On Mon, 21 Apr 2008 10:11:26 GMT, Short Wave Sportfishing
wrote:

On Mon, 21 Apr 2008 01:59:12 -0500, Vic Smith
wrote:

On Sun, 20 Apr 2008 20:54:26 -0700 (PDT), Tim
wrote:

On Apr 20, 10:33?pm, Wayne.B wrote:
On Mon, 21 Apr 2008 02:10:37 GMT, Short Wave Sportfishing

wrote:
And my first action will be to change the size of the hockey puck to
the size of a dinner plate so you can actually see the damned thing on
TV. ?:)

Whatever happened to those electronically augmented pucks you could
actually see?

TV hockey has gone from the days of B/W where you could almost never
see the puck, to color TV where you could sometimes see it, to large
screen HD where you can see it about 80% of the time. ?

Wayne, that's fine but who really cares about the puck? At a hockey
game people want to see blood..

Went to fight and a hockey game broke out.
The fighting is what killed what feeble interest I had in it.
I'm a fight fan when they're wearing trunks and a mouthpiece.
But not seeing the puck was always a pain in the ass.

Hockey was, note the was, a violent contact sport and the occasional
fighting was a huge part of the game - part of the reason you watched
hockey.

Not me. I watched for good skating, passing and shooting, whether a
slam or finessed with passing. Hard checking and boarding has always
been a part of hockey, and never bothered real hockey players.
Once the gloves came off I was bored, because hockey players fighting
is no more fun to watch than a baseball diamond pile-up.
Sometime in the '70's the fighting was encouraged by official neglect,
and outside of Gretzky the game went to hell.
Might be wrong, because when the "fighters" became the stars I quit
watching.

When they changed the rules to make hockey more "family" friendly
discouraging fighting, hard cross checking and boarding (because of
the namby pamby crowd opposed to "violence") the viewership and
attendance went down.

I never got back to watching it, but my impression is the opposite.
Started meeting a number of women who went to Blackhawk games and I
thought the cleanup had improved attendance.
But that was just an impression.

Now that these aspects of the sport are returning, viewership is going
up slightly and attendance is improving. Of course part of this is
that the sport has a diluted talent pool and too many teams in the
NHL. In my opinion, hockey needs to pulll back to the original 16
teams - 20 max. Seriously, who needs hockey in Arizona? Or Los
Angeles?

Well, the mayors of Peoria and Decatur and their chambers of commerce
would probably beg to disagree.
Team sports is just a business now. That's my take, anyway.

--Vic