LIV It Up: Why The NHL Has To Aim Higher

Stanley Cup Final Pop Quiz: How many of the players on the Final teams from Florida and Vegas are rock-solid choices make the Hockey Hall of Fame? As it stands today, with the Golden Knights prepared to close out the Panthers for their first Stanley Cup, the answer to that question could be… none?

Certainly if Florida’s Matthew Tkachuk and Vegas’ Jack Eichel put up another ten years at their current play they’d be HHoF candidates. But that’s a big if. Panthers goalie Oleg Bobrovsky’s trajectory has looked like the Leviathan roller coaster at Canada’s Wonderland. Way up. Way down. Who knows? Alex Pietrangelo will have won a Cup in St, Louis, but he’s a marginal Norris Trophy candidate. 

Florida’s Eric Staal has won a Cup and is the seventh active NHL scorer, but his political problems over LGBTQ this year might hurt him. For the rest, only time will tell. Injuries and inconstancies have derailed many a player like Jonathan Marchessault or William Karlsson of the Knights in the past. Look at Mark Stone if you want to see what injuries can do to an impact player. 

In fact, of the NHL’s top tier of elite players in today’s game— the sure HHoF candidates— Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Alex Ovechkin, Jonathan Toews, Anze Kopitar, Drew Doughty and Nathan MacKinnon have lifted the Cup. But a long list of HHoF slam dunks starting with Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, Auston Matthews, John Tavares, Joe Pavelski, Claudia Giroux and more are still waiting for their first Cup. 

The point being that the NHL showcase series is being decided by two teams with little legendary HHoF power. The games are tight, cramped, physical. That’s the NHL’s covenant in its expansion business plan. Keep expanding to new markets (latest estimates are two more clubs by 2025). Thin out the talent. Exaggerate the importance of fourth liners. Give goalies all the advantages. Lower the common denominator.

As HHoF Ken Dryden wrote in 2022, “All the players’ amazing skills, developed in hours of practice, visualizing and dreaming in basements, on roads and local rinks, in drills with coaches and expert teachers, their minds and hands now able to move as fast as their feet, to find and use all the open ice that is there. But with so little open ice where open ice matters, for what?”

NHL sweats will tell you that’s how it must be played. With 80 percent of the action occurring within three feet of the boards you need grinders and pluggers to win. Fair enough. There is certainly a market for it. But that style is also a restrictor on your reach. Does dumbing down the Final serve to restrict the growth of the sport at a higher level?

What if the NHL were to open up the game as Dryden suggests, letting its superstars roam? “This game, one that allows for such speed and grace, one that has so much open ice, is now utterly congested… Never in hockey’s history has a tail so wagged the dog.” Look at how the NBA, NFL and soccer market their stars globally. Now compare that to the NHL. 

In the NBA’s Steph Curry era the game has been freed up from big guys clogging the middle. MVP Nikola Jokic can shoot from inside and a way outside. “If a big guy can’t pass and shoot, there’s no place for him. With big guys dispersed and away from the basket, little guys now even get rebounds… This NBA game, played on a much smaller surface than a hockey rink, is now far more open, much less congested,” writes Dryden. 

Would taking Dryden’s prescription for opening up— larger nets, smaller goalie equipment— be the step toward greater creativity, making a global business model for hockey instead of more of Gary Bettman’s cash-grab expansion plans?

The question struck us last week as we saw the Saudi LIV Golf owners in effect buy out the PGA Tour after a short, nasty fight. After 18 months of sniping at the Saudi-backed scheme for debasing the product— and letting top stars like Rory McIlroy get caught up in the rhetoric— the PGA Tour suddenly folded like a cheap suit last week. 

The men who’d led the PGA Tour into this rout suddenly realized they’d brought a pitching wedge to a long-drive contest. Their boosting of paydays for players who didn’t defect and the costs of legal cases was going to put the Tour into the poorhouse. If settling meant betraying all the people who’d taken their side in the dispute, not giving them fair warning of what was to come, so be it. So long as Tour commissioner Jay Monaghan got to keep his job.

As it had done with F1, the top soccer leagues and clubs in the world and even the WWE, the Saudi Sovereign Investment Fund (PIF) was telling the Tour “You can’t win. We have more money to grow the sport. Be our partners or rot in the field.” The Saudis understand global outreach in many areas, not least of which is sport, in trying to whitewash a 14th century theocracy’s brutalities. The spread of PIF-funded sport across Asia and Africa can be the first stepping that process. The returns are enormous. 

The NHL, which has abandoned the Olympics and World Cup models for more pointless regular-season games, could be primed for a similar takeover. Undercapitalized and stagnant after three decades of Bettman’s cautious franchise model, the entire NHL could be bought with the PIF’s pin money. If team loyalties and histories are preserved will fans care who owns the team? Ask fans in Newcastle who’ve seen their Saudi-owned team in the Premiership vault  to Top three in the table and a place in the 2024 Champions League. 

From the Saudis to the collapse of cable TV, the sports model is changing everywhere. The only question is, will the NHL stick with its traditional values till the bitter end or will it embrace a creative product to restore international and Olympic hockey as the top tier? 

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Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx