The 2016 NHL playoffs are over, and perhaps not a moment too soon for broadcasters. We will wait to see how ratings for Game 6 – the season’s finale – which featured the Pittsburgh Penguins claiming their fourth Stanley Cup, seven years to the day since they won their last one, in 2009. Yet, chances are the numbers are not good. And it might seem besides the point to bring this up now, but perhaps we might waver on these stats, rather than those from ice level, for a little while, because it’s through them we might start asking more interesting questions.
For instance: why don’t hockey fans like hockey?
It’s no secret the NHL struggles to maintain eyeballs, particularly in the spring, and particularly in the United States. Even at its most exciting – during the Stanley Cup Final – hockey lands behind network reruns or The Bachelorette, and gets clobbered by mid-season Monday night Major League Baseball games. Even in Canada, where the figures improved as the Cup race went on, overall viewership was down 18% over the first three games of the final round.
I point to these numbers not out of woe for the game’s popularity, or to note the troubles broadcasters are having, or even to gloat of some kind of karmic comeuppance visited upon those who might sign multi-billion dollar broadcast deals, thereby taking hockey away from a traditional TV home. No, I note them because they may be proof that we are all a bunch of phonies.
Because, if we were really all hockey fans – lovers of the sport, of the game, rather than of a team – then this spring’s TV numbers would not have been what they were. Objectively, this was a more-than-decent (perhaps even quite good) playoff season, for it contained the most potent of ingredients necessary for very good hockey: drama.
Do you like surprises? How about the St Louis Blues? Here was a team who for the past few years become something of a depressing joke about how to lose in the playoffs. They not only bested the defending Stanley Cup champion Chicago Blackhawks in the first round, but deftly handled a beefy, high-powered Dallas Stars team in the second, knocking them out, too. And imagine their surprise to discover themselves not only in the conference finals (finally!), but in the conference finals facing the San Jose Sharks. The same San Jose Sharks who only a couple of seasons ago seemed like they were facing an internal civil war. The same San Jose Sharks who – if the Blues were a joke about constant playoff failures – were the inevitable, sadder, punchline.
Do you enjoy unexpected turns of events? Then two words seem useful: Jonathan Drouin. The Tampa Bay Lightning forward had, only months prior to conference final, been doing all he could to force his team’s hand into trading him at the deadline – or before, if he could manage it. Back in January, after Drouin had been sent down to the AHL, he even refused to show up for a game because, as his agent claimed, he was worried a potential injury might hurt his value on the trade market. By the time the Lightning dropped out of the playoffs in May, Drouin had racked up 14 points in his 17 postseason games.
Do you like underdogs? The two final teams competing for the Stanley Cup got there thanks to their rookie goaltenders. Martin Jones, who had never been drafted to an NHL team, appeared between the pipes for the Sharks after being wrapped up in a couple of package trades last summer. Rookie goaltender Matt Murray was called into action for Pittsburgh near the end of the regular season, after starting goalie Marc-Andre Fleury went down with a concussion. They were nobodies in October; by June, either one could have been a Stanley Cup champion.
Do you like catharsis? Meet Phil Kessel. Phil Kessel arrived in Pittsburgh from Toronto last summer, surfing a giant wave of good riddance. Kessel’s bristly attitude – especially with media – was a constant distraction from the good numbers he usually put up on the ice. Toronto is the toughest market this side of Montreal, and is even quicker to throw its latest demigod straight to hell on a cloud of noxious talk radio fumes the second he has not fulfilled the enormous dreams the city has created to fill its humongously inflated sense of self-worth. Phil Kessel’s hell was supposed to be Pittsburgh. So much for that.
Finally, do you like sadness? Then I give you Joe Thornton. ‘Big Bird’ Thornton, as he was once known thanks to his gangly appearance, played over 1,367 regular season games before he ever saw a Stanley Cup final. That’s 1,367 games of never quite living up to the unrealistic expectations that had been placed on him from the moment he entered the league. Maybe it’s no wonder he finally grew that massive beard; it was a hiding place behind which he could finally just play some damn hockey without everyone caring that he was Joe Thornton. And it worked. These playoffs were like watching him reemerge as a younger, more lively version of himself. It’s a shame the ending wasn’t happier. Sunday night was likely not Thornton’s last game. But who knows if he’ll ever get that close again.
All of this, and we didn’t watch this year’s playoffs. Some hockey fans we are.
