Dear NHL
I’m a huge hockey fan. Or let’s say NHL fan. I don’t watch euro hockey.
I used to watch Finnish national league as a kid but after the NHL coverage got much better, I stopped watching euro hockey completely.
I’m happy with my NHL Gamecenter, watching every game live.
Now, as an NHL fan I’m also a huge fucking whiner and I’m under the delusion that I know everything much better than Bettman and co. does.
So here’s some shit that I would like to be adressed ASAP. Thanks.
1. Bring back the enforcers
This discussion is older than Jaromir Jagr’s NHL career and everything that can be said about this has already been said about 9 billion times so I’m not even gonna get into it. Just gonna wrap it up with this:
“kill the instigator rule and apologize”.
2. You ruined it, now go back indoors
The outdoor game was a great idea. I watched the very first one in 2003.
My Oilers lost to Montreal. Steady Steve Staios scored a goal. A bunch of geezers played in an alumni game. It was great. NHL ran with it and Winter Classic became an annual thing. That made it a bit less special but still a cool concept and I’m so glad they kept it as a normal regular season game with 2 points on the line and didn’t turn it into a boring cash grab wankfest the ASG is. But Stadium Series? Really? Fucking stop already.
My homeless brother spends less time outdoors than the NHL these days.
3. The fucking “TV-Timeout”
Every game broadcast now has 17 commercial breaks. Yeah. I counted.
In addition the announcers have to do reads. There is no longer “power play” in game. Instead we have “Subway Mega Schnitzel powerplay” and “Jimmy’s Lawnmowers powerplay” and “This powerplay is sponsored by Nikolai Khabibulin’s Driving Vodka — Please drink responsibly”.
Yeah they want money, I get it. I like money.
I’m fine with everything else but the fucking TV-timeout, or as I call it “the momentum killer”.
Not only does it fuck up my hockey watching flow and make it really hard to get into the games with the action being constantly interrupted by horse shit I will never buy, but it absolutely kills the momentum in game.
Timeout is now wasted on resting after an icing or throwing a shot in the dark
challenge on some goal, because the fucking thing is just not needed anymore. If one team starts gaining some momentum (you know, game getting some actual real life emotion going and shit), coaches no longer need to use their time out to calm down their team an break the momentum of the other team. No no, let’s just wait for 28 seconds and we’ll get that break for free while making people watch more of Jordan Eberle’s terrible acting on some car commercial.
By the 2nd commercial break the game is starting to lose my attention (unless it’s really exciting which is kinda rare these days) and I start reaching for my guitar, first to have something to do while trying to survive another set of commercial, then to have something to do because the game
already lost me and I don’t care anymore.
4. We still talking about the amount of goals scored?
Yeah yeah we’re down to 5.2 goals/game and the american audience needs more circus and Disney.
Well how about we stop dicking around with minor changes then and just make the nets a little bit bigger.
No, it wouldn’t ruin the record books and no we wouldn’t need an asterisk next to all stats in the future. Goalies are now twice as big as in the 80s and somehow that’s all fine and dandy, but making the nets like 2 inches wider and 1 inch taller would be a problem?
I don’t really care either way, I’m just annoyed with the discussion we have about this every year.
5. Change the NHL.com website
New NHL.com site sucks shit. It looks like a blog now. A bad blog as the writers for the site are notorious for being really bad at… well, writing.
That horrible layout that looks like a free wordpress template is an absolute eye sore and the functionality of the site is all gone.
I used to be able to get the boxscore of all games in 2 clicks, now I need to click and scroll and wait for things to load just to get the scores, so I can click and scroll and wait some more and when I finally find the page with the stats, it’s such a fucking mess that it’s all as readable as a research paper on quantum physics, written by a 4 year old slow kid whose hair style
resembles the Jofa bucket Jagr used to wear.
And did I mention the fucking thing is ugly as shit! Worst website ever.
I have some more but let’s save them for some future rant, want coffee now.
-Niko