John Scott, All Star

One thing that bugs me through this whole John Scott, All-Star saga is that once Scott got elected to the game, fans were making a big deal out of how the league was being disrespectful to Scott in trying to get him to step down. The whole point of the make-Scott-an-All-Star exercise was to make the league look dumb, and while the NHL has conclusively proven through this that there is no bad situation that they can endeavor to make worse, treating Scott with respect was never in the cards.

The point of the exercise was to send a face-puncher to skate with the league's best and make him look silly, thereby making the league look silly. But the butt of the joke was always supposed to be Scott, and crying now that Scott was somehow disrespected seems somehow like crocodile tears.

John Scott has come out of this looking far better than he had any right to expect, and that's a marvel of timing (and I presume of media message). The league ends up being the bad guy, and I presume that the league circumstance will conspire to ensure that the All-Star game is the last NHL game that Scott plays.

But maybe the most important thing is -- people are actually talking about the All-Star game.

For once.

Bring back the tie game

Coach Nikota at PPP has some sane suggestions for the GM's meeting.  Go read them.  For the most part I agree in spades.

I'd quibble with dealing with the tie game thing -- my latest crazy idea would be to bring back the tie game, but punish teams for not settling things before overtime, going to a modified three point system: a regulation win is worth three, a tie is worth nothing, and an overtime win is worth two. Overtime would still be five minutes of four-on-four.  That gives everyone an incentive to play hard at the end of the third and in overtime, because if you coast, you get -- nothing.  Crazy, huh?

Your 2013-14 Ottawa Senators In A Sentence

I watched more international hockey in the last two weeks than I've watched NHL hockey all year so far -- including the game I went to live.

Enjoyed it more, too.

(OK, that's two sentences.)

Grantland Fixes The NHL

Grantland has some ideas about how to improve the NHL product.  It is a lengthy list, and well worth reading.  For the most part I agree with the suggestions and the rationale for some things which were explicitly not suggested.

Things I disagree with, kinda:

Lose the puck-over-the-glass penalty: The cynic in me says that people don't like this rule because it is black and white.  There's no room for interpretation as to whether or not the puck went over the glass -- if it is in someone's beer, and that someone isn't on the ice, it went in the glass.  Fans -- and players -- like rules with room for interpretation (or "discretion") because it means that in certain game-critical situations, the enforcement of rules can be suspended in the interests of letting the boys play the game.  Changing it so that it is the same as an icing call is fine with me from a game-flow point of view.  As long as the rules are consistently applied, I really don't care too much about the specifics.

No more Bettman Cup Presentations: I'm all for making Bettman sad, but frankly the cup presentation isn't about the players.  This is about the owners inserting themselves into the process so that history will look back and see how gracious the owners were about providing this format for the feats of greatness that the players perform.  It is, in short, about the money rather than about the sport.  And as long as Bettmen is involved with the NHL, he'll be handing out the cup.  Besides, it makes the cup presentations something to remember and talk about when it goes so comically, hilariously bad.  Otherwise nobody would care about it after the live presentation.  I mean seriously, which Prince Of Wales Trophy presentation is the most memorable to you?  If you exclude those awarded you your favorite team at the time, I bet the answer is none of them.  (And I had to look up the trophy name.)

Crossover Final:  I'm pretty sure this will never happen because of the potential for increased travel costs.  And frankly it would lead to situations approaching those as ridiculous as the Mets and the Yankees playing a subway series for the "World" championships.  And really, that will lead to larger segments of the country feeling left out when every final is played between two Western teams.  Because it will.  So if you want a crossover series of playoffs, why start at the second level?  I say, rank the teams from first to last in terms of points, and seed the top eight, and go from there.  That will make more of the regular season games meaningful, give random playoff combinations.

Place a moratorium on redesigned logos/jerseys: Again, this is about money, although in this case it is more blatantly about moving it from the fans' pockets into the owners.  I think that as long as fans keep buying the jerseys, the teams should be permitted to make whatever changes they want.  A fan spending a couple thousand bucks a year on tickets and parking and beer probably has a budget where another $200 jersey is a rounding error.  If fans really don't like it or feel that the costs are exorbitant then they'll stop buying the new jerseys.

