What Does NHL Stand For?

I am not a hockey fan.

This is not to say that I do not like to watch a hockey game now and then.  But it's different with baseball, or football, or basketball. Especially baseball.

I grew up in a city whose baseball team was terrible in those years. The Phillies were perennial cellar dwellers.  And I now live in a city with a team that has strung together 20 losing seasons.  But I have always been a fan of the game.

Not so with hockey.  I am loyal to my town's teams, so I root for the Penguins.  But in nearly 35 years, I've been to one Penguins game.  And until I got a big-screen TV, I rarely watched hockey on TV, because I could never see the puck.

So I'm a Penguins fan, but not a hockey fan: a fan of the team, but not really of the game.  Abbreviations tell the tale.  (Remember, I'm a doctor.)  Say "NHL," and I'm more likely to think Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma than National Hockey League.

Thus, the NHL lockout hasn't been a big deal for me.  I've hopefully followed the NFL season until the Steelers, still in control of their own destiny, could not beat the Bengals in Pittsburgh in Game 15 and failed to secure a wild card berth.  And I've enjoyed the college football rivalries and bowl games.

Watching Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Manziel perform magnificently as he led Texas A&M to victory over Oklahoma in the Cotton Bowl was a delight.  Even though I have no direct ties to Alabama or Notre Dame, I am much more interested in who wins their national championship game tomorrow night than I am in whether there is an NHL season this year.

In the two decades since the Pirates' last winning season there have been four (!) NHL labor disputes, with one season entirely scrubbed and three others dramatically shortened.  I barely noticed.

But I have to wonder what the owners think they're accomplishing. How many hockey fans have been turned into folks like me, just not that into it any more?  Professional athletic competition is entertainment. It's show business.  If there's no show, there's no business.  And when there's no business, some customers who are turned away will never return.  No matter how much the owners succeed in striking a better deal with the players, this cannot be a good thing.

The regular season in the NHL could be 48 games instead of 82, and by the end of it, fans will likely still be satisfied, because then the second season (also known as the playoffs) begins.  I suspect there are a lot of lukewarm fans who, like me, don't really watch many regular-season games anyway, and really don't pay a whole lot of attention until the playoffs.  (No doubt the same is true for the NBA, whose playoffs are also long enough to constitute a second season.)

But how many serious hockey fans are just thoroughly disgusted by the whole thing?  This is, after all, about the game, the competition, the beauty and the guts and the glory of matching athletic skill and finesse - and, yes, brute strength and street-fighting ability, too - against another team on the ice.  That's what it's about for the fans.  And the fans are pretty sure that's what it's mostly about for the players, too.  Sure, they want to make a good living, and they like being famous. But they enjoy the adulation of their fans, and they know what it takes to earn that.  It's what they do on the ice, the fast skating, the great passes, the breakaway goals, the brilliant saves, and the slamming of an opponent into the boards to separate him from the puck.  It's all about the game.

Yes, the fans know that for the owners it's all about the money.  They're businessmen. Sure, they like the game, and they want to put a winning team on the ice.  But for the vast majority of them, that's only because they may be able to make more money that way.  Do they care about the players?  Do they care about the communities in which their teams play, and the economic impact of a professional sport - or a missing season?  Do they care about the fans?

We know they care about the money.  They haven't shown us they care about anything else.