What a beautiful scene.
More than 105,000 hockey fans – the largest attendance in the history of the sport – braved snow flurries and 13° temperatures to fill up Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor to watch the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Detroit Red Wings play in The Winter Classic. The annual outdoor game has become one of the coolest traditions in sport, if not the coolest (and certainly one of the coldest). The Winter Classic celebrates the origins of the sport and gives a nod to the game’s lore and nostalgia – the idea of kids playing on the frozen pond or on some makeshift outdoor rink in the dead of winter, ignoring the elements and simply playing for the love of the game. And the since you get is that the players love playing in The Winter Classic, as it’s a unique experience in an otherwise plodding 82-game regular season. Sure, the falling snow made for some difficult conditions to play in, but it’s a 1-off deal and, in the bigger picture, the Winter Classic celebrates all that is good in the game.
And this year’s Winter Classic also showcased one of THE WORST aspects of hockey, which is the shootout: tied at 2-2 after regulation, the Leafs and Wings played 5:00 of sudden death, 4-on-4 OT, then settled matters with a penalty shootout, which was ultimately won by Toronto.
The LOSE absolutely, positively hates shootouts. The lose likes to see winners and losers determined by legitimate means in the flow of the game, and not through artificial means. The shootout in hockey is just as contemptible as the penalty kicks in soccer, if not moreso because it now is a possibility in every single game, whereas in soccer it’s reserved only for knockout matches. The method for settling games in college football – each team possessing the ball at the 25-yd line – is also hokey, but at least there is something akin to real football involved in the proceedings.
Basketball and baseball, of course, have always had traditions of playing OT as long as is necessary to determine a winner. Such games take on a unique character to them. The more OTs a game goes in basketball, the more exciting is tends to get; the more extra innings a game goes in baseball, the weirder it gets. I understand that for a sport of such physicality such as football or hockey, or a sport like soccer in which you’re constantly in motion for 90 minutes, the idea of regularly settling games by playing as many OTs as possible is unrealistic.
The NFL has struck a balance that I think is reasonable. It used to be sudden death – first team to score would win – but teams didn’t like the fact that a team with receive the kickoff, drive down and kick a FG and the game would be over, so now if the first possession of OT results in a field goal, the other team at least gets a possession. (If the first possession of OT results in a TD or, even cooler, a safety, the game is over.) After each team has had the ball, if the score is tied the game becomes sudden death, and in the playoffs you play on and on until someone scores, but in the regular season they call the game after the 5th Quarter is over and declare it a tie – which happens rarely, maybe only once in a season.
The NHL still has play-until-you-drop OT in the playoffs, but regular season games that ended deadlocked went down as a tie in the standings. The league added a 5:00 OT period in the late 1980s, a single period of 5:00 at 5-on-5, and it did reduce the number of ties somewhat, but risk aversion strategy kicks in if you’re a coach at that point – are you better off playing to win in OT when losing gets you nothing, or are you better to go through the motions for 5:00 and get the single point? Long-term, the latter is definitely the smarter thinking.
So in an effort to further revamp a game that really didn’t need revamping to begin with, the league switched to playing 4-on-4 in overtime. And in 2005 the league decided to adopt the shootout to determine the outcome of all regular season games that remained deadlocked after the OT. The standings used to be simple – you get 2 pts. for a win, 1 pt. for a tie, 0 for a loss. Now you get 2 for a win, 1 for a loss in OT or a shootout, and 0 for loss in regulation. And The LOSE thinks this is bullocks. Losing is losing. You shouldn’t be rewarded for failing to do what’s necessary to be declared the ‘winner.’ The NHL’s glass half full argument is that, instead, the game is basically a tie and teams are striving to gain the extra point in OT – which makes sense until you actually see someone do some of this stuff in a shootout. It is just an exhibition, a glorified skilled contest, and the fact that you actually get an extra point in the standings for this is nonsense. The attitude of the players seems to be that a shootout is “meh, whatever.” At least you get a point for showing up.
