Hockey Face Off

Indy Vets Drop the Gloves Over the NHL's rule changes

The Opposition: Smooth = Bland

By Chris Hu

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Photo by Kimberly Kuang
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After nearly a year and a half of absence, the National Hockey League is finally back on the ice. But for hockey fans, the league's ebullient return will prove to have been a false dawn. The NHL, which lost all of its 2004-2005 season to an owner-imposed lockout, has re-emerged with a new collective bargaining agreement and a new-model version of the game itself—or, to use the language of NHL officials and my opponent Jason Ng (see image below), a fully revamped "product."

With over a dozen significant modifications to the rules governing play, this is the most comprehensive raft of rule changes ever undertaken in North American professional sports. It also threatens to corrode the character of one of the West's greatest cultural achievements with a flood of ill-considered, gimmicky changes, nearly all of which are intended to expand the NHL's market share by making the game more "open" and "flowing." Insofar as the average consumer likes speed, goals, (bloodless) action and—in the United States at least—wouldn't understand hockey if it hit him in the teeth with a 100-mph slap shot, the NHL has decided to give him exactly what he wants.

Smooth drowning

The NHL's goal of an uninterrupted flow of play is to be achieved primarily by three changes: (1) An increase in the size of the offensive zones, which comes at the expense of the neutral zone and the space behind each goal; (2) Allowing for long cross-ice passes formerly prohibited under the "two-line pass" rule; and (3) Perhaps most importantly, a renewed pledge to strictly enforce existing rules prohibiting minor obstruction, such as hooking, holding, and interference. Goaltenders are now prohibited from stick-handling the puck outside of a prescribed trapezoidal zone, and they are to be penalized for freezing the puck "unnecessarily." To cut down on fisticuffs, there is also a new rule mandating automatic suspensions for players who instigate fights at the end of games, and a minimum $10,000 fine for their coaches. And, because Americans seem incapable of comprehending the idea of a draw, there are now mandatory shoot-outs to settle tied regular-season games—a rule which was until recently regarded by NHL owners and administrators as a cheap gimmick to be employed only in hockey's semi-pro lower leagues.

Individually, some of the other new rules might have been good for the league—for example, reinstating the "tag-up" offsides rule, which will reduce pointless stoppages of play, or reducing the size of goaltenders' protective pads, which will increase scoring without tampering with the structure of the game itself. But implemented all at once, along with the litany of other changes listed above, these reforms significantly change the character of the game, and for the worse.

In a Boston Bruins-Pittsburgh Penguins match-up I watched this past weekend, the difference was apparent from the moment the puck was dropped. To be sure, the game featured faster, more offensive play than one might have expected from the old NHL. But these were frictionless, unsatisfying flows, devoid of the tension between speed and limitation (from crushing body checks to clever pokes and hooks) that makes hockey capable of exhilarating drama. In my eyes, the new rules had wrought an irritating abundance of obstruction penalties and a plethora of devalued goals (the final score was 6-3, a tally more akin to Major League Baseball than professional hockey). Once players have learned to change their style of play to conform to the newly-vigilant stance on "obstruction," the game will have changed even further—fully sanitized and fast-forwarded for the lucrative market which the NHL is sure is out there, just waiting to be captured.

OUT WITH THE "BORING," IN WITH THE BLAND

Here is how the story goes: Owners were losing money, game attendance and TV ratings were down, and the future of the NHL was in question. Clearly, Something Had to Be Done, and the league's scapegoat was the allegedly "boring" state of play. Never mind that the new collective bargaining agreement, ratified the same day that the rule changes were announced, already went a long way toward re-asserting the team owners' economic position; that much of the NHL's apparent decline was due to factors such as the inevitable collapse of the league's 1990s boom, a faulty star system, and ridiculously pricey tickets; or that the much-maligned "neutral zone trap," which helped the New Jersey Devils to Stanley Cup championships in 1995, 2000, and 2003, and was blamed more than anything for making the game "boring," was never as odious or unbeatable as many thought. ("The trap" was capable of producing its own moments of hockey sublimity: cf. Scott Stevens' concussion-inducing, but eminently clean, hit on Eric Lindros in the 2000 playoffs.)

Many of these changes have been considered previously, but a thoroughgoing reform of the game would have never been possible before last season's lockout. That was due to the previous good sense of owners, players, and league officials, who realized that whatever the economic state of the NHL, its problems could not be legislated away by finding ways to abolish the neutral zone trap. At most, they were content with minor tinkering of the rules. But that was before the season-long lockout. With the NHL in a parlous state, its decision-makers knew that they could get away with anything. Like the Patriot Act or an IMF-imposed structural readjustment program, these changes have been rammed through en masse because of the widespread perception that recovery requires the league to drastically alter the way it operates—long-time fans, and caution, be damned.

The NHL's new rules are an affront to hockey tradition, and to those fans that have remained loyal to the game, oblivious to its allegedly boring state. But this new "product" will also fail in achieving its stated goal of increasing the economic and cultural presence of professional hockey in North America. If these rule changes are allowed to persist, the game will lose much of its toughness. Admittedly, this toughness would be boneheaded if it were an end in itself, but in fact it is essential to the constitution of hockey's visceral appeal.

Without friction and limitation, without cross-checks and battles for the puck along the corner boards—and yes, fights—there is nothing against which finesse can define and heighten itself, nothing to produce the radical contrast between grace and violence which hockey allows for. Otherwise, the game becomes 60 minutes of meaningless cycles and flows, punctuated by the trumped-up excitement of the puck entering the net. Rather than striving to make the regular season more like the gritty and compelling Stanley Cup playoffs, as it might have done, the NHL has put us on course for a future full of bland, high-scoring All-Star Games. Ultimately, this is not worth watching, as even such deluded cheerleaders of the NHL party line—Mr. Ng included—will soon find.

CHRIS HU B'06 prefers his flows un-deterritorialized, thank you very much.

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