ha Wendel, if not for the bad back he'd have been one of the all time greats, he was too small to play the way he did and that cost him his back health, he was a shadow of his former self after his first few years.
a Wendel Clark shift when he was young and healthy was way more entertaining than watching a Gretzky shift, Wendel was a bat out of hell, crashing into bigger players with thunderous body checks, dropping the gloves and throwing punches before the other guy knew what was hitting him, Wendel was a great fighter but he was pretty shady in how fights started. Then the Wendel Clark wrist shot, not a snap shot which most players use today which is really a mini slap shot, Wendel had an old fashioned wrist shot that was as heavy as any i've seen.
I gave up on the NHL for a long time, 15 years where i maybe watched 10 games in total, I turned my attention to the NBA. the sport was ruined by the neutral zone trap and the hooking and holding and with the instigator rule which took fighting out of the game for the most part, and the refusal to do anything about the size of goalie equipment or the size of the Net - the NFL is the greatest sports league on the planet because they are always changing the rules to keep the game compelling and entertaining for the people who matter most, the fans. The NHL refused to. Until the lockout season.
The changes made after the lost lockout season improved things, skill players could actually use their skills, slow skating blockheads were weeded out of the game, younger faster players increased in numbers because of the salary cap, young players are cheaper under the rules of the salary cap. I regained some interest in hockey and watch again. It's bogged down again, coaches are smart. They need to alter the rules further - make me commissioner of the NHL for a year and I'll fix it up.
Get rid of the friggin' instigator rule, players should be held accountable for their actions and mouths on the ice, more fights - fans love fights. It would be controversial as hell but I'd also take out the 'third man in' penalty, any of you who grew up in the 70's and 80's remember what an NHL donnybrook looked like when both entire teams jumped off the bench and mass carnage ensued. The reason the NHL ended bench clearing brawls was that in the US
non-hockey fans including major sportswriters and even comedians would treat hockey like a junk trash sport always citing the violence and fighting and the NHL came to the conclusion that that image was hurting the potential of the NHL from a marketing and business standpoint. Well guess what - none of those people were hockey fans and none or few of them became hockey fans. Fuck them. That was 20 years ago, the world has changed, UFC had and still has the same image problems the NHL had but the young generation loves it and the UFC is cashing in. Kids between 19-34 have never seen what a bench clearing brawl in the NHL looked like - makes UFC look tame.
And my biggest problem with the NHL is the goaltenders - the size of the net has never changed and the size of the goaltenders and their equipment has dramatically. You only have to go back to the 80's to see the obvious -
just look at the Leafs goaltenders from that era - Mike Palmateer and Alan Bester. Tiny guys, 5'6" though they were probably listed at 5'8". There were many other like them. Go to YouTube and see some classic games from the 60's - half the goalies looked like lawn gnomes - their heads barely over the crossbar. And the goalie equipment, the pads and gloves were half the size of today's. Combined with better more scientific coaching methods of goaltenders plus oversized equipment and physically taller and bigger goalies - they are almost unbeatable. Watch hockey today and the only way to put a goal past them is with dazzling finesse like an Ovechkin, a great goalmouth passing play OR how the majority of NHL goals are scored - the goalie simply can't see or react to the puck, deflections - which results in way too much of the scoring that there is in the NHL really being just 'accidents'.
Go back to the 70's and 80's and see what's missing today - players with great slapshots and wrist shots every game blasting pucks by goaltenders who knew the shot was coming, had full view of it but were powerless to stop it. Guy Lafleur speeding down the right hand side of the Forum ice, everybody in the building and watching on TV and the goaltender facing him knew what was about to unfold, Lafleur would cross the blue line at full speed and wire a slap shot or wrist shot picking a corner cleanly. Wendel Clark with his wrist shot could and often did score from deep in the faceoff circles - that just doesn't happen today and it's a part of the game I know fans miss.
Time to make the nets bigger or the NHL with the goalie equipment manufacturers make each goaltender's equipment for him and issue it out direct from the NHL - here's your equipment for the year, deal with it - doctor it and you're suspended the rest of the year.
Never has the NHL had better skilled players, the worst player on every team today is more skilled and better conditioned and bigger than the top few players on each team from the 80's. I think the best pure hockey game I've ever seen and that includes Canada Cups, Stanley Cups was last year's gold medal game at the World Junior Championships between the US and Canada. Every player was highly skilled and played like he was playing for his survival.
The pipeline of great young hockey players from Canada, US, Eastern Europe and Scandinavia has never been as full. With HD TV and 3D HD TV coming now is the time for the NHL to make a big push and that starts with rules changes that will make the game better for existing hockey fans and win over new fans.
I'm not a Gary Bettman hater, he's very smart and has overall done a good job leading the NHL but he's very stubborn and arrogant - when he came in the world and technology was very different, the holy grail for a pro sports league back then was a huge NFL type national broadcast network TV deal in the US. To get that Bettman needed a bigger TV footprint in the US in non traditional hockey areas. Two teams in Florida, two new teams in California, Atlanta, Nashville, Phoenix, Colorado - most have been complete flops.
The truth is that today with the entire world wired, every game broadcast and available to the entire planet it doesn't matter that much anymore if the US South cares about hockey or if the NHL has a big US network deal, it's all about niche and regional/global marketing these days in business. Put the NHL where it does matter, two of those Southern US teams need to come back to Winnipeg and Quebec City and that will happen. Fans who are watching want to see games played in arenas filled with rabid hockey fans. It's really hard to get excited watching any game when there's nobody in the stands - games from Atlanta look like exhibition games or practices.
NHL should be the first North American pro sports league to really go global -
establish a European division - put NHL franchises in Moscow, St Petersburg, Prague, Stockholm, Helsinki, Munich and possibly London. 4 divisions - Europe, an all Canadian division and US East and US West. The players are making millions, let them deal with the travel, the same way music stars travel on world tours. If the NHL did this it would put itself on a whole new level.
The darkest spot on the NHL horizon is Donald Fehr being hired by the players as the head of their union. He pretty much destroyed baseball for millions of fans when he was the baseball players union head man.
|
