The NHLFA & NHL rules

NHLFA - November 2008 Mini-poll - Results

I thought that this was pretty interesting. It shows some of the differences between American and Canadian hockey fans' thinking. Mostly it isn't that different, but it's interesting all the same. I just wish that they had better questions.

I haven't been to this site in a while. I've known about the NHLFA (National Hockey League Fan Association) for quite a while. I thought it was an interesting concept, and one that perhaps ought to be taken more seriously.

As with any professional sport, you have four parts: the league, the teams, the players, and the fans. You can look at it like a pyramid where the league has the smallest amount of people, then the teams, then the players, and finally the base of the pyramid are the fans. Out of this 4 player system, only the fans don't have a voice in how things go. And yet, they're the ones that support the entire sport. Without the fans, you just have a beer league.

What has always amazed me about the NHL is the fact that they're constantly tweaking the rules. Not a season goes by without some major rule revision. And people wonder why the officiating sucks - it's because the rules are changed all the time. Much of this rule-tweaking is geared towards making the game more exciting for the fans. But has anyone bothered to ask the fans what they think would make the game more exciting? Of course not. Everyone would rather just guess.

The NHL is the most backward of all of the major sports in North America. They really are. They just make things up as they go along and hope for the best. It doesn't even occur to them that there's a more rational and systematic approach to improve just about everything. There's a reason why football and baseball do so much better here. It's because they're very methodical in their approach.

Let's look at baseball, for instance. If they pulled a major rule change, Congress would have to convene. Fans would throw a fit if anyone made any major changes to the game. They want tradition, so they get tradition. They want to be able to look at statistics from the 1920s and compare them to statistics in the 1990s and not have to think about how the game has changed in the meantime.

There has been only one major rule change in baseball between 1975 to now: limited instant replay was added during the 2008 season. That's it - the only rule change in 33 years. In the 132-year history of Major League Baseball (1876-2008), there have been only 76 major rule changes - 42 of which were made before 1900 as the league was getting itself established.

The NHL has had approximately (at least?) 20 major rule changes since the 2004-2005 lockout ended.

Canadian hockey fans talk about tradition, but they're not talking about the rules of the game. The game today doesn't have the same rules as the game did even 10 years ago, let alone 30, 40, or 50 years ago. This tradition of which they speak doesn't exist in terms of how the game is or was played. The basics are still there, but that's about as far as it goes.

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