Go back to home whites: Home whites only look good if you are the Toronto Maple Leafs, frankly.  Just about everyone else's look stupid.  The only time I liked the Ottawa Senators whites was with the "old" logo (see any Ottawa Senators post on this blog) because it didn't look good with the black.  So if we can go back to the "old" logo for the Senators, I'd possibly be down with going back to home whites.  But maybe not, I'd have to see how the logo looked on the current red.  I really like the red first.  And changing the Senators logo would conflict with his "moratorium on redesigned logos/jerseys".

More home-and-homes: I'm totally OK with this if it is applied fairly.  See also the 2011-2012 season, where something like seven of eight Senators-Leafs game were the second of a two-games-in-two-days sequence for the Senators.  That was totally ridiculous.  And yes, the Leafs totally deserved to win most of the games they won against the Senators that year, but wouldn't Leafs fans prefer that those victories were earned fairly? </rhetorical>

Fewer outdoor games: See also the entire discussion about how if fans think the costs are too high they'll stop paying.  But more to the point, outdoor games are interesting because they are rarities.  But if there are only one or two of these games a year, the pressure will be on to ensure that they are big draw teams like Pittsburgh, Toronto, New York Rangers, all the time.  The series would lose media and fan interest if one year you had a Nashville-Edmonton game, and the next year it was Phoenix-Tampa, and the next year it was Ottawa-Winnipeg. Having lots of these means you can keep the focus on the big draws, while throwing pity events to those of us who live in smaller markets.  And it will spread the pain in the standings of having to play a game on bad ice around more.  Maybe six is too many, sure.  But one or two isn't enough.

So there you have it.  Most of my objections or comments surround those changes to the way the business is organized.  His proposed changes to the on-ice game I more or less agree with.

Good News Everyone

Boy, isn't a good thing now that the Phoenix ownership situation is settled, the NHL can get on with the business of running the league without having the inherent conflict of having to run one of the teams as well... wait, what? Oh, nevermind then.

Blah

Who would have thought that the worst part of post-lockout hockey would be the officiating?

Frankly between the circus-clown officiating and the lack of conditioning and polish of these teams, I find I'm just not that interested in hockey right now.

I mean, I went to the home opener, and what resulted from that? It was fun and all, but the most noteworthy reaction I had was the fact that I paid $5 for a fountain drink that was all carbonation. So I went and found a vendor selling pop by the bottle, and paid her $5 for a 600mL bottle of pop. So I ended up paying $10 for a bottle of pop.

Hockey? Yeah, there was some hockey. And the good guys won, which was good.

But overall I don't feel the need to vent about the officiating because frankly I'm just not watching. For some reason I just don't care.

...other than that, I got nothing.

(Update: This article talks about the new definition of interference, which explains some of the calls which would be ordinarily stupid.  Personally I look for normal service to resume well before the playoffs.)

Chirping The CBA: Wake Me Up When It Starts To Matter

So it's been a month since anything happened in the CBA negotiations. I mean really, the player's "counter offer" was so out there that I wondered if the NHLPA was even taking the process seriously.

When you consider that the "counter offer" basically boiled down to A) suggesting that maybe the owners should share revenues between themselves more, and B) reducing the revenue split down to 54% for three years before jamming it back up to 57% of revenues, there's no wonder that the owners thought this was a non-starter.

Now there's been a counter-counter offer from the league, which would A) redefine "hockey related revenue" (down, of course) and B) set the revenue split between owners and players at 50% for five of the six years proposed.

There's been no mention of the other details that I've been hoping for.

But since there is still two weeks before 15 September, we are still not at the point that any of this should be taken seriously.

I Love The Smell Of Hypocricy In The Morning

The title of this article says it all: Minnesota Wild owner on crying poverty then spending $196 million on Zach Parise, Ryan Suter

Let's review:

In April, [Wild owner Leipold] told the Star Tribune that his team wasn't turning a profit, and put the onus on player salaries:

"We're not making money, and that's one reason we need to fix our system. We need to fix how much we're spending right now. [The Wild's] revenues are fine. We're down a little bit in attendance, but we're up in sponsorships, we're up in TV revenue. And so the revenue that we're generating is not the issue as much as our expenses. And [the Wild's] biggest expense by far is player salaries."

