

“I think people should anticipate the status quo for the forseeable future and i think the status quo has been very good to us, NBC and VERSUS. VERSUS continues to grow, I think their [sic] in 75 Million homes. People are very pleased, fans are very pleased with the treatment that we get on VERSUS and over the years we did and this isn’t to knock ESPN, they were a good partner - but, when you have all the sports that they do, there were hockey fans that felt we weren’t getting our fair share of the attention, and I don’t think anyone should anticipate any immediate changes in what were doing on broadcasting.”

Uhh Gary, "status quo" is that you have a sport fading from the casual fan's mind primarily on an obscure network. "Status quo" means your network television leaves over-time playoff situations for a GD HORSE RACE! "Status quo", to be frank, sucks.

It would have been more acceptable to say the truth; that Versus offers a good amount of money and that ESPN's scene is too crowded with NBA, College B-ball, NASCAR, and yes, poker; all of which are better options for ESPN to show due to ratings.

We like to think that we don't bash Bettman or the league just to bash them, it's neither productive nor helpful to anything but this situation has our blood a little boiled. For a man as bright as Bettman, it doesn't seem like he's in tune with what's going on. The NHL has been good at seeking out new Web 2.0 opportunities, but television is still key. The NHL doesn't and shouldn't go back to ESPN with their tail between their legs, but to get back on the sports public consciousness, it does have to go back in some manner. It's frustrating that Bettman and co. can't or don't want to see this.


(hat tip to kuklas korner for the link)

Re-seed the playoffs!

Interesting thoughts from the World-Wide-Leader on NHL playoff seeding:

Burnside: How would you reward the conference champs? Give them five home games in the first round? Let them choose their opponent? Actually, I think that might have some merit. How do you stand on the whole divisional alignment situation wherein you're going to have Carolina getting home ice for winning the Southeast Division, but likely ending up with a handful of fewer points than the sixth seed, whom the Canes will face in the first round?

The South(l)eastern division has been the butt of many jokes (some on this site) but they have produced two of the past three Stanley Cup champions. They may be easily the weakest division in hockey, but anything can happen.

Do not like the idea of 5 home games for a team. Doesn't seem right. Owners won't like it either, the chance of only getting 1 game of revenue from the playoffs.

But maybe the system needs a slight tweak. Instead of locking division winners in the top 3 seeds of the conference, why not just guarantee them home ice in the first round of the playoffs?

True standings right now:
1. Montreal 92
2. New Jersey 91
3. Pittsburgh 91
4. Ottawa 89
5. New York Rangers 87
6. Carolina 87
7. Boston 83
8. Philly 82


Those teams highlighted would be playing each other under the current system, with Carolina holding home ice as the #3 seed and those in front of them bumping down a notch.

In the system TST proposed (giving weak division winners a 4 seed), here's how matchups would look right now:

1/8: Montreal/Philly
2/7: Jersey/Boston
3/6: Pittsburgh/NY Rangers
4/5: Carolina/Ottawa


That balances things out a little more. One could argue though under this system it might be more beneficial to be a #5 seed than a #3. But then again if the top seeds all hold, the #5 seed would have to play the #1 in the second round, so that argument doesn't hold water.

Make the divisional races mean something with a reward; home-ice in the first round. But guaranteeing a 3 seed is forcing uneven matchups. Teams that perform well in the regular season and kill division winners (like the losers of the Montreal-Ottawa race and the NJD-Pitt) deserve to be rewarded with not facing a similiar tough #5 seed, reward them too.

The next Daniel Alfredsson?

One of the many things we would change, if we were calling the shots in the NHL, is some of the drafting rules, specifically pertaining to European players. In Europe, where soccer is king, those clubs obviously want to see the multi-million dollar transfer system to shuffle players over to North America. But, as it looks they are learning, that is not going to happen in the foreseeable future.

The way the current draft rules work now in the new Collective Bargaining Agreement (in short: if you draft a player, European or otherwise you have just a few years to sign him; just 2 or 3 years we believe for European players) are not friendly to NHL teams or European players with NHL aspirations. NHL teams would be better off not risking it and drafting more collegiate or CHL players that would have more time to develop and be more open to spending time in the AHL. And, as the data shows, in the past couple years more and more picks (especially high ones) are being used on players playing in North America.

But what about these highly skilled players that play in Europe and need a little more time to develop before jumping to the NHL. Players, like say Daniel Alfredsson, who was drafted in the late rounds (the 6th round of the 1994 draft in this case), and didn’t come over to North America quick enough for his team to retain his rights (though Alfredsson did come over to the NHL for the start of the 1995-96 season, he was 22 years old by then).

We mention Alfredsson by name, because a young player in Sweden, named Fabian Brunnstrom, is said to be perhaps the next Alfredsson, at least by The Hockey News. (follow that link to another link to youtube for a pretty slick highlight reel).

First of all, how awesome is that name; Fabian Brunnstrom. It sounds like he should be some mid-20s hipster heir to a fortune that routinely sips mochas with the likes of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan or something.

But in this case, Brunnstrom is a name you will likely learn for his skill as a hockey player, and learn it quickly too. At 22 years old, Brunnstrom is playing his first year in the Swedish Elite League for a team called Farjestads, and playing well. According to his hockeydb profile, he’s a team high +11 and has 28 points (7g, team high 21a) in 34 games, one point off the team leader.

