The best seat in the house is the view from the couch

An open letter to NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman

Dear Mr. Commissioner,

I am your target audience. I am a fan of the sport of hockey, and I have lost my way. I am an 18-40 year old, college educated white American male with a good job and enough disposable income to attend many sporting events every year.

This is not a lecture on the loss of faith in a league recovering from a work stoppage. I do not profess to know anything of labor disputes, and I hope that I never will. I do profess to know something of the world of sports, and more importantly, I would like to think that I am fairly representative of the "average American sports fan".

In the past, I have enjoyed following the NHL season from both my living room and from my home team's arena, the Boston Garden/FleetCenter/T.D. BankNorth Garden. I have stayed current with league standings, player transactions, and general news of the world of professional hockey. I even attended multiple minor league games both for entertainment and to see the next wave of talent that I would be able to enjoy watching on the big stage.

For the most part, I enjoyed watching hockey from the comfort of my living room or local neighborhood bar. For the life of me, I could not understand why the NHL would choose to broadcast their product on a third rate network such as OLN (or "Vs.", or whatever they decide to call themselves in the coming years - I really couldn't care less). ESPN provided the NHL with a good home for years, and provided fans with a first class viewing experience. OLN has provided fans with little more than a flashback to the type of production values that we would expect from a 1984 broadcast of a Jets/Whalers tilt. You might as well just tape delay the games and let fans settle for nothing more than the box scores.

If ever there was a sport made for high definition television, hockey is it. Not only is it easier for the casual fan to follow the action, but the clarity of picture that HD can provide would be enough to hold their interest and keep them coming back. Last time I checked, OLN doesn't offer HD programming (or else they reserve it for their non-stop coverage of such riveting events as the Tour de France, or yet another program about the joys of fishing and hunting with Tred Barta).

More importantly than all of this though, is the product on the ice. I have been told that this season was one of the most entertaining in recent memory; that the new rules changes and the salary cap would provide every team with a realistic opportunity to compete for a playoff berth and a chance to claim The Greatest Trophy in All of Sports. Mr. Commissioner, I'm sorry - when you have such a small pool of legitimate professional talent as the NHL has, and as many teams that need full rosters, the quality of play will suffer. Just the fact that a #8 seed is about to begin play in the Stanley Cup finals should speak volumes about the quality of teams in the league.

Since contraction of teams is clearly not an option for any American professional league in today's sports climate of "high profit first, quality product later", I understand that this is not an issue that is likely to go away. But when more than 50% of the teams in a league are playoff eligible at the end of the season, perhaps it's time to re-evaluate the format. This is not Little League baseball. These are full grown men playing a brutally tough sport. They do not need to be coddled. They do not need a consolation prize. They do not need to be told that they were good enough to be average, at best, and therefore deserve a chance to compete for a title.

They deserve to be told that they need to try harder next year. They need to be motivated to finish in the upper echelon of competition. A six team playoff system with two first round byes worked nicely for the NFL for many seasons – far and away the most successful professional American sports league - there's no reason to think that it wouldn't work just as well in your sport (not to mention the added bonus of offering top teams a week to rest and recuperate).

This will be the first year that I have not only failed to attend a professional hockey game, but as of this moment, I have yet to watch more than one period of any single game for the entire season. You have lost me, but I am not gone forever. Fix the mistakes, and I will come back with a clean slate, and pretend that the last two years never happened.

posted by Big D @ 9:31 AM