Three months later, Leipold authorized his general manager to sign Zach Parise and Ryan Suter to contracts totaling $196 million — including $50 million in signing bonuses in the first three years of the contracts.

Everyone keeping up now?

This is why there has to be brakes on the insanity that is player contracts.  The players themselves, while not totally blameless, are certainly not the prime reason for the hole that the Wild are carefully digging themselves.  And while I'm not opposed to Leipold being creative with his future as an owner, he's taking an awfully dangerous risk with the franchise, one that could hamstring it for the next ten years or more.  And that's likely into the reign of the next owner, after Leipold goes bust or decides hemoraging money isn't such a good idea after all.

Chirping The CBA: No Movement Clauses

SensTown asks if the League should do away with No Trade Clauses in contracts:

It's another offseason filled with players wanting to be shipped somewhere new, but only if they approve the destination and I can't help but feel that rightly or wrongly, the end conclusion is hurting the game and frustrating the fans.

My reply in a comment on that post:

No. Frankly the only answer is the one you hand wave away at the top of your post: if management doesn't want to deal with NMC/NTC contracts, they shouldn't offer or sign them. If they sign them, they should live with them.

The NTC is about player compensation, the recognition that at a certain level of skill, the player wants some kind of control over their destiny and career so that if a contract does go sour, they don't get shipped off to some career graveyard like Edmonton (see also Dany Heatley) in exchange for a bag of pucks (see also Dustin Penner).

Banning NTC contracts would put the power disproportionately in the hands of management, and like him or loath him, Heatley's history with the Senators had afforded him the respect that gained him some measure of control over his destiny should a move be required.

You claim these contracts "hurt hockey". I don't buy that. They hurt individual franchises, yes, and I can see how individual fans could confuse the two. If a franchise becomes stuck with a player who doesn't want to be there, then that's a problem. However, shipping him off somewhere else he doesn't want to be like Edmonton doesn't fix the problem. It merely transfers it. And while shipping Heatley off to Edmonton would have solved Ottawa's immediate problem, it wouldn't have done anything for the Edmonton fan since Heatley clearly didn't want to be there either.

Chirping The CBA: Alleged Opening Offer Terms

There are media reports that the owners have tabled a summary of an opening offer to the NHLPA.  Keeping in mind that an opening offer is as much about gauging the opposition's attitude as it is towards setting the table for constructive talks (ie: the details mean nothing in the grand scheme of things), let's quickly look at those same alleged details in the framework of my CBA wishlist:

• Reduce players share of revenues from 57% to 46%: this is a meaningless position.  We know the owners want more of the pie.  46% is never going to happen.  It is a good starting point from which to compromise.
• UFA status now only happens at 10 years, not 7:  This I think is a ridiculous idea.  How many players' careers make it even to the seven year mark?  Increasing the length of time a player's rights are "owned" does nothing for the game, really.
• Contracts limited to five years: yeah, that's pretty much verbatim one of my wishlist items.  I like this.  I don't understand why the owners are talking sense in this matter.  It is not in the interest of the individual teams to have shorter contracts even if it is in the interest of the League's overall health.  Maybe the grownups really are in charge for once.
• End salary arbitration: honestly I don't know enough about arbitration to make an intelligent comment about this.
• Entry level deals five years instead of three:  I don't like this, I think that there needs to be some more give on the matter of entry level deals.  Forcing new guys into a standard cookie-cutter deal for three years is bad enough -- there's a difference between Erik Karlsson and Zack Smith right from the get-go.  Locking them both up for five years at the same peanuts rate is stupid.  My suspicion is that this is a throw-away position to be compromised away through negotiation.
• No more signing bonuses: I don't like this.  How management and players structure the transfer of money to the players shouldn't be an issue, as long as the cap hit issue is addressed (see the next item).
• Future deals all have the same financial value for each year of the contract:  This is why they want the signing bonuses eliminated, because it makes the math simple for analysts like Dave Hodge to follow without a capologist calculator.  I'd let owners and players structure deals differently through different years as long as the cap hit reflected the money paid.  If they want to pay some guy (say) an extra $1 million as a signing bonus in year 1, I have no problem with that, as long as the cap hit for that year reflected that $1 million.

