Saturday, October 18, 2008

Why I haven't seen one hockey game this season

I haven't had any interest in hockey this season. In fact, I think I've watched a combined total of 10 minutes of hockey so far, and that includes the 7.5 minutes of highlights I sat through in order to see the Baseball highlights. I definitely think that the rule changes over the past few years in the NHL have decreased my enjoyment of watching NHL games.

An example of the types of changes that really annoy me has something to do with their relentless pursuit of increased offence [1]. Is the North-American public so enamored with goals that they could care less about anything else? If so, why don't we play 3 on 3 with no goalies and make the nets huge?

I hate power play goals. I always have. I hate them just like I hate penalty shots in Soccer. They're cheap and are too-often the direct result of a bad referees decision. In most sports this isn't so bad because the best referees get to make judgement calls and can thus avoid goals which are within the letter of the rule but violate the spirit of the rule. In the NHL, however, they've made a concerted effort over the past few years to take judgement calls out of it. I for one am sick of it, and won't give them any more of my already precious time.

I'll keep watching football where a hold is only a penalty when the referee thinks it affected the play.

[1] - http://www.tsn.ca/columnists/darren_dreger/?id=252833

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