The TV ratings for the Stanley Cup playoffs have not been good. Monday’s Game 1 of the Final got a 2.8, well off the 4.2 of the opener a year ago, crushed by Game 7 of Warriors-Thunder. The final numbers for Game 2 likely won’t be much better with the game banished from NBC to NBCSN thanks to not the Warriors, but the extreme jungle gym competition that is American Ninja Warrior. Ratings have been down throughout the playoffs, as well, with the New York, Los Angeles and Chicago markets all being eliminated by Round 2. And then there’s Canada, where viewership has plummeted without a single Canadian team in the playoffs for the first time in 46 years.
But good things are happening for the long-term health and growth of the NHL, and they have nothing to do with adding another team in the desert.
Ice hockey’s inherent selling point over every other sport is the speed of the game. The fastest skaters in the NHL can approach 30mph at top gear, a notch or two above Usain Bolt running full throttle. Add in the skill of handling the puck, the soccer-like passing artistry and repeated contact with other bodies flying around the ice and it’s a compelling overall package. This is not a desperate “please like my sport” pitch – just a simple analysis that hockey as some obvious things going for it, speed chief among them.
Only the NHL has long failed to capitalize on the best part of its game. Countless words can, and have, been written on how the rise of the New Jersey Devils 20 years ago, behind Jacques Lemaire’s neutral zone trap, stalled the play on the ice and the growth of the sport. None of them will be rehashed here because reading about those Devils teams was almost as boring as watching them play hockey. Almost.
The reason those Devils had a lasting impact on the game, though, as unsightly as it was, is because they won: three Cups and five conference titles between 1995 and 2003. The NHL, like all sports leagues the world over, is a copycat league. The thinking goes: if you want to beat the best, you have to be almost exactly like the best. So plodding, defensive hockey ruled the day, bolstered by referees that looked away from clutch-and-grab defensive tactics, and slowed ever more by the presence of unskilled goons on every roster tasked with enforcing hockey’s “code,” a faux-macho self-governing system almost as outdated and illogical as Major League Baseball’s “unwritten rules.”
Regardless of which team wins this year’s cup, the rest of the league will have a clear mandate they will have to meet in order to compete: get faster. Both the Pittsburgh Penguins and San Jose Sharks play lightning-fast, possible pun intended. The Tampa Bay Lightning, the team the Penguins beat in the Eastern Conference Finals and who fell in six games to the Chicago Blackhawks in the Cup Final a year ago, also play a quick and skilled game, same as Chicago. But San Jose and Pittsburgh have shifted it into a higher gear – and the Penguins especially, who probably not coincidentally hold a 2-0 lead in the series.
Started by an offseason trade that landed Phil Kessel from Toronto, old man Penguins general manager Jim Rutherford embraced a new style. Kessel may look like a guy who would huff and puff his way through a beer league game, but he plays at a pace few in the league can match, his every rush down the ice nearly producing the feel of a Bartolo Colon home run. Before midseason, Rutherford somehow acquired Trevor Daley, one of the NHL’s best skaters, from the Blackhawks in exchange for Rob Scuderi, a toppled traffic cone on a snowy road. That was followed by the addition of winger and blur of blonde hair Carl Hagelin and the Penguins giving full-time roles to Bryan Rust and Conor Sheary, two young wingers from the AHL. Added to Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin, the Penguins quickly became the fastest team in the NHL and posted the league’s best record in the final months of the season.
This Penguins team is much different than even the last Pittsburgh Cup-winning team of 2009. Those Penguins gave heavy minutes to Scuderi, Brooks Orpik and Matt Cooke, players who were a mix of slow, slow and dirty and just dirty. None of the three would hold a roster spot on the 2016 edition. In fact, Orpik now is one of the top defenseman for the Washington Capitals, the Presidents’ Trophy winner the Penguins dispatched with ease in the second round. Washington GM Brian MacLellan built his group to be “big and heavy” for the playoffs, an approach that now seems outdated. You can’t physically impose your will on an opponent if you can’t catch them to hit them. MacLellan has since said he hopes to add more speed to the Capitals lineup for next season. Even the Philadelphia Flyers, who have mostly been attempting to punch their way to Stanley Cups since the mid-70s, have seemed to adjust their approach under general manager Ron Hextall and the franchise now has more Shayne Gostisbehere types in the pipeline than toothless whirlwinds of violence.
The Sharks, the highest-scoring team in the playoffs entering the final, so far have proven unable to skate with the Penguins, but they made it this far on puck movement and skill. Playing a physical game won’t turn things around, even if this Sharks team was capable of it: the biggest hit in the series came in Game 1 when Patrick Marleau dropped Rust. If Marleau, one of the league’s true gentlemen, is your enforcer, you better focus on speed.
Casual hockey fans may not be noticing it yet – and judging by TV ratings, they most definitely are not – but the Penguins and Sharks are showing the NHL has shifted from big and slow to skilled and fast. Hockey at its best. The rest of the league must now try to keep up.
