Hockey Night in Canada is ignoring the boring elephant in the room
Hockey is not thriving in this country.
Wait. What’s the opposite of thriving? Floundering? Flailing? Wallowing in existential despair? That’s what hockey feels like these days. It’s as if our national sport is now on life support, unable to exhale the same passion and interest it once did from coast to coast to coast.
So if changes are coming to Hockey Night in Canada, as the Star’s Dave Feschuk reported Monday in a front-page story, you can’t blame the execs at Rog- ers for rolling the dice while fighting a blinding urge to guzzle Pepto-Bismol straight from the Stanley Cup.
Rogers spent $5.2 billion in 2014 to snag the broadcast rights to a sport that, two years later, has never seemed more irrelevant. That’s like dropping $80 million on a waterfront mansion and 24 months later learning it was built on a seismic fault line in a hurricane zone downwind from an active volcano.
Which is why shaking things up at HNIC, whatever that might entail, also provides no safe haven in the short term. There is no shelter from the perfect storm that’s battering the entertainment of hockey. There are no sandbags that can stop the ratings from cratering or the buzz from drowning amid a sea of more compelling diversions. This isn’t about a TV broadcast. It’s about viewers suddenly not caring. Even if Rogers plays musical host chairs and swaps out George Stroum- boulopoulos for the return of Ron MacLean, which is what sources told Feschuk, this alone won’t mitigate the growing perception that watching hockey is now about as thrilling as attending a spelling bee in a language you don’t understand. A-b-u-r-r-i-d-o. That’s right. Hockey has gotten downright boring.
This season that just ended in triumph for the Pittsburgh Penguins will be remembered by many Canadians as the season they forgot about hockey and didn’t miss it one bit.
Yes, our national mediocrity — this was the first season no Canadian team earned a spot in the playoffs since 1970 — did much to torch our enthusiasm.
But the slow melting started years ago.
Forget who hosts on TV. The underlying apathy and malaise of who watches is what stakeholders should be scrutinizing through their corporate visors. Is the problem league overexpansion? Is it NHL commissioner Gary Bettman’s remarkable capacity to be the most grating executive in any professional league? Is it on-ice changes?
The legendary Gordie Howe, who died this month, was rightfully lionized as a ferocious talent, in every sense of the word. But how his flying elbows and kamikaze forechecking would be received in today’s NHL is anyone’s guess, though the smart money is on biannual disciplinary hearings and lengthy suspensions.
There is nothing wrong with change and evolution. When medical science starts to glean more about, say, brain injuries, it’s only a matter of time until enforcers are forced out of hockey and rules are recast in the name of progress and safety.
But the problem for hockey, the reason it seems to be having an identity crisis, is that while parts of the game were excised, nothing of value was added. The gatekeepers obsess about the bottom line without realizing they are often forfeiting the top lines of any spectator sport, which is enjoyment and intensity.
We watch hockey because we want to, not because we have to.
Question for the remaining fans out there, and please answer honestly: How much did you actually watch this season? Less than any season before? Would it have made any difference if HNIC were co- hosted by the ghost of Foster Hewitt and Paulina Gretzky in lingerie? Were there not inexplicable moments of quiet reflection, in between sipping a Molson and through the final horn, when you thought, Why am I wasting my time with this godforsaken NHL?
I ask because I have experienced those same feelings.
And the alienation has only gotten more pronounced after the Blue Jays started to soar and the Raptors broke new high-water marks as a franchise.
What’s that all about? Sport in Toronto can be exhilarating even when it does not happen on ice?
Could hockey’s misfortunes, at least in this market, change now that the Leafs have the first pick in the NHL draft this weekend? You can bet my Wendel Clark bobblehead.
But this isn’t about winning. It’s about creating a sport that’s watchable even when teams are losing.
Though hockey is flirting with unprecedented tedium, it has the power to rise up and grab us by the jerseys. It remains laced to our collective DNA, which makes DOA close to impossible.
But something needs to change before hockey assumes its former perch in our hearts. And that something has nothing to do with TV. vmenon@thestar.ca