Week 4: Last Week’s Bonanza and the Skill of Hockey Players
By Cooper Gould
I can’t not talk about the 32-team night, right? I mean it was a pretty wild spectacle to behold — one night with every team in the NHL playing? And frankly, I don’t know if I have all that much more to say about it. Especially not much more to say than what has already been said. It seemed like despite all of the hockey going on, a measly two basketball games were still the bigger sports story of the evening. (Opening night featuring the reigning champ Celtics and the debut of the leading father-son scoring duo of all time James’ turns out to be a pretty big deal.)
The point about the all-team night I’ve heard that resonates the most with me the most though, is that it feels like a step in the right direction that the league is taking to promote hockey in a big way that gets people excited about the sport. The rise and fall of the Winter Classic series definitely provides some context for an initiative the league takes on where the fans very quickly realize they have too much of a good thing, but in general, it seems like the fact that things like this are happening bodes well for the health of the league and the sport.
Last week when I wrote about the magic of this time of year in the NHL and how well the activity of the other four leagues compliments the magic and adds to it, I didn’t quite realize how much of a one-way street that magic runs down. I think there is a certain amount of awareness of the other major sports that is baked into being a hockey fan that fans who primarily watch one of the other four major sports markets don’t necessarily have. For the NBA, certainly, we’re aware of the buildings that are shared homes to hockey and basketball teams. And nights like last Tuesday are so remarkable in part because of the logistical finagling it takes to get all of those buildings free on the same night. (Notably, the Rangers, Kings, Bruins, Stars, and Leafs were all away that night — not that all of their home stadiums were being used, but two of them were — and it’s easy to see trends of logistical challenges when multi-team stadiums are involved.)
In any case, though, the point is that I’ve had a few conversations with basketball fans in the past week (stay tuned for a potential NBA column to join this one on this page) and while I’ve had enough info to stay afloat in conversations about basketball, hockey seems to be a foreign language to those who haven’t been lifelong fans. Having an all-team evening is certainly an awesome step to remedying that, even if it wasn’t quite as exciting as it could have been, and even if it was overshadowed by two games going on in a different league. But it also shines a spotlight on a perennial problem for the NHL, which is how do they get more eyes on games?
As the smallest of the four major North American sports markets and also the one with the greatest parity in terms of predictability, it feels like a perennial problem of untapped potential. It’s one of the most exciting seasons in professional sports, with the OT loss point letting more teams hang onto playoff contention for way longer than other sports and often the most tumultuous postseason on the continent, and yet it always feels like a surprise when I find out that someone else I know actually follows the league. What are we hockey fans missing here?
Something that I think has contributed to it is a trend emerging in all sports (I think). It’s one that has had a lot of debate around it, and I don’t care very much to weigh in on it with any amount of authority or conviction, but I do think it has mattered more in hockey than it has in other sports, at least as far as popularity is concerned. The ungenerous way to frame the phenomenon is that players have gotten “too good.”
I think it’s uncontroversial to say that in hockey — and in all sports, but we’ll stick with hockey for this piece — the game has gotten faster and more skill-oriented, as opposed to the slower, more physical game of the past. Gretzky himself has said that “the game today is better than it was in the ‘80s.” And it isn’t hard to tell that this is true. The league has become a place where even the most bruiser-ish fourth-liner needs to have hands like butter and be able to shoot the wings off a fly. Take a look at any highlight reel from any game this season. It’s got goals that are outright unbelievable from guys you’ve never heard of before. Again, this is not a controversial take on how the league has evolved in the 21st century, it’s simply a fact of modern hockey.
And it makes watching highlights more fun than ever. A 10-minute video from every single game of (almost) nothing but highlights that would have made Sports Center in 2004? Sign me up! But the game is more than highlights, both literally — in the sense that regulation is a full hour of play — and figuratively, in that the build-up and gameplay that leads up to those highlights — or in some cases, happens despite of the highlights — is the foundation of the game. And the majority of what broadcast stations have playing on their screens when they’re airing hockey games. In fact, the highlights, when taken in the context of the rest of the game, feel less like highlights and more like moments of what I think actually is caused by the skill level of every player in the league now, which I think might best be identified as opportunism.
One of the stats that I always looked for at the end of a game when I was growing up was Scoring Opportunities. It always confused me a bit in what made something a scoring opportunity and not just a shot on goal, or how something that didn’t count as a shot on goal could be a scoring opportunity. If you were watching the game, you could more or less intuit the moments that could be scoring opportunities — you know the moments where you get right up on the edge of your seat because you expect the lamp to go off — but it always seemed a bit hazy to me. Like if Sidney Crosby had had that look it probably would’ve been a scoring opportunity. But that goal that Ovechkin just potted? Wouldn’t have been an opportunity on anyone else’s stick.
The thing about watching hockey now is that almost any second in the offensive zone feels like a scoring opportunity. Players are so good that any transition into the zone, even if a player is completely on his own with two defenders in front of him, could end up in the back of the net. Someone wildly hacked at a bouncing puck in the corner, trying vaguely to knock it to their teammate behind the net? Could be a goal in a matter of seconds when their crashing teammate plucks it out from between the other guys skates, passes to the pinching defenseman through two sets of legs and over a stick blade, and the defenseman rips off a wrister that beats the goaltender clean over the glove with a 90 mile an hour shot bar down. On every line of every team there are players that are so good, that they can turn even a fraction of an opportunity into a goal in milliseconds. It’s exciting, and it feels strange that this should all be said in a leadup to something that I think is actually driving eyes away from the sport. Because as exciting as it is, it’s not pretty.
Players are good enough that it seems like we’ve hit a turning point where low-percentage passes and knocking the puck about in unstructured plays and transition have a higher chance of connecting for a split second with someone who has the hands to turn a split second of settled puck movement into a top-corner snipe or a cool five-hole slide through the crease. Relegated to the power play are the careful zone constructions and cycles that seemed to dominate offensive prowess of the ‘80s and ‘90s. And gone too is the time afforded to any offensive players for the kind of maneuvering that Gretzky was famous for. Assists coming from "Gretzky’s office” are no longer carefully quarterbacked plays but so often no-look passes based on skill and instinct in less than half a second, or even missed attempts to bank in a goal off of the back of the goalie that a teammate is positioned to put away.
I feel like one of my old peewee coaches drilling the cycle into us with repeated laps around the corner circles, asking my players desperately to move in circles and pass in triangles after being disappointed with the sloppy and random offensive gameplay that was produced the previous weekend in our game. And the thing is, I really don’t want to be. It’s so exciting to watch a broken play turn into a flash of brilliance. Whether it’s a McDavid or a MacKinnon or a Panarin making the kinds of plays they’re expected (and paid) to make, or a third line rookie I’ve never heard of scoring a breakaway goal in transition off of a stretch pass that makes my hair stand on end. But the thing is, it doesn’t happen every time. Not even close. And when it doesn’t happen, it looks sloppy and chaotic. Whether it be a forecheck that amounts to a puck bouncing around the boards before being recovered or a break out that goes for icing, all too often the low percentage play goes exactly the way you’d expect: unsuccessfully.
What feels much more rare now is a goal that utilizes all or most of the players on the ice, the full expanse of the offensive zone, and meaningful passing between more than two players. New Jersey had one this past Sunday that gave me chills it was so pretty to watch, and in a highlight reel of spectacular scoring, that was by far the standout. And I mean sure, there are plenty of beautiful passes still. Watching McDavid or Raantanen thread a needle to give a teammate a wide open net to shoot at is just as exciting as a flash of brilliance goal. But it’s really the same phenomenon. A flash of brilliance claimed in a fleeting moment of opportunity.
And I think it’s the opportunism of the modern game that might make it hard to attract new viewers. Sure, there’s a certain amount of opportunism that’s necessary in hockey to succeed. And that’s true of other sports too. I mean look at soccer — there are usually less than three goals in any given soccer game, and those matches stretch over an hour and a half plus, 1.5 times the length of a hockey game. But soccer attracts viewers in quantities orders of magnitude larger than hockey, and they still call it the beautiful game. What’s hockey missing?
It’s not the goals. They’re more plentiful than ever in recent years and they’re by and large beautiful (as I have wasted no time in saying). But I think it really is the decline in the beauty of the intervening gameplay. Barcelona fans have no problem watching a long 1-0 victory when they get to chant their “ole’s” as their team plays tiki taka in the backfield.
If anything, hockey has a potential for even more fluid beauty than soccer does. Certainly more clock stoppages, but far fewer out-of-bounds'. We’ve got 14 foot tall glass surrounding the playing surface to make sure of that. And sure, the television deals are differently structured, requiring TV timeouts for hockey games when soccer fans are treated to 45 minutes of non-stop action. But still — line changing on the fly, dump-in/forecheck/breakout gameplay structure, and the fact that skating on ice means the players are all moving about twice as fast as they are in any other sport on foot should be a recipe for some of the most fluid and entertaining gameplay in the world. And yet… it still feels like a sport that’s ever so slightly more fun to watch in highlight reels than in full.
Really, I’m in no position to complain. And truly, I hope it does not sound like I’m doing so. I love hockey, and I love professional hockey, and I love the dynamism that has been infused into the NHL. Who can watch the overlay that’s out there somewhere of Gretzky and McDavid each scoring a coast-to-coast solo goal, and not see that Gretzky’s skating through molasses compared to the speed and precision of McDavid? It’s hard to watch where the game has come and not think that we’ll just be living in the greatest era of hockey we’ve ever seen forever.
But I want more cycles. I want to see passing in triangles. I want to see breakout passes to players haven’t drifted all the way to the red line. I want to see smaller hockey and slower hockey. I want offense play structure to look like power play structures on every possession and not just once a game during an especially dominant — or more often intentionally lopsided — shift.
Hockey is so often so beautiful. The players are so so good, they create remarkable and breathtaking individual moments. I maintain that those two things don’t need to be counteractive to one another. And while we wait and see how the game continues to evolve, I’ll just enjoy the moments that we get to see the beaty of the game and the skill of the players all at once.
