On Frozen Blog

Likely we agree that the NHL has a pretty compelling product to pitch . . . particularly when relative to say, celebrity poker or the Professional Bowler’s Association or Pro Bass Fishing. It boasts world-class athletes who virtually to a man are an unrivaled blend of brawn, bravado, and sublime skill. Additionally, they commonly comport themselves as upstanding members of their communities; which is to say, their All Star Games, for instance, are seldom associated with spawning terrorism in large cities. In action, NHLers are showcased in perhaps sports’ most novel setting, walled and glassed in with no out of bounds escape. To quote the illustrious Ron Weber, “Welcome to the world’s fastest team sport!”

And yet, with so much greatness indigenous to its game, the NHL can be counted upon to come up Marty Turco short when it comes to Madison Avenue marketing.

It could fairly be said that the NHL does a terrible job of illustrating and mainstreaming its core product to the American public, if such a charge weren’t so serious a slander to “terrible.”

But why is the league so amateur and so ham-fisted in its marketing endeavors across the board? The answer may be in analogy: in the quest for a healthy share of the mighty purse offered by the American sports revenue landscape, the NHL ever steps into the ring with a twentysomething Mike Tyson physique and his stonebreaking fists and proceeds to try and sway the judges with intermittent scoring jabs. Season to season, it never seems to know if it’s a puncher or a jabber. And decades of split decisions ultimately land you on Versus.

My favorite bumper stickers are irreverent and clever, such as “My kid can beat up your honor roll student.” The NHL needs to be the revving Mustang with the non-working muffler grinding its gears down quiet Main Street bearing that bumper sticker. Not because it’s cool or hip or trendy to do so but because that’s its authentic ride. Once upon an Original Six time, the league was like this. Sadly, today, chauffeur Bettman and seemingly all his colleagues in the New York and Toronto offices prefer a Taurus.

To be fair, the NHL is confronted by a cultural quandary in North America that no other professional sport — including even NASCAR now — does: Canadians get it while 80-percent-plus of Americans do not. And yet, ironically enough, some of the most durable relationships between hockey and the American community occur south of the Mason Dixon, at the minor pro level. Texas, for instance, once had a minor pro league all of its own and today fields seven of the CHL’s 17 teams.

Understand, too, that the aim here isn’t to dislodge the NCAA hoops tournament from its Swiss Bank account perch; rather, contemporary professional hockey that features the young virtuosos that it does ought to be able to better the cooking channel numbers on Monday and Tuesday evenings. Even if the chefs are playing poker while the lasagna bakes.

[Timing in life is everything, and this morning The Onion has a riotously humorous mockery of the NHL's television plight up on its site, featuring the Commissioner announcing a new broadcast agreement with the Food Network.]

Last year Reebok promoted its new wonderkid, Sidney Crosby, with a 30-second television advertisement striking in its sparse production values but so compelling in its cumulative subtleties that it fairly ran on a loop on Versus and regional networks the entire season. I saw the spot perhaps 425 times last season, enjoying it as much in April as I did in October. It’s worth, I think, a reminding look:

Maybe the spot moves you like it did me, maybe it doesn’t. But is there any denying that Reebok unearthed an ageless essence of our grand game in a way the NHL seldom ever has? A few years ago, Mastercard gave us a similar “reverence of spirit” treatment in an ad that featured a boy and his father stomping through prairie snow toward a frozen playground, their sticks and skates hauled over their shoulders. These “postcard” impressions of hockey’s roots, searing in their splendor, have few rivals in sports; they ought to be fixtures in marketing campaigns.

Why is it that corporate America can at times magnificently honor hockey while the NHL most often profanes it? Remember the NHL ’s multi-million “Re-launch” ads of last season, proudly debuted by the Commissioner at some swanky New York restaurant for the press last autumn? Bare-chested, scar-free, shiny-and-authentic-toothed actors (as opposed to authentic hockey players), introduced by indecipherable Asian poetry and billed as warriors of some sort, were pre-game massaged to loud music by pinup tramps in unintentionally satirical excess. Good breeding and taste prevent me from YouTubing a sample for you here, but Bettman should have been impeached for authorizing those.

Shakespeare told us “To Thine Own Self Be True.” Hockey’s return to the sporting mainstream has its own salvation within, if only its leaders would recognize it.