This also makes an OT game more collectively valuable, since there is 3 pts. total awarded as opposed to only 2 in regulation. The International Ice Hockey Federation has now gone a step further to correct this mathematical quandary away from the North American continent, awarding you 3 pts. if you win in regulation and 2 for winning in OT or a shootout – which makes the standings even more confusing. The IIHF was actually responsible for making this mess to begin with, instituting shootouts as a decider in World Championship and Olympic play back in 1992. This was done as much for logistical reasons as anything else – when you’ve got 4-5 games scheduled for one day in an arena, a game that goes 2OT screws up your schedule pretty badly. The NHL following suit in 2005 marks about the first time in history that the NHL has agreed to follow some guideline from the IIHF, an entity the league makes a point to show the middle finger on a regular basis. The NHL likes to think of itself as being vastly superior to the rest of the world when it comes to the game of hockey, and with good reason – it has the best players, the best salaries, and generates the most revenue. But compared to the other major professional sports leagues in North America, the NHL languishes far behind, not just in terms of popularity but also in terms of competence. Not much of the ways the league operates has ever made much sense, and this instituting of the shootout is simply one of many, many examples.
What’s wrong with a tie? I grew up playing basketball and baseball, which don’t have ties, but I also was a goalkeeper in soccer, where ties were commonplace and considered to be an acceptable result. Honestly, my experience in soccer was that draws were usually filled with enough mistakes by both sides to warrant either one losing, so ending up with the draw was fortuitous, or maybe you were playing a game against a superior side and you fought hard to wind up stalemated. More often than not, a draw felt OK. It’s still better than losing, which is something I know far too much about. There is a reason this blog ain’t called IN PLAY DRAW.
This doesn’t actually happen as often in the NHL as it might seem. In the 2012 season (the last full season), only 12.2% of regular season games ended deadlocked after regulation. That really isn’t that many. I’ve never really understood why the game of hockey felt a need to institute something is part lottery, part dog-and-pony show and pretend that it’s a legitimate way to be deciding games.
Then again, I’m reminded now of a quote I heard once after a particularly lame game around about the turn of the millennium, a 1-1 tie between the Vancouver Canucks and (I think) the Mighty Ducks of
This seemingly throwaway quip from a frustrated coach (and in those days, coaching the Canucks was definitely a frustrating endeavour) actually speaks to the NHL’s motivations behind moving to a shootout – the idea that tie games are somehow unsatisfying to the rank-and-file, paying customers. Unlike the other three major sports, all of which have massive national TV deals, the NHL is far more dependent on actual gate receipts to pay the wage bills and keep the lights on. The top brass in the league offices essentially decided that, as a way to keep fans entertained, and thus willing to continue to shell out the cost of high ticket prices, it was always important to have a winner. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, a disciple of NBA commissioner David Stern, was essentially copying from the NBA business model – if the game seems somehow to be lacking in excitement, then go about trying to manufacture some.
And given the poor financial state of the league about 15 years ago, you can understand why they were thinking along those lines. The league cancelled the entire 1995 season in a nasty labour dispute; franchises from Québec and Winnipeg relocated, as the Canadian dollar was sucking wind at the time. The league has continued to struggle ever since, as the overall accounting numbers are somewhat deceiving. The league collectively posts annual profits, yet most of those black numbers on the balance sheets are the result of only 6-8 or so of the 30 franchises. During the recent economic depression, it was rumoured that as more than half the franchises were in serious financial peril and were for sale on the downlow.
And you can also understand the league’s thinking about upping the entertainment value in the hockey-going experience, since the single-most exciting and entertaining aspect of the sport – scoring goals – seems to have become a lost art form. I first started following the game
Actually, no. In 1982, when offense was aplenty, 17.6% of the regular season games ended in ties. The number of draws has, in fact, decreased by 5% in the 30 years since, even though the goal count is down. It would seem that, as the game has become more defensive in nature, and defensive strategies have improved, so have the strategies for protecting leads.
