In the Globe & Mail on Saturday, Montreal Canadiens great Ken Dryden, now vice-chairman of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, offered a manifesto for Saving The Game of hockey. Dryden's essay comes in the wake of continuing complaints from fans and players that detrimental changes have plagued the NHL for the past ten or fifteen years at least; such changes include the issues of expansion, vigilante violence, and an increasingly congested game.
Dryden has for a long time been one of the most respected archivists and critics of hockey, especially as it is instituted in Canada. Despite a relatively short playing career of only 8 seasons as goalie for the Montreal Canadiens, Dryden earned 258 wins and 46 shutouts, and won the Vezina trophy as the league's best goalie five times. A lawyer with degrees from Cornell and McGill, Dryden has published some of the best books on hockey, including the classic The Game.
Dryden's editorial in The Globe accomplishes at least two things: first, he contextualizes change in the sport of hockey, noting how it began as a game of seven-on-seven with no forward passes for its first 50 years; and second, he makes the case that the change that is necessary now must be a holistic change, not simply a tinkering with one or two isolated rules.
Dryden challenges some of the standard arguments about "the problem" with hockey, such as the suggestion that modern players simply don't respect each other:
To me, the change isn't a loss of respect, it's the presence of opportunity. As a checker, if you are 10 feet away from a puck carrier, you can't hook or slash him. You can't high stick him, either. And you can't do much damage to him if you are moving at him at cruising pace and not at a sprint. But with today's shorter shifts that allow you to move faster, to get closer, it's different. Now you have opportunity. Now you can hook and slash and high-stick your and smash him into the boards. So now you do.
Dryden notes a change in the fundamental physics of the game by the presence of bigger players playing shorter shifts:
In 1952, the average NHL player was 5 foot 10 3/4 inches and 175 pounds. In 2003, that same player was 6-foot-1 and 204 pounds. The extra 2 3/4 inches doesn't mean much. The extra 29 pounds does. And it really makes a difference when you add another change. In 1952, the average player each time he went on the ice played shifts lasting about two minutes. Today, an average shift lasts 40 seconds. Playing two minutes at a time, a player has to play a coasting/bursting style of game to save energy. You coast in the neighbourhood of the puck at most moments, then when there is an offensive chance or a defensive urgency, you burst. Playing 40 seconds at a time, you burst all the time. You play at a sprint. I remember little of high school physics, but I do remember: F = ma. Force equals mass times acceleration. So when a body that weighs 29 pounds more, moves at a sprinting speed, the force of collision is significantly, dangerously greater.
His argument might be summarized as: The problem isn't an increased intent to injure; the problem is the increased opportunity to injure. So, what's to be done about this? And something must be done, because, while hockey has not degenerated to Slapshot-like excesses, it has become a game dominated less by flashes of brilliance from superstar players, and more by the defensive efforts of the lowest common denominator. The offensive stars of the NHL are being cloaked by defensive systems and the unwillingness of the league to enforce obstruction rules.
One of Dryden's suggestions is to declare "finishing a check" interference. As it stands, players are allowed to hit someone who held the puck one or two seconds prior. Interference is only called when one player hits another player who has yet to receive the puck.
We need to see hits from behind and hits to the head for what they really are. We need to see finishing a check for what it really is. These and other plays are not traditions of the game worthy of protection. They have brought danger to the game. They have hurt the game.
It is unlikely the NHL will adopt Dryden's suggestion for "finishing a check," but in his typically astute understanding of the game he has zeroed in on a single action -- hitting someone one or two seconds after he releases the puck -- that embodies a number of wrong attitudes in the game. Of course, Dryden's complete answer involves revisiting the rules of the game in their entirety. He's not advocating a radical transformation; instead, he is asking that we see the cumulative effect of incremental changes.
Dryden's focus on the relational properties of rules seems to be more in touch with the flow of hockey. Perhaps more than any other sport (save soccer), hockey is about flow, movement, continuity. Americans prefer sports suited for television, sports that emphasize stoppages more than flow: football, basketball, baseball, in particular. Hockey is faster than these games and relies on changes on-the-fly. Most Americans don't have the grass roots exposure to hockey to be able to track its movement. To most Americans, the game must appear to be a blur of uncoordinated movement and violence, just a scramble for a puck the American televisions can't seem to transmit (witness Fox Sports' disastrous creation of a digitized "streak" that trailed the puck in their brief stint as the marginal American carrier of NHL hockey on TV).
American sports are ideal televisual spectacles. The stop-and-start quality of baseball and football, for example, does not change a bit with the introduction of TV. But anyone who has been to an NHL game recently knows how obtrusive the "TV timeouts" are to the flow of the game. The use of hurry-up faceoffs in the World Junior Championship every year shave at least 30 minutes off the length of the broadcast, and eliminates all the unnecessary jostling between stoppages.
In baseball, you can lower the pitcher's mound and it changes the game in a very concrete and observable way. The pitcher has less dominance over the batter. In hockey, you can change the size of the goalie's equipment, but this does not account for lighter hockey sticks, more obstruction, or shorter shifts. Hockey is a game that is played, and therefore must be thought of, holistically. Even though there are one-on-one matchups in hockey, as there are in all team sports, the speed of transitions in hockey reduce the singularity and impact of these matchups.
In baseball, the pitcher-batter matchup dominates; it is primarily a game of individuals, especially pitchers. In football, the one-on-one matchups, such as defensive backs and receivers, are largely pre-ordained in the called play, and do not evolve as organically as, for example, when a defenceman "pinches" in hockey and a forward must cover his deserted spot on the blueline.
It is the fluidity of hockey that makes it such a beautiful game, and the solutions to its current problems must be considered with the same sense of relationality, transition, fluidity, wholeness.
2:31:51 PM 
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