Bunnstrom is a unrestricted free agent in terms of the NHL, any team could sign him. In essence, what Japanese players are to Major League Baseball could be what Europeans like Bunnstrom are to the NHL. True, there is a salary cap so the big markets cannot gobble up all the talent with big money, but something doesn’t sit right about the whole process.

In the old days, European prospects went to the team’s that dug those diamonds up in the rough, like Alfredsson, or Pavel Datsyuk (drafted 171th overall in 1998) or Henrik Zetterberg (210th in 1999) or even to a lesser extent someone like Radim Vrbata (212th in ’99).

Now, it seems, the European prospects might be left to see what cream rises to the top and then be signed by the highest bidder.

Somehow, that doesn’t seem right.

New Schedule

As you've probably heard, the NHL announced the long expected change to the scheduling of games to start next season.

It's kind of like (but not exactly) what I proposed back in September:

Every team plays a home and home with the other conference (15 x 2 =30 games). Each team plays their 4 division opponents 6 times: 3 at home, 3 away (6 x 4 = 24 games). Each team plays their other 10 conference opponents 3 times: 2 home, 1 away one year. flipped the next (10 x 3 = 30 games)

My idea was the exact thing the players association proposed, though I doubt they stole it from me....

What the NHL has approved though did not add two more games (as me and the players came up with), so not every team will visit every city every year. But at least it's every other year and not some weird once every three years thing like in the past. Here's the new and "improved" format:

Eeach team play[s] 24 divisional games, 40 in-conference matchups, 15 games against non-conference teams and three wild card games against out of conference teams.

This de-emphasizes the divisional matchups; a team will only play them 6 times (instead of the current 8) but the out-of-division conference matchups remain at 4. I suppose this is a good change, it's not fun to sit through 8 games against the Devils or Islanders. And it's really not fun for teams in the Pacific division or Southeast who don't really have natural "regional" rivals. Yeah, those Washington-Miami matchups and Phoenix-Dallas ones just don't hit the spot eight times a year.

But this doesn't accomplish what the fans wanted: the chance to see every team (and the marquee players) come to your city once a year. Sure this change is an improvement over the current setup--now it will be every other year, but it's a change that doesn't really satisfy any of the principals. So what's the point?

And I'm curious to see how the "wildcard" games are allotted. Will a strong team with a strong fanbase (like, say Detroit) be playing a marquee out-of-conference game (such as Ottawa) for the sake of a solid matchup? Or will the NHL send them to a place like Washington or Florida that doesn't really draw well, but would on a night with a team like the Red Wings (and their spread out fan base) coming to town?

It once again comes down to the old $$$ versus the best hockey action possible. And, of course, if you get the good "wildcard" matchups like Detroit-Ottawa that means at the other end of the spectrum you'll inevitably be stuck with a team like Edmonton or Phoenix going to Florida, where the crowds would probably draw more folks to see another divisional matchup against a familiar foe like Tampa Bay.

As you can see, it gets complicated and with 3 of these wildcard games and the already difficult logsitcal nightmare of scheduling games anyways, I'm guessing you'll probably see a pretty decent mix of some solid matchups plus some games that just look like revenue boosters for non-traditional hockey markets....I mean with this much complexity, plus the "parody" of teams playing at a SC Finals level one year and then not making the playoffs the next it's tough to tell. But some indicators, regardless of tough to forecast future outcomes will be obvious. If you see Detroit playing in Washington, Florida and Long Island next season, and Toronto in places like Nashville and Columbus then I think you'll know.

Should be interesting to keep an eye on. Somehow I think I know the answer to the $$$ v. good hockey matchup. (Hint: it's the NHL).


Obvious but perhaps necessary note: None of this is meant to take shots at markets like Miami, Nashville, Washington, Phoenix or anyone else. But traditional attendance figures and revenues "are what they are" as the saying goes.

Fixing the Schedule

The NHL gets to adjust the schedule after this year and there's a lot different ideas. No one seems to like the current format, which favors divisional rivalries too much and doesn't let every team appear in every city atleast once. In fact, factoring in the lockout, in some cases it'll be five seasons that some teams haven't played in some cities. Considering there's 82 games a year this is inexcusable.

It'd be great if they cut down the regular season a little, but considering owners need money from the ticket sales, and players now get their money as a percentage of what the owners make, guess if that's going to happen. So here's my humble suggestion for the new NHL schedule.

Every team plays a home and home with the other conference (15 x 2 =30 games)

Each team plays their 4 division opponents 6 times: 3 at home, 3 away (6 x 4 = 24 games)

Each team plays their other 10 conference opponents 3 times: 2 home, 1 away one year. flipped the next (10 x 3 = 30 games)


This adds up to 84 games. So the owners and players get a little bit more. Either way, expect the scheduling answer to be short term: they're building an arena in Las Vegas as we speak, and Kansas City won't be vacant for long. Bettman and the owners love the expansion fees, and some will need the $$$.

So the next question won't be how many times to play division or conference opponents, it will be teams like Detroit, Nashville and Columbus bitching about trying to get into the Eastern Conference and the logistical nightmare about how to juggle the setup of a 32 team league.