Overall: this sounds like a pretty standard opening offer.  There's no way it will be accepted (not that the owners would be heartbroken if it was).  It is a starting point for discussion.  There's stuff to like in here and stuff to hate.  But I don't agree that this amounts to the owners "declaring war" on the NHLPA.  What matters more is how the NHLPA reacts to the offer, how reasonable they are with a counter-offer, and how willing to move the owners really are.  Only once we see that, probably over the next two or three weeks, will we really understand if we're dealing with a contract negotiation or a "war".

CBA Wishlist

OK, so the open secret here is that there's going to be a lockout of the NHLPA by the NHL owners in September.  The reason for this is because the current collective bargaining agreement (CBA) is apparently so heavilly tilted in favor of the players that they players would be quite happy to see another year run under it.

The owners, on the other hand, are in the position where around a third of them (I have read 10 of the 30 teams) would lose less money by not playing hockey in October than they would if hockey was played.

So, well, lockout, with the theory that they will be forcing the players to consider the potential damage to their careers (which for many players will be breathtakingly short anyways) and loss of a year's earnings.

Yeah.  We'll see how well that works, shall we?

Having watched hockey in one form or another for a few years, I have some thoughts about what I'd like to see change in the CBA.  Note that I'm not coming down on this from the side of either the owners or the players, although my bias is towards the players personally.  I'm trying to propose things that will make the NHL a better league, something which benefits the owners and the players both.

Player Contracts

The problem the last time around we did this was that some of the owners who had money had gone on a spending binge that tied up insane amounts of money to players that A) the owners couldn't afford and B) had the side-effect of raising the expectations proportionally for everyone else.  Having spent themselves into a hole, the owners were demanding that the players dig the league out of this predicament.  Which they did, through the introduction of the salary cap et al.

There are two problems here that can't really be addressed by any CBA (these proposals included): A) owners and management are smart people and will find clever ways around any rules that actually get written in order to spend money they don't have; and B) owners and management are dumb in that they'll use said clever ways to spend money they don't have and dig themselves another hole, and the next time the CBA comes up for renegotiation we'll play the same game again.

This time around the clever way/dumb result is the insane contract lengths that marquee players are getting these days.  Eight years for Quick.  Ten for Kovalchuck.  Twelve for Crosby.  I don't know how many years Luongo got initially, but he's still got ten to go.

The purpose of these contract lengths is to pay marquee players large amounts of money by planning to pay them much less at the end.  Since the cap hit is the total contract payout divided by the length, you can pay someone a large amount of money now, and still have a cap hit such that you don't have to pack the rest of the team with league-minimum entry-level type deals.  In Crosby's case, this allows Pittsburgh to pay Crosby $12.some million over the first three years, and then by reducing that number to $3 million over the last three years they get a manageable cap hit of around $8.7 million.

The thing is, it has always been a dumb idea.  The player probably won't turn out to expectations, and you end up with mediocre players eating both cash and cap space.  Or getting dumped into the AHL where the salary on their contract doesn't against the NHL team's cap (see also our favorite 6-year, $36 million man, Wade Reddin, who ended up playing in the AHL and getting paid more than most of the rest of the AHL -- combined).

So there are two things we need to do to create a disincentive against being excessively clever: make contracts more dangerous by forcing teams to live with their contracts, and limiting the maximum damage that these contracts can do to franchises.

So, my proposals:

1. Change the cap hit calculation to be the money paid, July 1 to June 30, for that playing year.  Management can still play with the individual amounts paid each year through a contract, but the cap hit is what is paid.
2. No more burying bad contracts in the minors.  1-way contracts stick with the big league team.  If a player doesn't make the cut, then have something like 75% of the cap hit still be charged to the team's cap.  If a player holds out or violates his contract (like running off to play in the KHL) then this doesn't apply.
3. I like the idea of buyouts but I want them still to hurt when applied.  Limiting them to a certain time of year is good; limiting the number that a team can do per year (and maybe, additionally a lower aggregate number over every four years) is also good.
4. Maximum contract length is four or five years.  That way, future franchise owners and management are not hamstrung too long by bad contracts.

None of this will happen easily because A) owners and management want the flexibility to be smart and believe there won't be any negative consequences for them; and B) the players think, if someone wants the flexibility to pay me $12 million while only costing them $8 million in cap hit, who am I to say no to that?

