The Return of a Great Game
By
ADAM THOMPSON
May 8, 2008 1:27 p.m.
Hockey took another step towards returning to the national sports conversation Tuesday with the news that Don Cherry will be filing dispatches for ESPN's "SportsCenter" over the last two rounds of the National Hockey League playoffs.
Young stars like Pittsburgh's Evgeni Malkin and rules changes to let them shine have made the NHL more watchable.
The bombastic Canadian may be guilty of sins both jingoistic and sartorial as he rants for the (North) American way in one of his checkered pink or purple blazers. But he is his game's most iconic announcer, for better or worse, and the ex-coach known as "Grapes" certainly has enough P.T. Barnum in him to get the attention of a few extra sports fans. Yes, he chipped in to NBC's Stanley Cup coverage in 2007, but you had to be into hockey already to catch his rants. Now he's performing for a much wider U.S. audience.
The fact that ESPN wants him around says something. As does the presence of hockey playoffs near the top of "SportsCenter" broadcasts, after a recent past where NHL highlights might be sequestered to the hour-long show's final five minutes. Or the fact that playoff ratings continue to climb for both NBC and Versus.
People are starting to watch again, and they should be. The game is as fast and fun as it's been in years, and this year's playoffs have made good use of its young stars. Names like Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Alexander Ovechkin continue to inch into crossover territory with each impossible deke, thread-the-needle pass and goal. A stable of second-tier stars like Jarome Iginla, Joe Thornton and Pavel Datsyuk are less known nationwide, but also spectacular. Scoring is up 10 percent over the last three seasons compared to the three before that.
That this renaissance is happening now comes after a lost decade and change. It may seem hard to believe now, but in 1994 Sports Illustrated ran a cover story with the headline
"Why the NHL's Hot and the NBA's Not." (Credit ESPN columnist Bill Simmons for publicizing that link and for also joining the list of national writers jumping on hockey's bandwagon with an
April column on how he found himself paying attention to his hometown Boston Bruins after several seasons away.)
Back when that SI story ran, the New York Rangers were in the process of winning their first Stanley Cup in 54 years. Their seven games against Vancouver and several of that year's earlier-round series reached Ali-Frazier levels of drama.
But the NHL let all that momentum slip away with a long lockout the following season, followed by several years of a stultifying style of play exemplified by some of the best New Jersey Devils teams. A sport that once saw Wayne Gretzky score 92 goals in 80 games one season was now being taken over by bigger, slower players with fewer skills. By 1998-99, Anaheim's Teemu Selanne needed just 47 goals to lead the league. And just as the NHL emerged from that defensive wilderness earlier this decade, players and management took the unprecedented step of letting their acrimony kill an entire season over a labor dispute, rendering fans hockeyless for 2004-05.
The small silver lining that followed that gigantic dark cloud, as Pittsburgh
general manager Ray Shero pointed out last week while his Penguins made short work of the Rangers, is the double infusion of youth the league got from two strong draft classes entering the NHL at once. If the league was going to awaken from its self-induced coma, at least it had the good fortune to do so as Mr. Crosby and Co. arrived to help the recovery.
They're benefiting from post-lockout rule changes that have shrunk goalie equipment and reconfigured rinks to benefit offenses. Most importantly, the NHL has followed through on promises previously empty ones to crack down on dirty play that neutralizes the game's stars.
Penguins co-owner Mario Lemieux, Mr. Crosby's boss and predecessor as a Pittsburgh hockey icon, had countless games shaved off his career by the unnecessary beatings he endured through much of the 1990s. He was hardly alone.
"Before the lockout, if you used to stand in front of the net, you'd be cross-checked," Mr. Shero says. "It'd be a tough place to go to score any goals. But now you have to defend smart. It gives the skill players a lot more opportunities to do their thing."
Literally and figuratively passing through New York recently, the Penguins appear to have dynasty written all over them, thanks to Mr. Crosby and Mr. Malkin, who was unmovable and unstoppable against the Rangers.
The NHL still has a laundry list of problems, from its placement on the still-obscure Versus to its continuing inability to penetrate much of the Sun Belt. Its outdoor game in Buffalo between the Penguins and Sabres lived up to the hype but the burden remains for the league to prove that wasn't a one-off success.
The league and union ought to swallow their pride, retreat from a few markets that have consistently failed to gain traction the NHL remains an afterthought in Nashville and South Florida and, for the love of all things decent, permanently table any talk of further expansion to hockey hinterlands like Kansas City and Las Vegas. A game already taking positive steps would look even better with a more concentrated talent pool free of talent-poor fourth-liners.
All that said, the present game looks great. With Mr. Cherry shouting this to Americans at the top of his lungs, maybe a few more will notice.
Write to Adam Thompson at
adam.thompson@wsj.com
