NHL Anti-Thread: Bad Business Decision Aggregator

[BeerGuyJordan]

1 hour ago, Marcos Flamengo said:

Absolutely. But when 2021 arrives, This would be the great talk.

So try the discussion in 2020, when it's relevant?

[Cosmic]

In addition to the NBC money and the local money, the NHL also gets CAD $433M/year for the Canadian rights.  Does MLS have any international deals? MLS is probably not that close to the NHL, but it will be interesting to see what happens with them and TV sports money in general.

[dfwabel]

16 minutes ago, Cosmic said:

In addition to the NBC money and the local money, the NHL also gets CAD $433M/year for the Canadian rights.  Does MLS have any international deals? MLS is probably not that close to the NHL, but it will be interesting to see what happens with them and TV sports money in general.

MLS has quite a few international rights deals both live games and digital. They're in the middle of a four year deal with SKY Sports for the UK plus:

FujiTV (Japan)

Le Sports (China)

Globostat and ESPN Brazil

 

http://m.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Journal/Issues/2015/03/30/Media/MLS-international.aspx?

 

http://www.lagalaxy.com/post/2016/04/21/mls-announces-new-deal-fuji-tv-japan-expands-le-sports-partnership-china

 

[The_Admiral]

4 hours ago, DG_Now said:

"Grow the Game" means something, but it could mean more if the league exercised more care in, well, basically anything. As a one-time fan who could potentially be interested in the product again, I don't see what the NHL has to offer me. Just confusing rules, confusing conferences, confusing playoffs, and the noise around ruining the Olympics. I don't get it.

 

The situation in the East this year might get the playoff system changed to something less stupid.

 

Which in-game rules are you confused by? Hockey is simpler than basketball or football in that respect.

[goalieboy82]

On 12/19/2016 at 1:45 PM, BeerGuyJordan said:

WTF is happening to my country?

 

[DG_ThenNowForever]

1 hour ago, the admiral said:

 

The situation in the East this year might get the playoff system changed to something less stupid.

 

Which in-game rules are you confused by? Hockey is simpler than basketball or football in that respect.

 

I'm being a little bit dilatory (surprise!), but I was left behind by the switch to 4-on-4 OT/shootouts. Every sport changes its rules. The NHL's changes seem to be the most dramatic.

[The_Admiral]

Yeah, the NHL's penchant for big rule changes is a symptom of how everything they do is a reaction to a problem they never anticipated or couldn't even nip in the bud. You can apply this to league footprint, labor relations, marketing, whatever. They're always a day late and a dollar short. They either didn't realize or didn't care that the natural conclusion of their overtime system was that teams would play for the shootout rather than lose in sudden death, so they had to start de-weighting shootouts, and then this three-on-three silliness.

[DG_ThenNowForever]

"three-on-three silliness"??

 

EDIT: I can look it up for myself, but Jesus. I own a handful of NHL jerseys. I've watched a ton of games. I played a lot of NHL 94. I read The Instigator. This league. It's incredible it still exists.

[The_Admiral]

Yeah, it's exciting in the same sense that determining an outcome by chasing down greased-up pigs is exciting. Say what you will about the shootout, at least the shooter-versus-goalie dynamic feels like something of a chess match, a distillation of the game to its most basic principles. It's not just "whoops, some guy tripped on a gash in the crappy ice that apparently no major-league teams can properly maintain anymore, odd-man rush, goal."

 

Next time I find myself burrowing up my own ass on some humor post that I'm writing to amuse only myself, I'm going to stop and finally look up those playoff overtime times-of-goals to see to what extent we really need this gimmick.

[DG_ThenNowForever]

It just seems like if you're tweaking the fundamentals of the game in OT to make it "more exciting," then you're admitting that the rest of the game is a bore? Not a unique observation, I know, but I just feel like across any niche form of entertainment chasing the casuals never really works.

[The_Admiral]

Not exactly, it's more that overtime had devolved into a dog humping a pillow because no one wanted to make a mistake. Hockey has been consumed by a complete and utter fear of making mistakes. Losing in overtime and losing in a shootout both count the same, they count as half a win, but a shootout, despite the stripping away of numerous variables, is seen as random chance while losing in overtime is seen as having screwed up. And no matter how many people are on the ice for overtime, it's all pillow-humping in the late stages of most tie games because no one wants to give up that guaranteed point. The only way to truly end this mentality is to say that wins are wins and losses are losses, because none of this happens in the playoffs.

[HedleyLamarr]

To me, the only answer that'll do away with that dog-humping overtime is to adopt the soccer-style 3-1-0 points system (and just scrap overtime during the regular season).  Instead of ties equating to half-wins, making them equal to 1/3rd of a win will open up the pace.  Hell, we could see scenarios during the season where, in a tie game late in regulation, a team will risk the one point to get three by pulling the goalie.

 

We've gone from "no overtimes, accept the tie" to "overtimes but still have ties" to the brief period of "regulation ties" to "4-on-4, no ties, shootout" to now "3-on-3, no ties, shootout".  Explaining that to a prospective hockey fan is going to scare them off.

[cmm]

2 hours ago, the admiral said:

Yeah, it's exciting in the same sense that determining an outcome by chasing down greased-up pigs is exciting. Say what you will about the shootout, at least the shooter-versus-goalie dynamic feels like something of a chess match, a distillation of the game to its most basic principles. It's not just "whoops, some guy tripped on a gash in the crappy ice that apparently no major-league teams can properly maintain anymore, odd-man rush, goal."

