Tis the season for NHL to revamp schedule

BACK IN 1996, before broadcasting the NHL All-Star Game, Fox developed technology that it thought would help fans keep track of the sport’s most important feature: the puck. The FoxTrax puck was designed to help fans watching on television follow it as it glided quickly across the ice by including an electronic device inside it that caused a blue streak to trail it around the screen.

The hi-tech puck was dropped — er, thrown out — about three years later, forcing fans to pay closer attention to where it was at any given moment.

Now, it’s time to make some l ow-tech but more dramatic changes — such as shifting the schedule around — that will help fans follow something even more important to the sport than that little frozen black disc: the games themselves.

As difficult as it is at times to keep track of where the puck is on the ice, it’s even harder to follow the sport when it’s continuously swallowed up by everything going on around it.

Case in point: The NHL has a couple of really cool games coming up later this month when the Rangers play both the Devils and the Islanders at Yankee Stadium. The Rangers and Devils will skate in the outdoor rink in the Bronx on Jan. 26, and the game between the two New York teams happens three days later.

Problem: How much attention will those games really get when the biggest sporting event in the world is happening just a few miles away only days later?

How much time and how many resources can local media outlets dedicate to those hockey games when 95% of the ink and airtime will be dedicated to Super Bowl XVLIII at MetLife Stadium on Feb. 2? But those are j ust two regular-season games in one city. More importantly, the NHL does a bad j ob of giving itself its own window in which to play its most important games every year.

The league opens it s reg ular sea son just as baseball’s playoffs are getting underway, only weeks before the NBA schedule begins and just as the NFL is kicking into high gear.

Then, the NHL playoffs start right around the time the MLB regular season does and run j ust about simultaneously with the NBA’s postseason. The Stanley Cup Finals and the NBA Finals basically overlap every year, wrapping up around middle to late June.

Never mind the fact that a sport played on ice by men wearing "sweaters" finishes just days before most of its fans are firing up their Fourth of July barbecues, the league j ust can’t compete with the other major sports when it comes to drawing attention

to itself. And that’s what it’s all about.

Here’s a simple solution to all of this: The NHL season should begin in the middle of summer — in the days i mmediately following the NBA Finals — and the league should crown its champion in the latest days of winter, sometime around the middle of March. If hockey’s most important playoff games can be played during the warm months, then why can’t its first couple of months of games? And doesn’t it make more sense to cozy up to the fire while watching the Stanley Cup get hoisted than it does to make sure your kid changes out of his bathing suit before plopping down on the couch to do so?

True, under such a format the NHL’s playoff season would start right around the same time the NFL season wraps up — and the Super Bowl would be played smack in the middle of it. But at least the NHL would have a chance to play its biggest games — its semifinals and finals — during a period of time that is now considered a dead zone for major sports — the final days of FebS ruary and most of March. ports fans can then turn their attention to the NCAA Tournament, the baseball season and the NBA playoffs — but only after the Cup is raised instead of while it is.