Despite Olympic glory, NHL must grow by contracting

Sidney Crosby and other NHL stars deserve a stage that's more concentrated in interest (image via Wikipedia).

Like everyone else, I was captivated by the two U.S.-Canada Olympic hockey games. You couldn’t ask for anything this side of the 1980 Miracle On Ice in the nail-biting gold-medal game to promote the sport.

But I bet the big bump — particularly in the NFL-like ratings on TV — afforded the NHL by the overtime thriller is more like a sugar fix. It’s temporary, fated not to last. Pro hockey remains an exciting, but still niche sport, its players and nuances still foreign to the majority of U.S. sports consumers.

Though the sport has staged a reasonable comeback from a season-busting lockout five years ago, the NHL is still a trailer in overall fan consciousness during the dead of winter. The main problem is too many teams. Can a niche league honestly say it’s compelling, competitive and relevant fielding 30 teams? That includes nine franchises in the South, Arizona and California — balmy or torrid locales where only a few diehards are hockey-wise away from the rink.  Ice is for cold drinks in this part of the NHL circuit.

You have a corresponding intensity of interest in cities and regions where playing hockey at the amateur level makes sense — duck indoors to a freezing rink where it’s still warmer than the outside temperature.

The NHL won’t do it, of course. But if anyone had any sense, the lords of the rinks would lop off eight to 10 teams and pull back north of the Mason-Dixon Line. That would leave a still-robust number of teams, competitive races and the sport being able to intensify marketing efforts where far more kids — their future — are playing at the amateur level.

The league needed to tend to its core business first. The Chicago Blackhawks revival is huge. How ’bout boosting laggard Toronto? Montreal, where hockey was akin to the state religion, is bumping along just over .500. Boston ain’t no great shakes. Detroit has dropped from its former heights. The Original Six needs tending before you think of hockey down among the sheltering palms.

At 30 teams, the NHL is simply too big for the average fan to follow. It’s not baseball, football or basketball, where there is 130 years of tradition or a firm track following talent as it matriculates from high schools through colleges to the pros. Hockey simply has too many names, many hard to pronounce with their Eastern European origins, for all but rabid fans to get to know and follow.  Compressing the talent pool so the best of the best get more name recognition and face time would serve the sport the best in the long run.

To be sure, like politics, sports interest is predominately local. But there has to be some knowledge of the league as a whole. And in too many parts of the country where the NBA has planted its flag, college basketball is a religion in the winter. The NCAA tourney is the next biggest thing to the Super Bowl (sorry, baseball playoffs and World Series). Even the NBA is too big for its own good. But pro basketball logically would get first dibs on fan loyalties before hockey.

Sidney Crosby and Patrick Kane are young, telegenic stars. Ryan Miller gave a classic display of just how far a hot goalie can take a team. They and other skilled skaters deserve to be on a center stage that’s not stretched too thin to regions where the ice would melt quickly if not subject to air conditioning.