The NHL doesn’t have a really marketable face of the players. As good as McDavid is, he’s got the personality of week old cold porridge. They’ve essentially bred the personality out of the players. Bedard is definitely more interesting but not by a ton. You’ve got to use the assets that you have and the players are some of the best marketing assets that the league has but they just aren’t good at marketing them. All the casual fan would see are players in commercials reading terrible scripts or in interviews giving the least memorable answers that they can.
I’d like the NHL to bring in a few rules that aren’t too gimmicky but could impact scoring. One could be that PPs are for the full length of time regardless of how many goals are scored unless the team on the PK can score a short handed goal. Hopefully this will not only increase scoring but, by increasing the impact of a penalty, could reduce stuff that impedes scoring such as holding.
Making the intermissions more interesting is also a must. It’s easy to give up on a game to watch something else when you have 20 minutes of empty blather - sometimes not even related to the teams that are playing. It can take a serious fan to drop the show that you watched during the intermission and go back to the game once it starts.
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