October has arrived, and with it the start of another National Hockey League season. But the question is, does anybody really care?
Despite our love for fast-paced violent sports, hockey really hasn't caught on in this country, at least on the professional level. Locally and across the United States, there are still thriving hockey organizations with numbers that have either grown or remained steady for years. The number of American-born NHL players is now at record levels in a sport that has largely been dominated by Canadians and, more recently, Europeans.
I was introduced to the game at a very early age, through the Franklin County Hockey Association, which my parents founded. As soon as the leaves started falling, my family started spending every Saturday and Sunday at the Greenfield Skating Rink, now better known as the Collins-Moylan Arena. When cold weather arrived, we'd play pickup games on Greenfield's Highland Pond, skating from morning to night some days—much like our friends to the north, where the pipeline to the NHL went from those very same ponds to the junior level, then to places like Madison Square Garden.
The U.S. doesn't have as established a junior program as they do in Canada. However, these days kids play year round, going to camps and seminars. A growing number of the more talented ones opt to go play at private schools like Deerfield Academy or Choate, Cushing and other schools. Local kids often take a post-grad year at these schools after high school in hopes of being recruited by a major college program. And make no mistake—the colleges are watching. The most notable local example is the newly resurrected UMass-Amherst program, where Coach Don "Toot" Cahoon constantly scours regional prep schools for new recruits to keep that program competitive in the rough-and-tumble "Hockey East."
The "goal" of most of these elite players is to get to the NHL. But, sadly, the NHL isn't what it used to be, from either a marketing or competitive standpoint. Attendance at games and television viewership have dropped off so dramatically that ESPN ditched its contract with the league after the last labor dispute, forcing it to take its product to Outdoor Life Network, now known as "Versus."
Some blame the drop in interest on the player lockout that shut down the league for over a year. The truth is that the fan exodus from pro hockey began long before that, and for a number of basic reasons that very few in the league want to accept. It's not because there is a lack of action or violence or intrigue. The NHL has all of that. What it is absolutely devoid of, however, is personality.
Growing up, I was a fan of the "Big Bad" Bruins of the 1970s. Sure, they got their asses kicked every spring by the Canadiens, but that was a team with all kinds of characters. Everybody knows Bobby Orr, but those '70s Bruins also gave us the scoring grace of Phil Esposito, the flamboyance of Derek Sanderson, the hard-edged "Chief" John Bucyk, and goalie Gerry Cheevers, who used to paint stitches on his mask every time he was hit in the face to symbolize the real stitches that would have been there had the mask never been invented.
I can't name you five NHL players today who are within a sniff of reaching that kind of notoriety, which is a big reason the sport is in the tank. Another problem is a lack of story lines. The purists will always be there, but for a league to grow, it needs non-purists to get excited, and the way you do that is by telling a story. Baseball proved that a few years ago with the Mark McGuire-Sammy Sosa home run record chase. People who didn't know the difference between a curve ball and a meatball were riveted to that chase at a time when baseball desperately needed something to make the fans forget yet another labor stoppage.
There are other issues. The rules are ridiculous and keep the game too bottled up. Franchises have opened in nothing markets like Columbus, a practice that has only served to water down an already-thin talent pool.
All these are problems other sports have faced and, for the most part, successfully dealt with, mainly because the people who ran those leagues acknowledged them. That doesn't seem to be the case here, which is why the NHL will continue to be the best professional sports league nobody is watching. I'm not sure how long we'll be able to say that.
Chris Collins is Director of News and Programming at WHMP Radio and a part-time political columnist and sportswriter for the Greenfield Recorder.
