[dobbles]

I've been thinking about this a lot since the other night. And even in general over the past few months as my kids have gotten involved with hockey....

I really think its an access issue. We can talk all we want about physicality and fighting, but at the end of the day, plenty of other sports do just fine without that. Certainly, as I mentioned in my first post, fighting was a differentiator for hockey. It did help make up for some of the shortcomings of an extremely expensive and location based sport.

But I just don't see how you can build a consistent following without it being a sport little kids can play either casually or in an organized fashion. Conversations like this often mention football as being an easy sport to understand. And in a way it is. But the amount of nuance the average fan already has is far and away better than what people know about hockey. People can learn touchbacks and nickel defenses because they have been around them all their life. Heck, I detest soccer but I know all the rules about corner kicks and throw ins and everything else because i watched my kids play it for 4 years.

Obviously thousands of ice rinks aren't going to magically get built. So what should the NHL do? Or USA hockey or any other group??? I don't know that I have a great answer, but just my gut reaction is they might have to try and leverage things like inline hockey, floor hockey, etc to get it more ingrained in non traditional markets.

Obviously all sports leagues have a huge problem with how ticket prices have been the last couple decades, so they lost out on regular families being able to attend games and get hooked. That is a major failing but al we as a society care about is money, so kind fo stuck with that problem.

Maybe another idea is that NHK teams need to really support and embrace their minor league affiliates so they can do more outreach. You think of how much more reach baseball has with its myriad leagues across the country. I know minor league hockey is an absolute disaster to make money on, so maybe the teams could take a more active role in helping their affiliates do community outreach.