A 28-Game NHL Season?

I want to talk about hockey for a minute. It’s not something I do that much but just bear with me. As you may know, the NHL has had a lockout and has not been playing this season. Supposedly the drop-dead date (the date when the season will be officially cancelled if an agreement is not reached) is this weekend.

But get this: if an agreement is somehow reached (as unlikely as that is) the NHL will play a 28-game regular season and will keep their usual 16-team playoff format, this according to an article on ESPN.com.

Can you imagine? What if a bad team got hot? What if a usually great team got terrible? Everyone goes through rough stretches during an 82-game season, but with 28 games you can’t recover from one of those stretches. In my opinion this would be the best thing to ever happen to hockey. (It would be even better if they cut out one round of the playoffs and limited it to eight teams.) It would give each game the importance that an NFL football game has. Every loss hurts, every win is huge. People would go to the games and watch the games on TV and the NHL just might make some money (finally).

Unfortunately there’s the issue of the salary cap and all the other garbage that won’t get settled in time for us to see something like this. It’s sad really. When spring comes we’ll only have the NBA playoffs, and those are hit-or-miss. The Lightning will still be champions (sort of) but they’ll never get to raise their banner. (I wonder, have the players gotten their rings?) The Stanley Cup has been awarded every year since 1919. It’ll take a miracle for it to be awarded in 2005.

For you non-hockey fans, first of all shame on you for not being a hockey fan. And I’ll have something about Reconciliation Week soon.