Don't follow enough to know obviously. Are they pulling star goalies in the 2nd period now to get a "fresh" goalie in? Playing a rotation with all forwards to increase scoring or other bullshit?

MLB

Trying their best to make the star SP obsolete. Can't think of a dumber decision. Also, thanks to Theo and a few others, every team except like 6 of them tanks every year now. Embarrassing.

NBA

Tanking problem isn't as bad as MLB but still worse than it's ever been for a respectable sport. Lots of 3 point shooting and a decline in low post talent means the game relies on luck more than any other.

NFL

God himself doesn't know what a catch is anymore, and it's not even one of their worst problems. Woke players scaring middle aged white men also becoming an issue.

What sport isn't shitting all over itself? Genuinely don't know. Tell me hockey has a chance before I go full communist and start following Curling or some shit.

_________________
Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

It would be hard to ruin hockey, considering it’s a gay ass time killer for white suburban kids who couldn’t play a real sport and couldn’t get a real job.

Anyway, the pitching thing won’t last. It’s a fad created by a team who is blessed with unique bullpen talent.

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The tanking thing is a bigger issue than the pitcher thing but from what I've read MANY think the pitching revolution is only going to accelerate. Baseball expert RPB concurs. I hope you're right though.

_________________
Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Don’t worry. They’re wrong.

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Not saying I don't believe you, just waiting for a baseball fan to chime in.

_________________
Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

The fact that you parrot IMU’s opinions on anything shouldn’t be a point of pride.

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Wow.

That's like accusing someone of child rape without evidence. Please back up that assertion with evidence or proof or we need to fight.

_________________
Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

The pitching thing should be complemented by a rule change allowing further specialization of labor for the other positions. The starting lineup should be expanded to 18 positions consisting of 9 fielders and 9 batters.

They should replace replay with NHL style fights. Whoever wins get the base/out. That's the ticket for reaching us millenials if they insist on dumbass rule changes.

_________________
Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

uhhhh...ummmm....okay. that hurts.

I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I think starters will continue to go 6+. I apologize if that hurts, but we’ll get through it.

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Don't panic and send him to conversion therapy, I think leash is joking. There's a solid chance your kid isn't gay.

_________________
Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

This...is a joke, right? But in the event it's not, we can dig the kernel out of the turd. One of the issues facing the NHL (and all the way down through Hockey Canada) that gets overshadowed by defensive schemes is the drastic shortening of shifts. Yes, coaches "rotate all forwards to increase scoring" because the exertion of playing hockey at full speed dictates it. But while shifts used to run from 60-90 seconds, with precious few minutes going to the fourth line, you're now seeing regular shifts as short as 30 seconds. If you have less talent than the other team, you can solve for a lot of that by rolling lines and playing a balls-out dump-and-chase game where no one is on the ice long enough to be fatigued and taken advantage of. Of course, the flipside is that having so few seconds to work with before you're off for another change strips a great deal of creativity out of the game and makes it much less fun to watch. Mike Keenan (the guy who even for an NHL coach quit or got fired everywhere he went) was sort of the godfather of the short-shift game all the way back in the NHL's heyday, but Dave Tippett really brought it to the fore with the Coyotes at the beginning of the decade, with high-effort-low-talent teams that were a crushing bore but eked out points on shootout losses, shot-blocking, and as any Hawks fan knows, catching teams slacking in the dead of winter. Then they lost a few guys and shat up the entire league for five years until Tippett finally got fired so at least there was that.

And much like rampant shot-blocking, another ill facing the game, you can't really legislate short shifts out of the game. Could you have something of a reverse shot clock where players who come on the ice have to stay on for at least a minute before they come back off? Hockey is a clusterfuck, it'd never take, especially because the people who own the teams would never want it to in the first place. Lots of NHL teams are as shitty on paper as NBA teams, but instead of every season being 82 games of "you're fucked," they float around and falsely appear competitive and make more money. So that's just the way it's gonna be, a bunch of fungible 23-year-olds sprinting up and down the ice like youth soccer on fast-forward.

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It was a half joke but we can agree I'm ignorant enough about the NHL where it could have been a serious comment, a bad joke, or a joke masking criticism and it doesn't really matter. I was mainly poking fun at the NBA from what I thought was an ok analogy because I don't know shit about hockey.

But from reading your post I don't think you can change stuff like that and I'm not sure you would want to. I think every sport needs strategic moves in place to be called upon for less skilled teams, even if it results in an "uglier" game.

_________________
Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

After Lockout II, the league did create a rule that a team that ices the puck (when you whack the puck from your own zone to behind the other goalie: Intentional Clearing Is Not Good) can't make a line change before the ensuing faceoff, meaning that a tired defending team resorting to delaying the game will remain tired while the attacking team can send fresh players, which is about as close to stretching out shifts as you're going to get. Starting this year, they don't even let coaches call their timeout then, something the middle-school minds of the NHL figured out as a way to beat the locked door on icings.

The Zapruder-film reviews of offside calls have been another recent detriment to the game. It's as if the NHL looked at the NFL and said "we need to imitate them," but picked the most tedious and stultifying thing about the entire league to imitate. I don't think you should eliminate offside violations, that's patently insane, but enough with quibbling over whether a wing was a hairsbreadth over the blue line before he got the puck.

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Hockey is really easy to ruin. All you have to do is tell the refs to disregard the rule book and allow clutching, grabbing hooking and holding to creep back into the game which they do every single season especially come playoff time.

Hockey is the only pro sport where the level of play/excitement gets worse in the playoffs.

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That is part of it, but teams flat out scheme differently during the playoffs. We saw that with the last 2 first round exits from the Blackhawks. Regular season....it's all about amassing points, but that goes out come playoffs. Playoffs, there is no way to use points to survive so the game gets much more conservative. Teams run a form of the trap which (to your point) not exciting to watch.

The one similarity with baseballl the NHL is clearly doing is watering down the talent level through expansion. The NHL is so concerned about more teams in non-traditional markets to grow the sport, the quality of play suffers....one from talent...two from increased crappy organizations.

Agree on replay for offsides...waste of time.

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