But for the health of the NHL franchises, which will all hopefully live on after the current owners are bankrupt and the management has all been fired, some kind of damage limitation has to happen.  The League really has to be the grown-up here and take a long term view of the entire organization's long term health instead of the 2 to 5 year view that management and owners typically take.

Cap Inflation

One of the interesting effects of the CBA was to tie the cap to league revenues.  Revenues go up, the cap (and minimum) go up with it.  The theory is, a rising tide lifts all boats.

It does make comparing apples to apples difficult though.  Since the last CBA went into effect, the cap has risen around 80%.  This means that contract values (statistics cash values of players) are hard to compare year over year, let alone across multiple years.

What would be more interesting -- and make things easier to compare -- would be to write contracts in terms of percentages of the cap.  So you wouldn't pay Jason Spezza $7 million, you'd pay him 8% of the cap.   Which, if the rules above applied, would help keep the damage being done to a franchise right out in public where the League can get a good sniff of it.

This won't happen because it would mean the owners would have to pay their stars more.

In the same vein something has to be done about the cap floor.  If the league really wants the smaller market teams to survive (forget succeed, just survive) without a revolving door of ownership, they have to make the smaller teams more able to spend to their budgets.

Revenue Sharing

Frankly, I think revenue sharing has no place in the CBA.  Once the gross revenue split(s) between the players and teams are decided, what the owners decide to do between themselves with whats left in terms of revenue splitting is their business.

The whole point of the cap was to ensure that the smaller teams have better access to big name/big skill players and have a better chance at overall success.  I think the wild-wild-west nature of the playoffs runs, where entry-into or failure-to-make the playoffs happens by hairs of points, plus the fact that there has not been much in terms of a dynastic hockey power, since the CBA marks this as overall a success.

On the other hand, franchises are always going to be unequal.  Not every franchise is going to be blessed with a history-steeped, hockey-mad, population dense area surrounding not only its arena but its city and region.  Frankly if the last thirty years can't blow MLSE's profitability out of the water, nothing ever will.  At the same time, Phoenix is putting a winning team on the ice but can't make it at the box office.  New Jersey made it to the finals, but I read that their owner is having finding the proverbial nickels to rub together -- which is a problem with the ownership, not the franchise, but still a problem for those in the front office.  In general, I read that there are potentially ten clubs that will lose less money if hockey is not played than they will if it is.  That's a third of the league, and there's no way you can consider that healthy long-term.

With all due respect to the fans of these franchises in trouble -- at some point the league is going to have to decide if the costs of carrying weaker owners/markets/franchises is really worth it in the long run.  There are options -- new owners, moving franchises to new markets, or outright revoking the franchises -- but bleeding the rich to keep tilting at arenas in the f---ing desert is not a long term recipe for success.

In general, revenue sharing only makes sense if you think the league really needs the number of teams that it has, in the locations it currently has.  And I don't.

But the bottom line is where I started: franchise revenue sharing has no place in the CBA.  What the owners/league decides to do with their share of the revenues should be entirely up to them.

Player Discipline

Overall the spinning-wheel-o-justice is not really any worse than it has been.  For all the guff I give Brendan Shanahan for his unwillingness to swing the Shahana-ban hammer more, he's been willing to stand up on YouTube and explain most of his non-actions.  This is the first step of improvement, and I hope that he (or whomever follows along after him) continues this reaching out to the fans and players to explain the league's actions.

I would prefer that "intent" wasn't ever an excuse for application of discipline, or lack there of.  There's no intent cop-out for off-side or delay-of-game.  There shouldn't be intent cop-out for head-shots.

I would like to see more serious fines for player violations.  $2500 is pocket change for too many of these guys.  Fines should be proportional to both the offense and the salary earned.

Related, I would also like to see fines levelled more at bench and front-office staff for repeat on-ice offenders.  At some point the teams have to take responsibility for the fact that they are employing some of these guys because -- not in spite of, but because -- of their willingness to indulge in hackery and goonery.  Which may be fine, but if we are fining and suspending the player, I'd like to see management held responsible too.

Realignment

The move of Atlanta to Winnipeg proves the point about revenue sharing, and that the League gets it, at least after a fashion.  The league was better off with strong support in a small market than with tepid or no support in a large market.

