Sounds like Bettman wants to add more games to the regular season. So be prepared for more hockey.
When I was younger and had the time for NHL hockey every night I would have loved this. Now that I'm a bit older I would lean towards shortening the regular season. 82 games is an absolute slog and I just can't keep up with it anymore.
I still watch all the highlights and check the scores but I can't commit to that many full games anymore. 1-2 games/week is a lot more manageable than 3-4 games/week.
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.
I liked Burke's suggestion. Less regular season games, and it would make scheduling easier plus let the teams save some travel money if they got rid of the requirement for every team to play in every building each year
Not really a huge surprise. I don't really watch a ton of random games, just Flames games.
The only other games I remember watching parts of this year are Kings/Knights opening night, Kings/Wild, Leafs/Jets, Oilers/Blackhawks, Oilers/Jackets, and some random Canucks game for the spectacle of it (I think it was against the Capitals).
I will watch any game that's live on ESPN/TNT if I'm on an airplane.
The league needs to be creative about how they can get onto modern media platforms and be cutting edge in how they do it. They need to show hockey in an accessible, interesting, and insightful way without being so gimmicky that it turns long time fans off. That is a very difficult balance.
Nhl have hypothesized that more scoring should equate to more excitement for fans. Well aren’t we seeing a substantial uptick in goals, comeback wins this year, yet the drop in viewership??
Hockey differed itself from other sports in that it was fast, skilled, and emotionally-charged violent. They have taken the third , most differentiating factor out of the game. The nba/nfl all offer speed and skill, and plenty of scoring.
Maybe it's just because I watch the Flames - but personally I find PP and PK boring.
So goals are up - but the games are more reliant on special teams which I find can be boring and take away from the flow of the game.
Then it's even worse since the calls and reffing is so inconsistent - so the game is dependent on something that people are frustrated with and don't understand why something is called but not something else.
Last edited by SuperMatt18; 02-01-2023 at 12:54 PM.
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Probably because of too many commercials. They are a big turnoff for me as well.
My dad, who helped me fall in love with NHL hockey as a child through his own interest, has stopped watching hockey because of this. He cannot stand waiting for every commercial break and would rather just do something else. I have similar feelings.
And moving board ads during the game are so distracting even for someone who understands the game and knows how to track a puck. I couldn't imagine how bad it would be for someone who is trying to learn the game.
One last point: hockey needs to be less white. People want to see and cheer players who they can relate to. By being so homogenous, it feels a bit like a club.
Hockey has a ton of barriers to entry for kids and families which excludes a lot of people who might want to play and who could really grow the game beyond where it is.
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I stole the original tweet from a Reddit thread about this topic. One thing that stood out to me was how many people in the US have become fans of teams outside of their market because local teams make it too difficult to watch the home team in TV. There was one fan in Montana saying that Seattle, Vegas, and Colorado games are all blocked on TV. They get Calgary games, but he said that it is a hard sell for an American to root for a Canadian team.
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378000 for national broadcasts? Wow that is abysmal. Outside of Canada, hockey is purely regional it seems. You follow your local team and that is it.
I love the espn+ platform, but only because it gives me access to Flames games. I'm generally only watching the national broadcast if it's a Flames game.
I wonder how much this viewership is out of line with the models used by Disney et al to buy the rights.
Is hockey anything more than a regionally product even in Canada?
I haven’t seen ratings in a while but it sure seemed that way last time I saw. Are the “Wednesday night hockey” games doing better than the regional game in any appreciable way?
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Is hockey anything more than a regionally product even in Canada?
I haven’t seen ratings in a while but it sure seemed that way last time I saw. Are the “Wednesday night hockey” games doing better than the regional game in any appreciable way?
I spend a lot of spare time on this site and talking about sports in general.
But I can't tell you the last time I've watched a game that didn't include the Flames in the regular season.
I'll watch playoff games from all teams but regular season...nope.
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One last point: hockey needs to be less white. People want to see and cheer players who they can relate to. By being so homogenous, it feels a bit like a club.
Hockey has a ton of barriers to entry for kids and families which excludes a lot of people who might want to play and who could really grow the game beyond where it is.
hockey is waaay too elitist
its better than it used to be but there needs to be more rec type hockey for kids and it shouldn't be frowned upon if a kid doesn't want to dedicate his entire existence to one sport.
My kid is having a blast playing in a 3 on 3 league once a week but there are still people who say things like "not real hockey" "not enough time on the ice" "he doesn't play in summer!" ect.
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bottom line is make it easier for people to watch...It boggles the mind when I am willing to watch a game with commercials but the NHL says no soup for you because of location
One last point: hockey needs to be less white. People want to see and cheer players who they can relate to. By being so homogenous, it feels a bit like a club.
