I completely buy that. The whole thing down to Raleigh sucking as a hockey hotbed.

I feel like the problem for them came with the merge into the NHL. They were a great WHA franchise. Very successful. I get the idea that a lot of fans had no interest in trying to root for multiple NHL teams at the time, and while they had a fan base in the WHA, a lot of those fans were also Bruins fans, and folks tend to stick to their first love.

It would be similar to a situation where the old IHL was competing against the NHL for players, and when it was folding, it merged with the NHL. Could you really sustain 2 hockey franchises in Chicago? Or if you want to look at actual distance, could the Milwaukee market survive with a built in fan base 100 miles away in Chicago? You can point to other sports where that does work, but, unfortunately, hockey doesn't have the mass appeal that baseball does. I wish it did. It's a great sport to watch.

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Inasmuch as the Blackhawks have done diddly shit to capture Milwaukee, combined with the general sense of antipathy that Wisconsinites have for Chicago, I would say they could have supported a team had they got in on the ground floor of the explosion in sports media. It just seems too late to get in on it now.

As for capitalizing on Wisconsin, I've felt that WGN should syndicate its weekend game package out to Madison and Milwaukee, but all of Wisconsin is considered Wild territory (why?), so I don't know if they could.

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How about Indy, then?

Either way, you see my point, considering we're playing God in this thread...

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Mehhhhh. A lot of the same problems as Milwaukee, plus Conseco Fieldhouse was designed to be basketball-first and presents the same obstructed-view problems as a lot of other NBA arenas without NHL teams.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Cm6F4kTVGFg/T ... dhouse.jpg

See how the scoreboard is over the blue line? That's because they have to knock out a bunch of seats on one end to fit a rink on the floor. That wipes out a lot of seats, plus the ones above with obstructed views. You'd be looking at probably 11,000 non-obstructed seats. Of course, the same thing is happening with the Isles in Brooklyn. But mostly I'd just be unenthusiastic about trying to compete with all that basketball.

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I see your point there.

I just don't think Hartford is a viable option anymore. Even with the proper marketing, I just think they wind up being the Tampa Bay Devil Rays of hockey.

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Yeah, you can't sneak them back in now, but if you had fought to keep them in the league, they'd have weathered the storm. Don't forget how awful some of those late '90s/mid-2000s Bruins teams were. They damn near fumigated the whole state.

So. Shootouts. There are too fucking many, and at a three-round minimum they're glorified coin flips. I hate ties, so that is not an option, but we need to make the shootout an endangered species.

As for the first part, change ends for overtime and extend it to ten minutes. With ten minutes in the long change, there should be ample time to get some quality odd-man rushes off on fatigued oppositions. While yes, you're going to have some crappy ice by the 30th minute of unzambonied play, the positives outrank the negatives here, I feel.

If 70 minutes isn't enough, go to a shootout, but extend it to five rounds, as was initially planned in the AHL. This should take a little bit of randomness out of the shootouts that are left.

Everyone wants to see the NHL go to a 3-2-1 points system with 3 points for a regulation win, but I'm not sure how I would feel about records that showed teams finishing the season with 165 points or something crazy. The point inflation we have now where you can damn near miss the playoffs with 100 points is bad enough. Ideally, we'd scrap the stupid points system altogether and just go straight W-L, but the purists would flip their shit. The best way to maintain historical balance while accounting for this would be to split one point in half after 70 minutes and play the shootout for the second point. Of course, standings with decimal points will make the purists flip their shit, too.

I've taken the liberty of producing the W-L-SW-SL standings for last year:

WEST
1. *Chicago : 30-7-6-5, 71.5 pts
2. *Anaheim: 24-15-6-3, 58.5 pts
3. *Vancouver: 21-16-5-6, 52.5 pts
4. St. Louis: 24-18-5-1, 56 pts
5. Los Angeles: 25-17-2-4, 55 pts
6. Minnesota: 22-20-4-2, 51 pts
7. Detroit: 22-19-2-5, 49.5 pts
8. San Jose : 17-19-8-4, 48 pts
-----
9. Columbus: 19-20-5-4, 47.5 pts
10. Dallas: 20-25-2-1, 43.5 pts
11. Phoenix: 17-21-4-6, 43 pts
12. Calgary: 19-26-0-3, 39.5 pts
13. Edmonton: 17-26-2-3, 38.5 pts
14. Nashville: 14-26-2-6, 34 pts
15. Colorado: 14-30-2-2, 32 pts

It doesn't make a huge difference, but it does nicely illustrate that the Sharks got hella lucky in shootouts and should have been busted down for it. If the four-column standings are too much, you could always just show wins and losses and keep the shootout record as its own column.

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I love the idea of extending OT to 10 minutes, and then a best of 5 round shootout. You're right, the best of 3 is not enough. It drives me nuts now that when I see a game go to OT, I can all but count on it going to the shootout.

Yeah, the 3-2-1 standing is a little much. I could see maybe matching the BPL in soccer and doing a 3-1 (1 being a trip to OT), but at the same time I'm not entirely clear on the 3-2-1 option...is it 2 pts for an OT or SO win?

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It should be 3 points for a regulation win, 2 points for an overtime win, and 1 point for a shootout win.

If you lose, you should get zero points.

And I have a way to solve too many shootout problems. In overtime, add one puck to the ice every minute, and have no stoppage of play. First team to score wins. Tell me that wouldn't be entertaining as hell.

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39 games have gone to overtime this year, and 26 of those have gone to shootouts. That's a nice, clean two out of three, and it's bullshit.

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Yeah...that's about what I thought. I get a few team updates on my phone based on my hockey interests, and it seems like that is the ratio that goes to OT.

DB: the point breakdown is a novel idea, but it would get shot down so fast it's not even funny. Even in the best of times, hockey, much like soccer is a game built to be played closely. The shootout was like a gift from the hockey gods to get rid of the godawful ties.

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It certainly would be.

Let's get a body off the ice. Give linesmen added authority and move the second ref to an eye-in-the-sky position. Maybe more fouls will be seen this way, too?

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Wholeheartedly agree. Overtime/SO wins should not count as much as regulation wins.

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I like this idea.

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How stupid of me to suggest that losing a game should earn your team zero points.

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That is how it used to be. One of the things that got added after the 2004-2005 was the 1 pt for an OT or SO loss.

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Puissification of America....

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Everyone gets a participation medal.

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Shootouts suck. It's a dumb gimmick. I'd be fine with three points for a win and teams split one for a tie after a 10 minutes overtime. If we must do shootouts, then I like the zero point idea for the loser with graduated points for the winner.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

I don't mind the shootout. The thing to keep in mind, and the probable reason it doesn't come up as a rule change, is that if the NHL is trying to appeal to a mass audience in America, then they need a definitive winner or loser. It's the same reason soccer really hasn't taken off. The average American wants a winner and a loser, or they won't keep coming back.

It's pathetic, if you think about it, but it's the sad reality of the modern culture.

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I'm fine with the shootout. I just don't want a losing team to be rewarded for losing.

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How would you feel about the 1.5/0.5 point split for shootouts? You have to dock teams for loading up on shootout wins, or reward teams for tying after 65 or 70 minutes, but you'd conserve the two-point game at all times.

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