denisdman wrote:
I disagree. I think hockey flows better than any of the major sports. Most games are intense and competitive. My biggest issue with the sport is the tremendous amount of player movement. Not only does it wreck the hometown team, it is hard to even know who is playing for which team anymore.
I would like to see the regular season matter more by cutting down the number of playoff teams to four per conference. I also hate overtime rules with loser points. I'd be ok with a short overtime and games that end in ties. The loser point inflates the standings too much.
1) I agree on player movement. The salary cap has made it difficult to keep more than a few franchise players around on the top end and some organizational soldiers at the bottom. The guys in the middle get squeezed out. I'm sure it's great for parity but it gives the feeling of a league where almost everyone is fungible -- if that's the case, that everyone just comes and goes without it meaning all that much, why invest yourself emotionally? I think a franchise-tag system where you can designate a drafted/developed (and that's key, never an out-of-town UFA) player not to count against the cap would open things up a lot more. Yes, it's not fair to the plucky small-market teams, but hockey as a game has inherent parity to spare; the cap doesn't need to enforce more parity on top of that. Even in the depths of the free-spending dead-puck era, the 2003 Minnesota Wild took a trash roster to the third round on a couch-change payroll by running possibly the most stifling trap anyone's ever seen. That's the kind of thing you legislate out, not a team's ability to re-sign its second-line wingers.
2) An eight-team playoff will happen over at least two dozen dead bodies on the Board of Governors. Even when the league only had 21 teams, they still sent 16 to the playoffs because that's where the money is in a league that still hasn't learned how to make money from TV. We'll hit 32 teams soon, whether that 32nd team is in Houston, Seattle, or up Gary Bettman's ass, and it'll be hard to argue the fairness of 16/32 teams making it in compared to 16/21.
3) Overtime sucks, loser point sucks, ties suck. If you only had wins and losses, no third column, no points, only the rule that number of pre-shootout wins breaks a tie in the standings, I don't think you'd see nearly as many stupid overtimes. Take away that cushion and the urgency will improve dramatically, as you see in the playoffs.
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Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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