The One That Starts It All

I suppose for my first real blog I should write about my first love. With all due respect to my lovely and charming significant other, I’m speaking here of the National Hockey League. (As I write, the Philadelphia Flyers hold a 4-2 lead over the hated New York Rangers in a nationally televised game on ESPN.) I have loved hockey for as long as I can remember, harboring delusions as a child that I would someday play for my hometown team despite the fact that I never learned how to ice skate. Ah, details. Well, I still love the game today, but -- as with most loves -- it has waned a bit and been tempered by all our years together. I still see positives in my love: grit, skill and grace, and the pure joy that happens so little in life when some players raise that Cup over their heads. Unfortunately, too many negatives are now heavily overshadowing those positives: an astonishing lack of passion and creativity in the game, fighting, empty stands, low scoring games, etc. With a giant labor war looming in the offseason, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman has been putting together panels in the hopes that some real changes can be brought to the game whenever it may resume – if one can believe Bettman. It is my sincere hope that he can be believed and that he is telling the truth. As for the changes I would like to see take place, here are a few: 1. Return the conferences to two divisions, one of seven teams the other of eight, and bring back divisional playoffs; this would bring back the old rivalries and more spirited hockey along with it. 2. Eliminate the touch-up rule on icing calls; as soon as the puck passes the goal line, blow the whistle; this would get shorten the real time of a game by several seconds per call, which would add up when one considers the amount of icings that occur per game. 3. Eliminate fighting. The NHL will never be taken seriously as long as this kind of behavior is condoned. 4. Move the nets back from 15 feet out from the end boards back to their original spot on the ice (I’m not exactly sure where they were, but the distance was significantly less); this will create more room in the neutral zone for teams to cover defensively, which will hopefully make the trap easier to beat and thus create more offense. 5. Increase the surface size of the rinks to match that of the international game; again, this will create more room for the defense to cover resulting -- again, hopefully -- in more offense. 6. Change the philosophy of the game from defense-first to offense-first. I know this cannot be legislated into the game, but I would like to see coaches stop insisting on players becoming better “two-way” players, and rather have them concentrating on the best way to win a game -- scoring goals. I could easily keep going here, but sooner or later I have to stop writing. (Don't worry, this topic shall be revisited many a time.) All I’m going to leave you with is that these are some of the changes that I would like to see happen so that I, and millions of others, can have the best love ever -- the rejuvenated kind.