When we talk about the transformation that NHL hockey has undergone over the past few decades, we often frame it in terms of what we’ve gained. Now that the sport has largely shed the violence and bare-knuckle brawling that defined it, the game has added skill and speed. Depending on who you ask, we probably added fans. We’ve certainly added a lot of new teams and new markets, and the financial results look much better today than they did then.
And maybe, just maybe, hockey has added credibility, restoring its own reputation and how it is perceived by the wider sporting world. The NHL is a league that you no longer have to be ashamed to love, like you sometimes had to love it back in the day.
OK of course. But let’s turn things around: what have we lost?
I grew up as a hockey fan in the 80s and 90s, when brawls were common and every team had at least a few frequent fighters. It’s almost all gone now, because reasons we explored all along last week. Fights are rare, brawls have all but disappeared, and the enforcer role that once occupied one or three spots in the lineup has been eliminated. endangered for a decade now. But what else has the sport lost?
The list of what has disappeared is not short, and it is mostly filled with things that no one of us will miss it. For example, we lost those conversations where we had to justify the violence of hockey to a disapproving critic who didn’t seem to believe in the idea that punching faces could make something safer. We lost the punchlines at our expense, those forced laughs of fighting and breaking up a hockey match. We lost the attention of fans of other sports. We’ve mostly lost the sloppy one-note caricatures in movies, sitcoms, and late-night one-liners. We have lost the lessons of newspaper scolding and the false concerns of television talking heads.
Most importantly, we have lost a source of countless injuries, many of which have a long-term, life-changing impact. We lost sight of clearly concussed players who stumbled to the bench or were carelessly dragged off the ice by their teammates, only to reappear later in the same game to do it all over again. Hopefully we’ll look back years from now and realize we’ve lost at least a few stories about our favorite athletes dying prematurely, battling addiction, or battling health issues in retirement.
These are all good things. You would have to be a monster to think otherwise. The NHL hasn’t overhauled its rules to make all of this happen the way we once thought, but it still deserves some credit for letting the evolution play out. The game is in a better place now.
But have we lost anything else?
This is the part of the conversation that gets awkward, because this is where we have to say the quiet part out loud. This is the part where we should probably drop the preamble and just ask the question: Was the NHL more fun in the fighting days?
In other words, was it a better entertainment product? If you’re like me and old enough to sit in those stands during the Before Times, did you prefer this version of the sport?
I think we’re going to split into three distinct camps here. The first one will be disgusted for asking me, because no, of course the game wasn’t more fun back in the day when you could cheer for the guys who were causing themselves brain damage, what who doesn’t go to your house? The second one will say yes, of course, it was absolutely more fun to be a fan back then, and what was with all the dramatic throat clearing before you could state the obvious?
And then there will be those of us in the middle. Those of us who don’t know the answer. Or maybe we do, but we just don’t want to say it. If it’s any consolation, I’m pretty sure we’re not alone.
Try this experiment. Go to YouTube and start typing the names of your favorite old players from the 80s or 90s into the search bar. Chances are one of the very first autofill suggestions is “fighting,” and that will be true whether or not that player is known for dropping the gloves. (When I checked just now, it was the fourth suggestion for Mario Lemieux and the second for Wayne Gretzky.) Find one of those grainy VHS clips of mid-80s mayhem, watch it if you want, then scroll down to the comments. Inevitably, you’ll see years of hockey fans lamenting how the sport has changed and how you just don’t get moments like this in the modern game. Of course, some of them will be angry breathers who think everything has gone soft these days. But a lot of them don’t have that vibe. They are neither angry nor righteous. They just seem a little…disappointed.
If YouTube’s comments section replaces society, then we’re all doomed. But in this case, I don’t think it’s a bad way to get a glimpse of that quiet side that doesn’t get talked about much. The game was different for a fan back then, when you knew you’d probably see a fight or two, and there was always a chance something bigger would break out, even (or especially) when it It was a third-period blowout and you already knew the outcome.
If you’re old enough, you remember it. You know the buzz in the crowd when your team’s tough guy lined up for a faceoff, neck-and-neck with Bob Probert, and you wondered if this was the moment they’d take their chances against his opponent. title. Or when you were sitting at home watching a routine scrimmage and there was a sudden roar from the crowd, and you had a second or two to wonder what just happened while the cameras were rushing to find him. Or when two guys broke away from the huddle and headed toward center ice, and suddenly no one cared about the score anymore.
Listen to this crowd. Of course, it’s Chicago and it’s St. Patrick’s Day, and they’ve all had a few. But when was the last time you heard a regular-season NHL audience react like that to… well, just about anything?
It was different. And yes, I’m pretty sure it was more fun.
This shouldn’t have been the case! We know it now. On some level, we should have known that then, or at least I spent more time trying to understand. And to be absolutely clear, no one should argue that we should go back. We couldn’t, and we wouldn’t, and no one should want that. Knowing what we know now about concussions, about mental health and what was really going on behind the scenes for so many players of that era, there is no way to justify what we were encouraging. If that makes you feel like any sort of nostalgia for the era is in bad taste, then you’re entitled to it, and for the record, I’m not completely sure you’re wrong.
But here’s that quiet part again: The NHL is an entertainment product, and for many of us, some of that entertainment has slowly disappeared. Is it acceptable to recognize this? Is it fair to ask what, if anything, it was replaced by?
Gary Bettman likes to say how there are more and more skills these days, and he’s right. Today, the league is full of guys who can do things with a hockey puck that no one imagined a generation ago, and they make it look easy. If that was the trade-off – fewer fights, a lot more highlights – then I imagine we’d all be happy to accept it. But that’s not really the case, because much of that skill has been offset by decades of unchecked commitment to systems, structure, and defense above all else. There are fewer goals now than back then, so much so that we collapse as soon as the numbers go up a little. The players are younger, faster, more creative and just plain better than ever, but you put all that shine on the ice in an NHL game and way too often. it all adds up to this.
So if all these skills don’t fill the void, what does? And perhaps more to the point, how worried should the NHL be if the answer is “not much”?
This is a difficult question, because it seems to lead you to a problem without a solution. The fighting won’t come back, nor will the days when we didn’t know how much harm they did. Maybe there was some happiness in all this ignorance, feigned or not, but it’s gone now. What do you replace it with? Short of some sort of big, bold changes that we’d all be complaining about anyway, maybe there just isn’t much that can be done, and the best option is to just keep the quiet part quiet.
For what it’s worth, the league doesn’t seem very concerned. The game is great, they tell us constantly, maybe it needs a few minor tweaks here and there, but that’s it. Audiences are okay, most franchises are healthy, and did we mention it record turnover? If Bettman and his friends worry that the product has lost some of its appeal, with grizzled fans of the past or potential newbies of the future, they do a great job of hiding it.
So perhaps this is our answer. No, the game hasn’t lost anything, at least nothing worth keeping, and if you think that’s the case, you can go back to the YouTube comments with all the other dinosaurs. Or better yet, you might consider the option we ironically proposed to the Anti-Combat Brigade all those years ago: go watch something else.
Some of you already are. But that’s progress, right? The game moves forward and things get better, even if we lose a few of you along the way.
(Illustration: John Bradford / Athleticism; photo: Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)
