I especially like the rule for icing. That is, the team that ices the puck, ususally after prolonged offensive pressure by the other team, can't make a line change until after the face-off. Great rule in that it penalizes a team for not being able to carry the puck out of their own end.

This sort of prostitution had been attempted for years in Soccer.

In order to make the game more attractive to the ignorecenti, they kept fine-tuning the laws of the game to encourage scoring. It didn't work. Good coaches and players kept using back-heavy systems of play, mutatis mutandi, and the 1-0 match is alive and well. We would expect the same result in ice hockey.

To change the game enough to open up the scoring enough to make it "exciting" to those who neither understand nor appreciate it would completely transform it. It would become a stupid, brutal shoot-out, but that's the whole idea, isn't it?

Professional, as opposed to olympic, ice hockey is a sport the way professional wrestling is a sport.

From a marketing standpoint, hockey was in great shape in 1994, when even die-hard basketball fans in the media capital, New York, had to admit that the seven-game Stanley Cup finals between the Rangers and Canucks was way more entertaining than the seven game NBA finals that same year between the Knicks and the Rockets (O.J. and his low-speed SUV chase starting in the middle of Game 5 was the highlight of that series). But then the NHL stupidly took a half-season strike in the 1994-95 season, which was followed by the rise of the New Jersey Devils' dominananc in the NHL with their clutch-and-grab trapping defense. Didn't matter that they played six miles from Manhattan, they dulled down the game in the same way the 1989-90 Detroit Pistons and their defensive style screwed up any NBA game not featuring Michael Jordan for the past 15 years.

Combine the Devils' boring style with the Rangers' descent back into their historic crappiness -- bad for trying to sell the game to advertisers and TV execs based in Manhattan -- and the result was a marketing nightmare for the league. The new rules (including the overtime shootout) are making things more interesting again, though it's going to be a long slog for the league to get back to where they were a decade ago.

Lou:

Spoken like a true defenceman. Are you related to Don Cherry?

I was at a Senators-Lightning game the other night and I haven't been so bowled over in years. The combination of speed and coordination of the offences of both teams was a dream to watch. They may have to loosen up a bit on the hooking and tripping calls (and enforce the diving rule), but it's not just the unitiated who are excited. Attendance is already up 4% from the year before the strike and the Canadian and original U.S. rinks are selling out. Any thug can haul down a player on skates.

Hey Lou, the professionals in the NHL are the same guys on the ice at the Olympics. The NHL now has rules more in line with the Olympics. If soccer players were allowed to grab the opposition and hold on during rushes, you'd have an apt comparison to what crept into the NHL in the recent past. One other thing I'd like to see is an increase in NHL rink size to just a little smaller than the Olympic rink.