Hockey has a ton of barriers to entry for kids and families which excludes a lot of people who might want to play and who could really grow the game beyond where it is.
In 2011 (the year I could actually find ethnicity statistics for the NHL), the NHL was comprised of 93% of players who identified as white, with the remaining 7% identifying as varying ethnicities. The oldest player (Mark Recchi, 42) was born in 1968, with the youngest players (Jeff Skinner and Nino Niederreiter, both 18) being born in 1992. The average age in the league was 26.5 years, so a birth date falling somewhere between 1984-1985.
The percentage of Canadians that did not identify as a visible minority in 1986 was 93.7%, and 1991 is 90.6% (closest available years with census data). I'm not even going to bother trying to find 1968 at the high-end, because it was 95.3% in 1981, so it doesn't take a big imagination to guess what direction the number is trending. Sweden and Finland don't keep official statistics on ethnicity, but everything I've found -- if you read between the lines -- is that it is still majority "European descent" and I don't imagine that was the opposite in the 80s. Russia, oy. The US stats on this are vast though a bit unwieldy, but between 1980 and 1990, the percentage of those identifying as 'white' went from 83% to 80.3%, however their geographic distribution also places them as most concentrated in the top third of the country (y'know, that part of the US that actually gets winter) so it wouldn't be surprising to see that number significantly higher in states closer to the border.
It's not really surprising that the demographics of the NHL are reflective of the demographics of the countries and regions from which all the players are coming, nor is it surprising where the US is concerned that most players come from the part of the country that gets real winters. The candidate pool of players good enough to compete now is simply reflective of the demographics of decades past.
This is not something the NHL alone can change, nor is it something that can be solved without a decade or more of effort across plenty of different layers. The work on this would need to start now for it to bear fruit in... let's say 13-14 years. Enough time to get kids involved at a young age where they can develop into the caliber of player that makes it to the NHL... and it isn't like the other traditional hockey markets are going to take their foot off the gas either.
The NHL -- to their credit -- has tried to promote and expand the game in non-traditional markets where success would hopefully inspire more visible minorities to get into the game. They need to do more in terms of marketing, outreach to partner with local communities to build rinks and get untapped areas of the country involved. The problem is it's also a winter sport and half the country receives barely anything resembling a winter at all, plus you're now competing with summer sports that can run year-round. Hockey equipment is expensive, takes a lot of time commitment from both the player and their parents, and requires nearby infrastructure in the form of rinks and community support in the form of local leagues and teams, and those rinks need to be indoors and with that is a much higher cost to run and maintain from cities that are already looking to cut expenditures.
I think they also need to find a way to make the regular season mean more and really re-think it. I also think they should really reward regular season champions in addition to playoff champions. (Extra Draft Pick would be neat at 33 Overall IMO - can't be traded).
Personally I do wonder if moving to almost more of a European Soccer schedule could breathe some life in to the NHL. Have a bigger reward for the regular season champion, and put it equal level to the Stanley Cup, opposed to how the President's Trophy is an afterthought today.
I still believe that a 62 game regular season schedule (all 31 teams play a balanced schedule of home and away games) and make this mean more and don't just gloss it over like the President's Trophy often feels glossed over. Players would be refreshed - matchups would be more exciting as you're only playing each team once per year.
Then go to more of a cup format for the playoffs where everyone makes the "Stanley Cup Playoffs" similar to how all teams play in the Football/Soccer Cups in Europe.
5 game divisional playoff in round 1 using the regular season standings. (1vs8 in each division).
7 game divisional playoff in round 2 and 3.
Crown your 4 divisional champions and then go into the final 4.
You get rid of all the extra divisional games in the regular season - but add a higher stakes playoff round at the divisional level in the playoffs and really build those divisional rivalries in the playoffs.
Last edited by SuperMatt18; 02-01-2023 at 02:43 PM.
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I hate all of the gambling adds, but I will say, fantasy football drives viewership of random games. I never watched NFL games until I started playing fantasy with my friends. The structure of games once a week works really well to make that all work. The NHL has too many games of insignificant meaning to make watching random games to see how my players are doing something viable. I have 2 fantasy hockey teams and I just basically watch the stats because if they don't do much on Tuesday, they'll probably do something on Thursday.
Long story short, I think a lot of casual viewing of NFL is driven by gambling and fantasy football and the structure of an 82 game season isn't really conducive to that.
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For me the biggest issue is just production quality of games and building excitement. Games, even on Saturday nights, just don't feel special anymore.
Little pre-game talk, non-existent post-game. I can only speak to the impact Sportsnet has had in Canada, but the sport no longer feels bigger than the sum of its parts. And when you're in a situation like the Flames where the team, even if it wins, just isn't entertaining to watch - you don't have much that draws you in.
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