And just because the game has become more defensive over time, it doesn’t necessarily mean the game is any better or any worse. It’s simply different. Similar declines in offensive output have occurred in basketball over the past 20 years, both collegiately and on the professional level, and I do think the game is the worse for it, simply because watching guys throw bricks is boring as sin. That Connecticut-Butler game which posed as an NCAA championship in 2011, won by UConn by a score of 54:41, was quite possibly the worst basketball game I have ever seen. At least Butler’s horrid display – they shot 18.8% from the floor – erased another dubious Washington State record from the books, which is worst FG pct. ever in an NCAA championship game. (And speaking of W.S.U. and bad basketball, what the fuck was this shit? Then again, for my study abroad program in college, I technically transferred to Butler for a year, which makes me as much as Butler alum as a W.S.U. guy. I was displeased that Butler lost twice in the NCAA final. Displeased but not surprised – this is IN PLAY LOSE, after all.)
The NHL had the perfect opportunity in 1994 to make some headway against the NBA, their prime competitor for winter sports entertainment dollar, as the Stanley Cup Final between the Canucks and the Rangers was widely regarded as one of the best finals ever, while the NBA final in the first year A.M.J. (after Michael Jordan) featured a cynical Knicks team reaching the final and ultimately losing to Houston in an ugly series which set the game back about 50 years. Hockey was hot and basketball was not, but then the NHL went and screwed it all up with a yearlong work stoppage. The NHL has never had much of an ability to stand prosperity. And the league should look in the mirror if it wants to start figuring out where the offense has gone in the game. For years, too much of the game – both in how it’s been administered and how it’s been played – has been for the benefit of the marginal player at the expense of the skilled player. The league should have cracked down on the clutching, the holding, and the obstruction in the neutral zone far sooner than it did.
But having said that, I don’t think the NHL of 2014 is necessarily better nor worse than it was in the past. It’s just different, but I happen to still enjoy it. I do know the players are bigger, stronger, and quicker than ever before, and the speed of the game is remarkable to watch in and of itself, even if the puck isn’t going in the net all that often – and part of that decline in offense, of course, has to do with the goaltenders being bigger and quicker as well. And for someone like me, adding a shootout just seems like a cheap sideshow. The game is fine as it is, even if the game ends in a tie.
But see, the shootout wasn’t instituted to satisfy people like me, nor was it instituted to satisfy the core constituency of hockey fans, who are the most diehard of fans in any sport. Hockey fans are hard core. They love the sport like none other. And they deride the 1 pt. awarded for OT/shootout losses as a “Bettman Point” for a reason – few decisions that Gary Bettman has made in his tenure as NHL commissioner have had the hard core fans’ interests at heart. He’s spent most of his time attempting to turn what is essentially a regional sport into a national one, be it through gimmicks to try and keep the interest of casual fans, or be it in the location of NHL franchises in places like Miami and Phoenix. A good rule of thumb here is that a game involving ice isn’t likely to flourish in a climate where ice doesn’t naturally form. The NHL’s Southern Strategy has been a flop financially, as most of those franchises are in perpetual financial trouble, and the league offices are simply too stubborn to admit their mistakes. The league would rather let a perpetually inept-performer like the Phoenix Coyotes continue rather than see them moved to a hockey-friendly city Seattle, or to a Canadian locale like Hamilton or Québec City where the Coyotes would be adored. (Never mind, of course, that the strong Canadian dollar has made doing business north of the border, in the hotbed of the sport, better than ever. I said before that 6-8 teams make most of the money in the league, and you can bet that none of those are south of Philadelphia.)
The NHL will tell you, of course, that their market research would indicate that people like the shootout. I would suspect that isn’t the case at all – marketing research is notorious in that you can slant it to pretty much reveal any outcome you want to reveal simply by asking the right sorts of questions. I would further suggest that the sorts of fans who would like a shootout ending are the sorts of fans the NHL has been failing to grasp ahold of for the past decade. The TV contracts for the league have basically gotten worse over that time, and the league continues not to fire on all cylinders. All of the NHL’s efforts to make the game into something it isn’t have, in the end, failed to yield the desired results.
