My Ideal NHL

So I’ve given you some time to think about your ideal NHL without clouding your thoughts with my own. Now it’s time to let you know how I think it should be. Let’s go!

Player safety

The NHL has been crowing a lot lately about how they will make decisions that are in the best interest of protecting their players. I’m going to call them on this one, simply because there is still an insistence on keeping touch icing.

Ask Marco Sturm or Kurtis Foster what they think of touch icing. We’ve seen Iginla and Regehr both have scary falls into the boards as a result of this rule as well. Broken legs and sprained ankles are easy to shrug off as a result of a fast and physical game, but it’s only a matter of time before we see a more serious head or neck injury as a result of this rule. The NHL is the only hockey I ever see that maintains this rule (although I realize there are still others); if the IIHF and the CHL can manage with no-touch icing, why is the NHL so adamant on keeping this rule?

With regard to player safety, I would also:

• grandfather mandatory visors into the league
• adopt the OHL’s helmet rule for fighting
• crack-down on players not tightening their chinstraps (if you can fit more than two fingers between your chin and the strap, it isn’t tight enough)

Gameplay

I’m of the belief that the NHL has improved immensely under the new standard of officiating that has been enforced since the lock-out. I think this could be further improved upon by increasing the size of the rink to the International standard. We’ve got an extra referee on the ice now, and bigger, faster players than we used to have. Opening up more space for them to move around out there would make the game more free-flowing, and, in my opinion, more exciting. Opening up that extra space makes it that much more difficult to successfully employ a stymying defensive strategy.

On that note, I’d also like to see more 4-on-4. I’m not a real lover of the shoot-out anyways, so why not play a longer overtime at 4-on-4? Especially on a larger ice surface, I doubt we’d see many games go beyond 10 minutes of overtime anyways. I’d even like to see 4-on-4 overtime adopted for playoff games.

Standings

I’ve made my thoughts on this one known here before: I hate 3-point games! Every game should have the same impact on the standings. That’s why I would endorse a 3-point regulation win and only 2 points for an overtime/shootout win, while the loser still earns a single point. It doesn’t make sense to me that all wins are created equal while all losses are not.

Uniforms

Don’t let the Canucks design their own uniforms anymore. Seriously, they’ve subjected us to enough already.

The Draft

This is the selfish WHL fan in me talking, but bump the draft to 19 year olds. Let the kids play another year in junior hockey. For the most part, I think we’ll see better developed players, and less guesswork for the scouts and GMs on draft day.

Playoffs

Let’s go back to playing out of your division in the playoffs. Remember the 80’s where the Flames were always playing the Oilers, Kings, and Canucks in the playoffs? That’s how real rivalries are built. There’d need to be a bit of divisional re-alignment to facilitate that, or perhaps some type of wild card system like the NFL uses, but I think the fans would appreciate those match-ups, and it would inject that much more excitement into the post-season.

The Schedule

Hack it down to 70 games. Each game means a little bit more, and we can finish the playoffs before the CFL season starts.

Salaries

My economics classes tell me there’s nothing wrong with NHL salaries, since they are what the market will bear; however, I love Bob McCown’s suggestion that rather than earning a dollar value salary, each player earns a percentage of his team’s salary. Teams would then be rewarded financially for each win, thereby increasing each player’s pay incrementally over a reasonable base salary. Check out McCown’s Law for the full description of how this system would work.

This is my great fantasy. I doubt we’ll ever see any of it happen, but if we do, I’ll be happy to take credit for it.