That said, the League needs more flexibility on realignment if and when franchises moved.  With the exception of leaving the East and West unbalanced in terms of playoffs and franchise numbers, the last realignment plan had several good points I would have liked to see:

• a better playoffs format, with more variety in the potential opponent seeding
• every team visiting every other team at least once per year
• Winnipeg in the West where they belong

I totally get why the NHLPA blocked the realignment over the winter.  But specifically some kind of  realignment has to happen as part of this CBA to deal with Winnipeg.  But in general the league needs more flexibility to deal with franchise movement.


In Conclusion


Most of these issues are probably orthoganal to everyone at the CBA's bargaining table except possibly the League.  The players want to look after themselves, and the owners want to look after themselves.

If anything, the NHLPA has a better long-term perspective since the majority of the players understand that their stay in the league is necessarily brief, and the PA especially has to protect the interests of the future members before they are actually members.  By contrast, the owners probably delude themselves that they'll either stay in this forever minting money or sell-up to some bigger sucker, at which point the mess becomes someone else's problem.

The only potential grown-ups at the table are the League -- and only potentially, since they dance to the tunes played by the owners.  But the squabbling over these issues isn't doing the long term viability of the League any good.

NHL Hockey is enjoying some of its best success ever.  The League just needs to be careful that in an attempt to slice up the current pie they don't make it difficult to keep growing the pie larger.

Overall though I'll say we'll see some movement on these issues, some movement against these issues, and some movement on issues I know nothing about.

And I predict that which this CBA has expired, some of the owners will have dug themselves a different hole they expect the players of the day to dig them out of.

Update(s):

The section on Revenue Sharing was lifted pretty much verbatim from a comment I left on this Sens Shot article on the subject.  Jared Crozier has posted a comprehensive dissection of my arguments listed in that comment.  He and I are approaching the discussion from different viewpoints; it is natural we have different ideas on the way forward.

Bad Officiating

Can I get a hell yes?

NHL Officials Need to be More Accountable

As fans, we should care less about this or that call against our team and instead unite in our anger about the standards of accountability and consistency in NHL officiating in general. These guys can and should be a lot better.

Parity

Backhand Shelf's Ellen Etchingham muses on what the drive towards parity means for the NHL:

Parity favors some elements of hockey over others. It does not, for example, favor the work of general management. The more all teams are inevitably equal, the less influence good management has on outcomes. Even now, the best GM in the NHL using all the most sophisticated technologies and advanced metrics available has only a small edge of the competition. The more parity increases, the less far behind the stupid franchises can fall, and an incompetent manager riding a lucky season has more and more of a chance of snatching the Cup away from the shrewd builder of a vastly superior team.

Super.

A Defense Of Hockey Night In Canada

The Backhand Shelf* wonders if Don Cherry is on his way out as a result of the inevitable re-tooling of Hockey Night In Canada that is about to happen at the CBC.  The article describes HNIC as "equal parts live broadcasting and unintentional comedy" and derides the analysts as not bringing much to either the evening's game or the state of the league in general.

Personally I like HNIC as it is**.  You have to look at it from the view of someone who doesn't eat, breath, sleep, live hockey the way the sports media does.  For most of the week they're stuck in something we call "real life" where you can't follow the instant-by-instant goings on in their favorite team, let alone the league as a whole.

For some of those fans, the opportunity to curl up with Don Cherry is exactly what they want.  He tells them what they want to hear and they generally go away happy with his delivery, if not always his message.

For me, my favorite part of the show's fixtures is the Hotstove where the issues of the week are stripped down to a 15 second sound bite and maybe 45 seconds of give and take on the part of the commentators.  It is here that we get an actual view into the minds of both the league and the NHLPA.  And while I'm sure the fact that I place such importance on this forum means I'm just not following the right twitter feeds or am not on the right people's speed dial, I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Every circus has its clown, and while Don Cherry is a one-clown act, Mike Milsbury runs a close second.  However of all the people involved, Milsbury has been involved at the highest levels and while he is may be an idiot, that gives him a perspective the rest of us can only dream of.

Besides, I read somewhere else that the CBC should be doing more stories on the players -- please.