 

Next time I find myself burrowing up my own ass on some humor post that I'm writing to amuse only myself, I'm going to stop and finally look up those playoff overtime times-of-goals to see to what extent we really need this gimmick.

I'll save you the time so you can keep up the humor posts.

http://www.hockey-reference.com/playoffs/overtime-goals.cgi

There have been 819 playoff OT goals, assuming I copied/pasted correctly.

277 (33.8%) came in the first 5 minutes of OT

472 (57.6%) came in the first 10 minutes of OT

576 (70.3%) came in the first 15 minutes of OT

652 (79.6%) came in the first 20 minutes of OT

[The_Admiral]

Allrighty, 57.6% is enough to validate my proposal for overtime: ten minutes, five-on-five, long change, then go to a five-round shootout and either split points 1.5/0.5 or call it a straight win/loss but go to ROWs as the first tiebreak.

 

 

Thanks. I always did suspect that most of the time, the game is done after about ten minutes, we just over-represent the triple-overtime games in our memory.

[OnWis97]

2 hours ago, the admiral said:

Allrighty, 57.6% is enough to validate my proposal for overtime: ten minutes, five-on-five, long change, then go to a five-round shootout and either split points 1.5/0.5 or call it a straight win/loss but go to ROWs as the first tiebreak.

 

 

Thanks. I always did suspect that most of the time, the game is done after about ten minutes, we just over-represent the triple-overtime games in our memory.

I like this, though I am a rare fan that is OK with games ending in a tie. 

 

Since most fans are not (and I think people generally enjoy shootouts), then I guess we'll have a shootout.  The ten-minute OT, coupled with not treating an OTL and SOL as the same should provide incentive to play in OT.

 

12 hours ago, DG_Now said:

It just seems like if you're tweaking the fundamentals of the game in OT to make it "more exciting," then you're admitting that the rest of the game is a bore? Not a unique observation, I know, but I just feel like across any niche form of entertainment chasing the casuals never really works.

I would not go so far as "admitting the game is a bore."  More of opening it up to create more goals (so they think).  But it is somewhat it the neighborhood of either "skills competition" or "college football."   Maybe the later, as it resembles the actual game but is not the actual game.  I am sure the NHL is aware that it's a fringe sport and while it's not admitting it's a "bore" I suppose it could be grasping at straws to capture the casual fan.

[The_Admiral]

On one hand they want to increase scoring, on the other, they instituted a system where goals are subtracted, never added, by examining game tape frame-by-frame to see whether a guy's toe was a hairsbreadth over the blue line before the puck was.

[The_Admiral]

My facebook newsfeed is asking whether I might like to win a chance to have coffee with Bobby Hull at Dunkin Donuts. I'd rather not, and not just because I hate both coffee and Dunkin Donuts. It's really time to start easing Bobby Hull out of active marketing campaigns of this sort. We're ten years in, the fences have all been mended, that's all fine, but enough's enough. I think what's made it so hard is that Stan's not there with him anymore. When it was Bobby and Stan, you could avert your eyes from the bad stuff a little bit because Stan Mikita is one of the game's great gentlemen, so psychologically, you can't help but think "well, he can't be that bad." In my opinion, the thrust of McDonough's whole ambassador campaign in the first place was that the Blackhawks were making a guy everyone liked welcome again; Hull, Esposito, and Savard were incidental. But now, seeing Hull sans Mikita is just a sad reminder that his old teammate, the guy everyone liked so much, is at home (or in a home) dying of dementia, about as awful a fate as anyone can have, so it brings me no joy to see Hull alone.

 

I don't think the Blackhawks need to publicly condemn Bobby Hull or ban him for life or anything. Outside of a small group of people who all talk to one another online, I don't think there's really an appetite for that, and even that may not be unanimous. But you can start to set apart the player and the person. Let him come to games for free, sure, and if the Hawks win the Cup again this year (which, even though we're in love with the East now and the Hawks have switched to IDGAF mode for the next three months, they have as good a chance as anyone of doing), have him on the ice for the ceremony. But I'd shy away from promotions like this one. You can acknowledge Bobby Hull as one of the greatest players in the history of the Blackhawks, which he is, without selling him as a person I might care to spend time with, which he isn't. I would want to eliminate the possibility, however infinitesimal, that a woman and/or a Jewish person wins this contest and throws delicious Dunkin Donuts coffee right in his face.

[Sodboy13]

Yeah, Bobby Hull as team mascot is a sad and honestly shameful display. You have the right idea; just let him pickle himself in a box every night instead of constantly showing him off to an audience that never saw him skate a shift in a Hawks sweater, and 90% of which has no idea what a bad person he is/was. (There's probably another 5% willing to excuse a drunken, wife-beating Nazi sympathizer, because woo sports.)

 

Jay Zawaski brought this up on his podcast this week, and he also had a solution: if you need a human mascot, make it Denis Savard. He's not a drunken prick, and people remember him playing.

 

Every story I've heard about Stan Mikita is a good story. Someone like him meeting a slow, withering end like this makes me sad.

[DG_ThenNowForever]

More than 5%. 

[Sodboy13]

I'm trying to be optimistic about something, goddammit.