Make hockey a Summer Olympic event
Canada has its hockey pants in a twist. The National Hockey League has decided it won’t allow its players to participate in the Olympics next year in South Korea. That means our best players won’t be there. So we probably won’t win. Without NHL players from 1956 to 1994, Canada won exactly never at the Olympics. Since 1998, when our best NHLers have gone, we’ve won gold three times out of five.
The NHL is portrayed as the heartless villain in the piece. It has looked only at the dollars involved and determined it makes no sense to shut down the league for two weeks so the Olympics can use its players.
But ask yourself this: If you owned a toy store and someone asked you to close your doors before Christmas, would you agree? Of course not. We are continually reminded that sports is a business, yet we insist on imagining that it isn’t.
So let’s forget about trying to figure out who the bad guys are, depriving us of best-on-best Olympic hockey. Let’s focus on the solution. Here it is. Put hockey in the Summer Olympics. It sounds like a crazy idea at first. You might dismiss it without a second thought because hockey is obviously a winter sport. But look at what’s happened to the winter game over the years.
The last time the Maple Leafs won the Stanley Cup, in 1967, the trophy was won on May 2. Not exactly winter, but close enough. Last year, the Pittsburgh Penguins won the Cup on June12. That’s nine days before summer. In 2006, the Carolina Hurricanes won it all on June 19. So hockey and summer are not polar (excuse the expression) opposites.
Besides, the weather barely matters. The NHL has hosted outdoor games in California, with palm trees in the background. The Florida Panthers play in the city of Sunrise, just west of Ft. Lauderdale and north of Miami. It never snows there. Never. The average low temperature in January is 15 C. The league has just added a team in Las Vegas. Should it ever play a Stanley Cup game there in June, the daytime temperature would likely reach 38 C.
The hockey season is already 10 months long; 25 players skating in July or August once every four years isn’t much of a stretch. Today’s NHLers are always in tip-top shape.
Heaven knows there’s an appetite for hockey year-round. Every NHL team in Canada runs summer hockey camps. When many of our kids could be swimming, hitting a baseball, running around a park, or just enjoying the sunshine, they’re locked indoors, skating at hockey arenas. The point is made — hockey no longer has a season.
Of course the Summer Olympics are already bigger than the Winter Games, and adding another major sport could be a problem. But there are lots of sports that aren’t particularly summery and moving them to winter seems easy. Gymnastics. Indoor cycling. Badminton. Table tennis. Boxing. Wrestling. Fencing. Judo. Weightlifting. Trampoline. Move any or all of them.
And then there’s basketball. Professional basketball is also a winter sport. But it’s part of the Summer Olympics. That’s why the NBA doesn’t have the NHL’s problem. Good thing, too, because the prospect of the NBA shutting down in the middle of its season is about as likely as snow in Sunrise, Fla.