Years ago I was a devoted follower of Formula 1 magazines.  I bought a non-trivial percentage of them*** and kept them for years.  Still have some of them, too.  What got me to stop following them was the fact that the stuff I really wanted to read -- the technical information about the cars -- was vanishing.  But worse, all the stories about people were inevitably in one of these categories:

• New rookie promises to become the next F1 god
• Mid-career driver seeking a way to step up his career
• Senior driver reflecting that it just isn't going to happen for him
• Retired F1 driver reflecting on his past glories
• Head-to-head comparison of the current two title protagonists (note the annual fete celebrating that year's winner falls into this category, for the winner is nothing without those he beat)

Substitute the names as appropriate.  Oh sure, throw in some randomized factoids to make it uniqe -- Salo's family owns a milk company.  Wurtz was an inline skater.  Montoya answered prepared questions from randomly pre-seeded red balls.  But the bottom line is the same.  Boring.

And frankly it would be the same for hockey.  Rookies on the way up, veterans on the way down, inbetweeners trying to become elite, celebrations of those who do become elite, hometown hero makes good... plus your weekly Sidney Crosby.  It would be always the same.

Bo-ring.


Meanwhile the parts which count -- who's zooming who (ie Don Cherry) and the business of the game (ie Hotstove), the only parts of the game which are new and changing -- they'd get cut out.

And the intermission shows would become even less interesting... and less watched.

I'm probably not even close to the desired target market for HNIC.  And sooner or later Cherry will get bored or run over by a bus or something -- and god help us if the CBC turns to Kelly Hrudy to fill in.  But changes will come, because that's the way of life.

I just don't think the state of today is so bad.

---
* =  which, amusingly to me, still shows up in my RSS reader as its previous title, Houses Of The Hockey.

** = ...well except from the excessive bias which puts the Toronto games on the national feed, but that's both A) my Ottawa bias showing and B) not that big a deal since I've sought the Ottawa game when I've been out of market exactly once in the last three years.

*** = this was in the days before the Internet.

Realignment Dead?

The news on Friday night was brief -- a press release from the NHL saying that the NHLPA had exercised their privileges under the CBA to block the proposed realignment for next year.

In some ways this looks bad for hockey. The proposed realignment had much in favor for it. Making two seven-team divisions in the east and two eight-team divisions in the west made things as balanced as they could be, and left room for Phoenix to be dropped into either Markham or Quebec City, leaving fifteen teams in the east and the west.

Playoff wise there would still be an issue where teams in the short divisions would end up with a better chance of making post-season play, but if we did end up with a seven- and eight-team division in both the east and west, that could be mitigated by permitting the fifth-place team in the eight-team division to steal the fourth playoff slot from the smaller division if they had a better regular season record.

So, lots in favor of this plan.

Unfortunately the NHLPA decided to block the realignment, claiming that the league didn't address their concerns about travel or playoff eligibility. Which is probably their right, considering that the NHL has acknowledged that the alignment plan won't happen for next season.

For the NHLPA there are bigger concerns in play here. The league basically owned them through the lockout last time around, with the NHLPA getting only face-saving gains. The players don't want a repeat this time around, so want the realignment discussions to take place in the context of the collective bargaining agreement negotiations which will start shortly. The thinking is that realignment will have effects on the player's working conditions (with regard to travel) and so they want a say in the plan as it is put together.

Which means they have to reject this plan, even if it would have been good for the show.

I've long thought that the whole argument about cost-containment was a bit of a stupid issue for the owners to hang their hats on. Basically they ended up saying that they had no self-control and needed protection from themselves. Of course letting the owners spend the league into oblivion wasn't going to be in the show's long-term interest either, so as distasteful as it was, some kind of cost-containment was probably necessary.

But at the end of the day, the guys on the ice are what we all come to see, and making sure that they get a fair share of the revenues yielded is only right.

To do that, the NHLPA has to have respect around the bargaining table. And by blocking the alignment for next year, they are letting the league know that they are to be taken seriously.

I can get behind that.

I don't think this means the proposed realignment is permanently dead, it just won't happen next season. Some kind of realignment is necessary, and likely it will be worked out as part of the CBA negotiations.

