"Puck This": An NHL Manifesto

With the official cancellation of games into mid-January now, the NHL has me thinking about it in ways it rarely does. Could one the four "major" sports in America lose a full season for the second time in less than a decade? Seems foolish to me.

Quite frankly, I largely grew up without an NHL team here in Minnesota. Our North Stars moved to Dallas in the early 1990's, depriving me of a local big league pro hockey team to take an interest in during my earliest years of fully understanding, paying attention to and aggressively analyzing sports in general.

But I was still able to keep tabs on the NHL at-large via ESPN's coverage, which provided games on both coasts and kept me (and I'm sure others in Minnesota) engaged in the most visible pro hockey league in the world. And of course we got the NHL back with the Minnesota Wild, who had their inaugural season in 2000-2001.

It seems to be the NHL as a whole, on both the management and players' side, has an inflated sense of where they are on the American sports' landscape. After that previous lost season, 2004-2005, the league needed to re-establish an audience beyond the "hard core" hockey fans they would not go away shy of the league being disbanded. They needed the ubiquitous presence of ESPN with the attention and coverage they provide, but instead a television contract was struck with the niche Outdoor Life Network, which later became Versus in the United States and is now known as NBC Sports Network.

NBC and NBC Sports Network are certainly solid partners for the NHL to have in their corner, but there's really no competing with the wide girth of ESPN on a national level. If ESPN forgets about your sport or is unwilling to offer much coverage across their various mediums, casual fans in the United States may well follow suit and forget as well.

I describe myself as a casual hockey fan, but that is not to say I won't watch the NHL when games are played again. The Wild made some big moves during the offseason, and I plan to be part of what will surely be record local ratings for their first game this season (assuming it happens). But I also feel like I'm not alone in having the league largely off my radar right now beyond the latest news (usually dismal) regarding the current labor situation, and that is too bad.

-BB