Spin it all you want …
After watching the Flyers game tonight, there is little hope for the NHL for true hockey fans. The refs and penalty calling in the NHL is a fucking joke. Everything is a penalty. Touch a player on the boards, penalty.
More Disturbing: Bully watches and covers EVERY game EVERY night. There is no doubt that less talented/profitable teams get more favorable calls regardless of score. No doubt. It is what it is. Like it or not, I fear the people running the NHL remain clueless and continue to kill the game. They can spin all the attendance numbers and how allegedly popular the new rules are but at the end of the day if the product was so great, it would be on ESPN and not sharing “network” time with Ted Nugent and so many people would not be complaining. (Yeah, good idea to go head to head with Monday Night Football with your “national” OLN broadcast. Real smart. Whose idea was that? Last week, a whopping 220,000 tuned into OLN to watch the NHL on Monday. Bully’s web traffic for the day smokes the NHL’s “national” feed. A damn joke.)
Fans are complaining, coaches are complaining left and right about the officiating but league kooks won’t listen. So don’t be surprised when your TV ratings dive even further because your product is more frustrating to watch than entertaining.
In 5 years, possibly less, TV will not even cover most NHL games in most markets at this rate. And who wants to sit through a web stream of an entire game. No one. But that is where this sport is headed: games streamed on the web.
Bully will continue to cover the NHL for now but we might just start concentrating on older film when hockey was hockey. This stuff today isn’t hockey to me at least. Maybe I’m just a throwback and I am out of touch but hell, tickets are expensive to games and I wouldn’t pay to watch this slop. Who wants to leave a game pissed off after dropping $400 or more to get there? This is not a cheap sport … And if 80% of league revenue comes from your gate, why not give the fans what they want.
Out of touch fuckers. Been known to ruin many a company, league and country …
November 19th, 2005 at 11:31 am
the “new rules” are a complete joke because the refs aren’t calling the pentalty. if they see a player fall to the ice or make some big production, they call it. players are starting to realize it and its turning the game into a joke. brasher gets called for “kneeing” when the other players leg went up into the air because he moved it out of the way and there was no contact. terrific call.
November 21st, 2005 at 2:01 pm
Fantastic rant. The NHL has turned into a high priced no-check men’s league playing to half full stadiums of casual fans. Great job Goodenow-Bettman. The officiating was mediocre at best prior to the lock-out. Now, Walkom and his band of fools seem to think everyone is there to watch them blow the whistle until they can’t see. The hypocricy is that this was supposed to open the game up, improve the flow and make it easier for the casual fan to understand. The opposite has happened: All PP and special teams, no line turnover shift to shift, and the most ridiculous new set of rules ever to enter an established sport.