Rule Enforcement

On Cheering For The Refs:

I never knew the rules. I used common sense. It’s really the only way to run a game. If officials called every penalty they saw, there would be no players on the ice and no one in the rink.
- Hall of Fame NHL Referee Bill Chadwick

This highlights the strength of, and the weakness in, the game of hockey as played in the NHL.

The problem is that many of the activities in hockey which are prohibited by the rule book turn out to be not that bad when they happen in moderation. The job of the referee is to then control that moderation and to not permit the game to turn into some kind of uncontrolled brawl. This puts the onus on the referee to use his judgement as to what constitutes an "ok" violation of the rules, and what is over the line. Different refs on different days will have different opinions as to whether a particular play is OK or not.

The problem is this variability, where certain plays are considered by the refs to be OK, but not considered OK by the players themselves. This leads directly to the problem of fighting, where players enforce their own ideas of what is acceptable or not by engaging in fights or after-the-whistle pushing and shoving -- even after perfectly legal plays being made.

The quote at the top of the article is true. If every rule infraction was called, there'd be a lot of games with nobody on the ice or perhaps the goalies playing tennis (at least until one let the puck slide into the trapezoid). But in the long run, if the rules were called, they wouldn't get violated.

The real question is, would the resulting game of hockey be worth watching?

I think it might be.

Why Bother?

Shanahan is showing absolutely no interest in consistency or rationale.

Ryan Lambert:

Tootoo got a five minute major for charging, a game misconduct and a two-game suspension, which is placating to the Sabres to a laughable extent. It’s also a sign that the frustrating inconsistency which has long plagued the NHL’s supplementary discipline system is alive and well. It’s difficult to say exactly what Tootoo did so terribly wrong that he lost two games of his season that Lucic didn’t do worse.

Step right up and spin the Random Wheel Of Justice. With your host, Mr. Shanaha-ha-han.

Shanahan On Why No Shahanaban For Wolski

“Now, if I felt this was intentional, or if it wasn’t at the last instant, just prior. [If] I might have felt there was any kind of sneakiness or history of these types of offenses for Wolski, he would have been suspended.”

- Brendan Shanahan's non-explanation for failing to discipline Wolski for his hit on Alfredsson. And we of course find nothing significant in the fact that it for some reason took five days to justify a decision that was made much more quickly.

Just business as usual at the NHL, nothing to see here.

(Update: a better link with the Shahanadance.)

Amateur Hour At League Discipline

This is why people don't think the NHL is serious about cleaning up the game.

To review: why is fighting permitted in hockey? Answer: because the officiating is bad.

And hoo boy, is the officiating bad.

For example, on Saturday's game against the Rangers, Ottawa player Konopha is sent off for a five minute major after boarding Ansimov:



You know, boarding is where you hit an opposing player from behind into the boards. (Note to refs: the penalized player is supposed to be behind the injured player, and injured players generally miss a shift.)

Yeah. Oops.

Next, here's a screen grab of the "incidental contact" made between the Rangers' Wolski's elbow and Alfredsson's head:



Video here.

Derrick at the Senday Observer makes the case that this totally blows Brendan Shanahan's credibility right into orbit -- if not the NHL's credibility too. And he's right.

So much for integrity. So much for discipline. So much for separating acts from intent.

I mean, you might expect this kind of "regulation-free" hockey during the playoffs, but this is just a meaningless Saturday afternoon regular season game, the kind that nobody will remember in five months.

But of course, nobody else cares.

Good on the rest of the team to claw the win back from the refs.

Officiating

Looks like we might be able to put the Random Wheel Of Justice away.

Houses Of The Hockey explores Shanahan's first efforts as discipline czar.

The highlight for me:

Negotiating around intent…can overly complicate behavioral modification, especially in an area like hockey where a certain level of violence is not only expected but applauded. The league would likely be far more successful in their efforts if they chose to strictly define the behaviors they want to eliminate and then consistently applied suitably large consequences to those behaviors regardless of the actors perceived intent or motivation. Meaning no more debates about whether an action was a “hockey play” or not. No more considerations paid to whether “he really meant it”.

I always said: if fighting is permitted because the reffing is bad, then fix the reffing. This is an excellent start.

(Oh, if you've noticed all the pictures are gone, that's because my hosted computer where the images are stored took a dump last week and I have not completely recovered it yet.)