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Change Mismanagement

By  -  January 23, 2007

It's often been said, truthfully in my mind, that hockey fans are a traditional lot. We don't like change for the sake of change. Stompin' Tom Connors sings "The Good Old Hockey Game," not "The Medicocre New Shiny Hockey Game Featuring Space-Age Polymers." Change isn't a bad word to us, per se, but it's a word that needs to be carefully considered, and not mindlessly embraced with the enthusiasm of an OFBer greeting a fresh keg of Guinness. Foresight, honest assessment, and a willingness to admit that something that isn't broken may not need fixing are the key components to an intelligent and rewarding plan for the future of the league. Not just the NHL -- any professional sports endeavor.

I don't think I'm saying anything revolutionary here, nor have I provided a Rosetta Stone to the league brass -- they know this stuff already.

So why the heck are hockey fans getting so much change shoved down their throats -- in such little time?


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1 Comment on "Change Mismanagement"

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Posted by The Peerless, January 26, 2007 1:17 PM

Amen. Hockey -- well, the NHL -- seems not to have a clue what it wants to be. And that starts right at the top. There is no "vision" expressed from the Commissioner's office of what the NHL is or wants to be. That's something that never would be said of the Rozelle-Tagliabue NFL, and say what you will about Bud Selig, it wouldn't be true of baseball, either. David Stern? The man oozes vision.

But Gary Bettman and the collected suits in NHL management? Their vision is 20-200.

As for all the changes, while baseball and basketball, and even from time to time football have tinkered with their games, the tinkering has been on the margin and didn't really change the look or feel of the game much, if at all. In hockey, though, the changes in neutral zone real estate, goalie movement restrictions, the tolerance level for certain infractions, etc. have struck precisely at the look and feel of the game. New uniforms and bigger nets offer the same (to be fair, I was an advocate once upon a time of expanding the nets by a "pipe diameter" -- a lot of pucks that rang off pipes and went out would go in, but it wouldn't affect the "viewing" of the game much. Now, I hold that view no longer).

One wonders, will the sport end up being more "hokey" than "hockey?"

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