We come to understand the way that a game is played. We come to understand the rules of the game, the tactics of the game, and the culture that surrounds it. Those inherent qualities are still what ultimately appeal the most. Draws are inherently a part of soccer, for example. Last year in the EPL, 28% of the games ended in draws – but given that the EPL is most popular professional sports league in the world, having more than a quarter of the games end in a draw doesn’t seem to affect business all that much. In the 1970s, the NASL top brass believed that Americans didn’t like draws, so they instituted a shootout to end every game. They also thought that Americans wouldn’t like the game because there wasn’t enough offense, so they jerryrigged a point system in the standings based upon how much your team scored. The end result was the most confusing table imaginable. Look at these standings, but scroll down first without looking at the key at the topof the page, and then tell me you can figure out how it actually worked. But people know a gimmick when they see one, and they weren’t impressed for long. Some would say the NASL going defunct was a sign that soccer could not succed in North America. To me, it made no sense to come to that conclusion, since what was being presented on the field wasn’t the game of soccer that anyone knew. The MLS tried a few gimmicks as well when it first started, but then it dawned on the league’s top brass that most of the fans of the game liked the game exactly the way it was. There wasn’t any reason to “Americanize” the game. Doing so meant that you didn’t fundamentally understand what Americans wanted.
And this is an important point to consider. What do you get when you watch a soccer game. You get 45 straight minutes of play that is rarely interrupted. There aren’t even commercials as such, only sponsor’s logos flashed on the top of the screen. Going to a sporting event in the U.S. is an act of sensory overload. I don’t go to see the Giants for the jumbotron or any of the artificial entertainment in between innings. I don’t go to Warriors games for the laser light show introduction and the bells and whistles during timeouts, all of which are basically the same at every single stadium or arena in the country. The game itself is what is ultimately appealing. If the product isn’t any good, then all of that other stuff won’t hold your interest. And if the game does hold your interest, all that other stuff is superfluous.
But even soccer changed when it needed to, and did so for the right reasons. When it was clear that lack of creative play was choking the life out of the game, soccer changed the system from 2 pts. for a win to 3 pts., while keeping the draws worth 1 in the standings. This has, over time, encouraged more teams to be less risk averse and try to win games instead of trying not to lose. It seems like this would be a natural fit in hockey, but that would first require hockey moguls to acknowledge that what they have now is something of a joke. Pride can be a difficult thing to overcome.
In the case of the NHL, maybe there is always going to be a regional appeal. But that’s fine. A lot of sports are. (Think anyone outside the state of California cares a whit about water polo?) The game can be great in and of itself. It doesn’t need tacky, artificial endings. Doing so simply cheapens the traditions that an event like the Winter Classic is supposed to uphold and celebrate. Even that event, as cool as it is, is turning somewhat into overkill this year, as there are no fewer than six outdoor games scheduled this year: two of them are at Yankee Stadium and serve as showcase events that lead up to the Super Bowl in New York, and one of which is in that bastion of winter sports, Los Angeles, which is far more likely to resemble beach hockey than anything else given this ludicrously warm winter we’re having in California. (Gloat gloat.)
I love the game, and one of these days I’ll get around to writing one of the more personally painful Profiles in Lose, which is that of my beloved Canucks. (How beloved? I was at two of those 1994 finals games with the Rangers I referenced earlier.) But the game doesn’t need gimmicks. It doesn’t need lotteries and trickshots. None of that should be part of the game. It was fine the way it was. Since they were making an exception to the norm in having the Maple Leafs and the Red Wings play outdoors in Michigan Stadium, I would’ve liked for them to make an exception and let the game end in a 2-2 tie. I know that you can’t, of course, for logistical reasons. But if you’re harkening back to the days of players’ youths when they were playing on a frozen pond, you should also point out one other wrinkle of playing pond hockey or freeze football or any other game as a kid – if the score was tied and mom said it was time to come home for dinner, the game was over. End of story. Moms make very effective pond hockey commissioners. Maybe the NHL should hire one and fire Gary Bettman.
