Columnist Dean Juipe: NHL idles as others gain ground

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at [email protected] or 259-4084.

There's an old proverb that states "If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there."

It's timeless and broad enough to be applicable to any number of situations. And it's a truism that can be applied with a certain earnestness to the National Hockey League.

There are hockey hotbeds in this country where they wouldn't recognize the obvious, but the NHL is in danger of losing its status as the fourth of America's four major sports.

As it is, the men's Professional Golf Association Tour is poised to supplant the NHL in that No. 4 spot, and maybe it already has. With a huge increase in prize money and a spectacular new TV contract that significantly ups its visibility, the PGA Tour is expanding its market well beyond the country club sect.

Pro golf is happening. So is auto racing, for that matter.

The NHL is not.

While tickets are at a premium in traditional hockey cities like New York, Detroit and Toronto, the NHL's growth curve has no curve at all. It's as flat as a topped slap shot from the blue line.

They're aware of this in the NHL front office and they've tinkered with the game over the last few years in an attempt to break out of the doldrums. This season's tweak was to increase the area behind the net, believing it would open up scoring.

But it hasn't. In fact, with the NHL approaching its All-Star break, scoring is actually down a fraction or two.

Next season it's likely the league will eliminate the center red line, which will make for more onside passes and, in theory, more scoring chances.

While it's easy to argue that goal scoring isn't the NHL's problem, many believe it is and that the lack of scoring is keeping the league from obtaining a creditable national TV contract. This thinking caters to the Generation X philosophy of the more, the better.

Purists cringe, yet there are fewer and fewer hockey purists.

There are also fewer North Americans playing in the league (by percentage) and fewer Canadian cities after the franchises in Quebec and Winnipeg were transferred to Colorado and Phoenix in recent years. The NHL is in a state of flux if not disrepair, with unlikely cities such as Tampa, Nashville and Charlotte having teams and spreading the league's talent base even thinner.

As the league evolved, it lost its coziness. Familiarity was sacrificed, and maybe not for the greater good.

A sport that traditionally had its niche in the daily newspaper now finds itself on the outs in many locales, replaced by everything from NASCAR Winston West results to the Extreme Games.

This comes at a bad time for the NHL, which was quietly hoping its games would receive greater emphasis and attention during the National Basketball Association lockout. But there was no such transference of interest and the NHL gained nothing at the NBA's expense.

It missed its shot at a renaissance.

Hockey, particularly at its highest level, remains a great sport. It's fast and electric.

Yet its popularity could revert to regional pockets just as other sports are mining for gold and finding it strewn across the land. While they're chasing prosperity and a yellow-brick road, the NHL spins its wheels.

It may have even lost its way.

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