A League Only a Canadian Could Love

by E. Spencer Kyte
Love of Sports Correspondent

A couple weeks ago, the Detroit Red Wings and Pittsburgh Penguins squared off in a Stanley Cup rematch in the Motor City and played the most entertaining game of the season.

The intense shootout culminated in the Pens coming back from three down in the third to tie the game, fall a goal down, and then tie the game again before finally winning 7-6 in Overtime.

The highlights ran 48 minutes into SportsCenter, after all the NBA highlights from sports hotbeds like Milwaukee and Oklahoma City had run their course.

While that last bit isn’t necessarily true (I’m Canadian and have no way of knowing how late the NHL highlights run on Sportscenter) the moral of the story is generally valid: The United States of America has zero interest in hockey.

Yes, there are diehards from Philly or Buffalo, and before they get all over me, let me clarify: I said generally. I know hockey fans exist outside of Canadian soil because it was my man Andy Smith from Pittsburgh who emailed me the night of the game raving about what a great show it was; and how sorry he is that so many people have little to no interest in a game played on ice.

More than 100,000 people will file into The Big House in Michigan to watch the Wolverines every Saturday they’re in town regardless of how poorly they’ve played this season.

NASCAR draws millions of people a year.

Baseball, the NFL and even the NBA do reasonably good business across the board with TV contracts and merchandise blitzes.

The NHL? Not so much.

Maybe this is perplexing to me because of my Canadian citizenship and hockey being intertwined with my DNA, but how can you not love this game?

The play moves fluidly from end to end with slick passes and bone crunching hits interspersed between changing on the fly and trying to beat out an icing call.

Guys dangle and undress defensemen before going shelf on a helpless goalie.

And when someone crosses the line of good taste, things are settled like they were in the old days – bare knuckles and one-on-one.

Seriously, what’s not to like?

People say the play is hard to follow. I say get HD (Seriously, it will be the savior of Hockey in the 21st century, I assure you). You don’t need the little blue and red lines Fox tried to use when they carried the NHL years ago to know where the puck is. You listen to the announcer and watch the little black disc get cycled in the corner and worked back to the point for a one-timer.

There was a time not that long ago where I, too, would have understood paying little to no attention whatsoever to the NHL.

Scoring was down. The New Jersey Devils ran the Neutral Zone trap from the time they scored their first goal until they bored you to sleep and skated off with a 1-0 victory. How else do you think Marty Brodeur has racked up so many shutouts?

But that was then…

Now there are stars – worthy stars – who do things on a nightly basis that make you shake your head and wonder if what you just saw really happened.

Like Alexander the Great scoring one-handed, off his back while falling against Phoenix a couple years ago.

Or Sidney Crosby on his first attempt in the shutout against Montreal.

Or Jonathan Toews dragging the puck on a string through the Colorado Avalanche defense last season.

Or Dion Phaneuf sending Denis Hamel airborn when he watched his dump-in just a little too long.

Still, the majority of the U.S. won’t tune in.

Franchises in Florida, Nashville and Atlanta play in front of nearly vacant seats every night.

West Coast teams like Los Angeles and Anaheim can’t draw from the massive markets available to them, even though, in Anaheim’s case, they’re only two years removed from hoisting hockey’s Holy Grail.

In spite of all of this, the NHL’s top two expansion destinations are Las Vegas and Kansas City.

Kansas City has been a part of the NHL before, when the Scouts lasted two years before moving to Colorado to become the Rockies before settling in the swamplands of New Jersey as the Devils.

I’ll save the “if you want to go to an old market, why not go back to Winnipeg?” speech for another day and save my suggestions for later too.

And Vegas?

Would it be a cool road trip / vacation destination for a killer guys weekend? Sure, but unless 3,000 groups of 5 guys are going to turn up 41 times a year, the team could be playing in front of empty seats.

Think about it – hockey is already failing in one desert town … and there are far fewer distractions and deterrents in Phoenix than there are in Las Vegas.

For starters, the NHL shouldn’t expand, period. The league is already too watered down and one or two more teams would only further deplete an already too shallow talent pool.

Ontario isn’t an option either, as many Ontario-based fans would clamour for. You can’t put a team in Hamilton because Buffalo would lose the Niagara Region and while another team in Toronto is intriguing, the last thing anyone needs is more Toronto Hockey Fans.

But if they do decide to expand, why does it have to be to a country that clearly could care less about the product more times than not?

Quebec City could use another kick at the can.

Halifax would love an opportunity.

And dammit, Winnipeg loves hockey. Give them another chance.

It’s time the NHL opened their eyes and realized that The Great U.S. Expansion that they hoped to witness as The Great One migrated to Los Angeles 20 years ago is never going to materialize.

There may be hockey hotbeds here and there, but on the whole, the U.S. ain’t buying, so why do we keep selling?