When we talk about the transformation that NHL hockey has undergone over the last few decades, we’ll often frame it in terms of what we’ve gained. Now that the sport has largely rid itself of the violence and bare-knuckle brawling that used to define it, the game has added skill and speed. Depending on who you ask, we’ve probably added fans. We’ve certainly added plenty of new teams, and new markets, and the bottom line looks a lot better now than it did back then.
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And maybe, just maybe, hockey has added credibility, rehabbing its own reputation and how it’s viewed by the wider sports world. The NHL is a league you no longer have to feel embarrassed to love, the way you sometimes had to back in the day.
OK, sure. But let’s flip it around: What have we lost?
I grew up as a hockey fan in the ’80s and ’90s, when fights were common and every team had at least a few frequent fighters. That’s almost all gone now, for reasons we’ve explored throughout the past week. The fights are rare, the brawls are basically extinct, and the enforcer role that used to take up a lineup spot or three has been disappearing for a decade now. But what else has the sport lost?
The list of what’s gone isn’t a short one, and it’s mostly filled with things that none of us will miss. For example, we’ve lost those conversations where we’d have to justify hockey’s violence to some disapproving critic who didn’t seem to buy the idea that fists hitting faces could make something safer. We’ve lost the punchlines at our expense, those forced chuckles at the one about going to a fight and having a hockey game break out. We’ve lost the eyerolls from fans of other sports. We’ve mostly lost the sloppy one-note caricatures in movies and sitcoms and late-night one-liners. We’ve lost the lectures from the newspaper scolds, and the faux-concern from the talking heads on TV.
Far more importantly, we’ve lost a source of countless injuries, many of them with long-term, life-changing impact. We’ve lost the sight of clearly concussed players stumbling toward the bench or being casually dragged off the ice by teammates, only to reappear later that same game to do it all again. Hopefully, we’ll look back years from now and realize that we lost at least a few stories about our favorite athletes dying early, or battling addiction, or struggling with health issues in retirement.
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Those are all good things. You’d have to be a monster to think otherwise. The NHL didn’t overhaul its rulebook to make any of this happen the way we once thought it would, but it deserves some credit all the same for letting the evolution play out. The game is in a better place now.
But did we lose anything else?
This is the part of the conversation that gets awkward, because it’s where we have to say the quiet part out loud. It’s the part where we should probably drop the preamble and just ask the question: Was the NHL more fun back in those fight-filled days?
Put differently, was it a better entertainment product? If you’re like me and you’re old enough to have sat in those stands during the Before Times, did you like that version of the sport better?
I think we’re going to divide into three distinct camps here. The first will be disgusted with me for even asking the question, because no, of course the game wasn’t more entertaining back when you could cheer on guys giving each other brain damage, what’s wrong with you? The second will say yes, of course, it was absolutely more fun to be a fan back then, and what was with that whole dramatic throat-clearing before you got around to stating the obvious?
And then there’s going to 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 name of your favorite old players from the ’80s or ’90s into the search bar. Chances are, one of the very first auto-fill suggestions will be “fights,” and this will be true whether or not that player was 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 some mid-’80s mayhem, watch it if you want, and then scroll down to the comments. Inevitably, you’ll find years’ worth of hockey fans lamenting the way the sport has changed, and how you just don’t get moments like this in the modern game. Sure, some of those will be the angry mouth-breathers who think everything has gone soft these days. But a lot of them don’t have that vibe. They’re not angry or righteous. They just seem kind of … bummed out.
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If the YouTube comment section is a stand-in for society, then we’re all doomed. But in this case, I don’t think it’s a bad way to get a glimpse at that quiet part we don’t talk about much. The game felt different for a fan back in those days, when you knew you’d probably see a fight or two, and there was always a chance of something bigger breaking out, even (or especially) when it was a third period blowout and you already knew the result.
If you’re old enough, you remember. You know the buzz that used to go through a crowd when your team’s tough guy would line up for a faceoff, shoulder-to-shoulder with Bob Probert, and you’d wonder if this was the moment they’d get their shot at his title. Or when you’d be sitting at home watching a routine scrum and there’d be a sudden roar from the crowd, and you’d have that second or two of wondering what had just broken out while the cameras scrambled to find it. Or when two guys would peel off the group and head to center ice, and suddenly nobody even cared what the score was.
Listen to that crowd. Sure, 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 crowd react like that to … well, pretty much anything?
It was different. And yeah, I’m pretty sure it was more fun.
It shouldn’t have been! We know that now. On some level, we should have known it then, or at least spent more time trying to figure it out. And to be absolutely crystal clear, nobody should be arguing that we should go back. We couldn’t, and we wouldn’t, and nobody should want that. Knowing what we know now about concussions, and about mental health, and about what was really going on behind the scenes for so many of that era’s players, there’s no way to justify what we were cheering for. If that makes you feel like any kind of nostalgia for the era is in poor taste, then you’re entitled to that, and for the record I’m not completely sure you’re wrong.
But then here comes that quiet part again: The NHL is an entertainment product, and for many of us, a chunk of that entertainment has slowly disappeared. Is it OK to acknowledge that? Is it fair to wonder what, if anything, it’s been replaced with?
Gary Bettman likes to talk about how much more skill there is these days, and he’s right. Today, the league is filled with guys who can do things to a hockey puck that nobody had even conceived of a generation ago, and they make it look easy. If that was the trade-off — fewer fights, far more highlight-reel moments — then I imagine we’d all be happy to take it. But that isn’t the case, not really, because so much of that skill has been offset by decades of unchecked commitment to systems, structure, defense above all else. There are fewer goals now than there were back then, so much so that we fall all over ourselves whenever the numbers go up just a little bit. The players are younger, faster, more creative and just plain better than ever before, but you put all of that brilliance out on the ice in an NHL game and way too often it all adds up to this.
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So if all that skill isn’t filling the void, what is? And maybe more specifically, how worried should the NHL be if the answer is “not much”?
It’s a tough question, because it sure seems to lead you to a problem without a solution. Fighting isn’t coming back, and neither are the days where we didn’t know how much harm it was doing. Maybe there was some bliss in all that ignorance, feigned or otherwise, but it’s gone now. What do you replace it with? Short of some sort of big, bold changes that we’d all just complain about anyway, maybe there just isn’t much to be done, and the best option is to just keep the quiet part quiet.
For what it’s worth, the league doesn’t seem all that concerned. The game is great, they’re constantly telling us, maybe in need of some minor tinkering here and there but that’s about it. The ratings are OK, most of the franchises are healthy, and have we mentioned the record revenue? If Bettman and friends are worried that the product has lost part of its appeal, to the grizzled fans of the past or the potential new ones of the future, they’re doing a great job of hiding it.
So maybe there’s our answer. No, the game didn’t lose anything, at least not anything worth keeping, and if you think it did then you can crawl back to the YouTube comments with all the other dinosaurs. Or better yet, you could consider the option that we used to sneeringly offer the anti-fighting 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 / The Athletic; photo: Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)