It has taken hockey slightly more than one week to do what it took baseball four years to accomplish.
Baseball didn’t fully recover from its lockout until Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa spent the summer of 1998 with Roger Maris’ single-season home run record in their crosshairs. All the NHL did was print schedules and drop pucks.
Perhaps the fans’ positive reception is the result of the NHL keeping its promise. The league hyped a more up-tempo, wide-open game, and that’s precisely what it has delivered during the sunrise of this all-important season.
Shots, goals, comebacks and attendance are on the rise. Clutching, grabbing and trapping are in decline. Teams are no longer satisfied to sit on a two-goal lead.
More Top Picks Best Reading Glasses With Anti Glare Coating
“You can tell when you walk into a building whether it’s a good product or not,” said Sharks general manager Doug Wilson, the former Blackhawks defenseman. “This is a good product.”
As acrimonious as the lockout was, as much as everybody agreed that suspending a sport already struggling to gain a wide audience was pure lunacy, the lockout may end up having an opposite impact. Ten years from now we may be able to say that it saved the sport.
“I think it’s the best thing that has happened to our league in a long time,” Sharks coach Ron Wilson said of rule changes meant to make the game more freewheeling and fan-friendly. “They’re finally getting it that we want to showcase the skill players and show the speed of the game.”
Most fans think the game is better than it was 15 months ago, and not just because low-payroll teams such as the Blackhawks and Penguins started signing high-profile free agents.
The game itself is better. Purists will disagree. They like the game the way it was. They’re not happy about ties being eliminated by shootouts, two-line passes and larger attacking zones.
But purists had taken this sport as far as they can, which was far behind football, baseball and basketball in most markets and behind NASCAR and golf in many others. Die-hard hockey fans will always be die-hard hockey fans. The league doesn’t need to reach out to people who remain steadfastly in its corner.
This is about the fans on the fringe. This is about the people flipping through the channels who keep going when a hockey game flashes on the screen. This is about the people who wouldn’t normally go to an NHL arena.
League officials want to make the game more appealing to the masses. They want to return it to how it was 20 years ago, before clutching and grabbing was used to combat the speed and puck handling of Wayne Gretzky-era hockey.
“The pause allowed people to really evaluate the game from a distance and not be emotional about it and listen to the fans,” Ron Wilson said. “All aspects had a little input, and it was an honest assessment of what we needed to do when we came back. If we had come back in February, we couldn’t have been ready for this and we would’ve continued to struggle along with the old style.”
The year of bitter acrimony has given way to unprecedented harmony. Players and owners understand that they are in this together now. The result is a renewed spirit of cooperation that can only help promote the game.