The National Hockey League began as one thing and wound up as something entirely different. Founded with four teams in 1917, it had just six from 1942 to 1967, with New York being its southernmost market. Even into the late 1970s over 90 percent of NHL players were Canadian, and the league was for decades a regional and peculiar concern. As we learn in The Down Goes Brown History of the NHL, hockey columnist Sean McIndoe’s entertaining tour through a century of “the world’s most ridiculous league,” in 1952, Gordie Howe’s Detroit Red Wings played an outdoor pick-up game against inmates at Marquette Branch Prison.
The NHL never really outgrew its penchant for oddity even as it expanded: McIndoe describes how Edmonton Oilers enforcer Dave Semenko gave Muhammad Ali three respectable rounds in a 1983 boxing match.
McIndoe’s book looks back on what was gained and lost during the NHL’s odd-man rush from delightfully dysfunctional parochialism to regular-dysfunctional global mega-business. Today, there are two teams in Florida, and Canadian players are in the minority thanks to an explosion of American and European talent. The book is also a chance to reflect on the strangeness of this transformation even taking place. As McIndoe puts it, “There are no guarantees in hockey. On the ice, the game moves too fast … off the ice, good ideas go bad, good men break their word and good markets run into economic realities beyond their control.”
There’s a larger narrative haunting McIndoe’s whirlwind review of goalie fights, draft-day shenanigans, and Toronto Maple Leafs-related pratfalls: The story of hockey’s strange and semi-miraculous victory over its flagship league, a feat that often feels just as improbable as Bob Probert’s 62-point, 398-penalty-minute season in 1987-88.
The NHL has botched issues small and large from the very dawn of its existence. The league tends to be schizophrenic in its expansion strategy, downright cruel in its treatment of certain hockey-mad cities, indecisive in handling critical issues of player welfare, and reactive in implementing much-needed rule changes. (Fun fact from the book: The forward pass wasn’t introduced until 1929.) Key rivalries and franchises are in decline, and scoring is a fraction of what it was during the league’s late ’80s and early ’90s golden age. Older fans “can’t help but wonder how the world’s most exciting game was allowed to get so dull,” McIndoe writes.
Worst of all, the NHL is trapped in a quarter-century-long cycle of labor dysfunction. In 2005, it became the only major North American sports league in history to cancel an entire season as a result of a work stoppage and then nearly lost another season during an even more pointless lockout eight years later. “The news wasn’t all bad,” McIndoe quips of the conclusion to the most recent dispute. “When the regular season opened on January 19, 2013, the league had made sure to paint THANK YOU, FANS on the ice in every building.”
It shouldn’t be news to any fan of any sport that the game is always a greater and purer thing than the grifters, dreamers, and literal criminals who often wind up in charge. We meet a number of such individuals in McIndoe’s book — Leafs’ owner Harold Ballard went to prison for fraud in the ’70s and nearly sold off star forward Frank Mahovlich for $1 million during a boozy night with Chicago Blackhawks owner James Norris in 1962.
But the key transitional figure in the league’s history isn’t a horse-trader or a crank. To many fans, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman is something far worse: A lawyer and former National Basketball Association executive who ushered in an ongoing period of heartless corporate rationality.
Bettman’s 25 years at the helm have seen the league expand by 10 teams and morph into a multibillion-dollar behemoth. But those work stoppages encapsulate the grim trade-offs of the Bettman era. At issue were the implementation of a salary cap, limits on the length and structuring of player contracts, and other much-needed guarantors of profit-stability for a league where teams were regularly going bankrupt by the late 1990s. Even if the changes were necessary, they were pursued in what many deemed to be an inappropriately ruthless fashion, with Bettman & Co. exhibiting the utmost reverence for a maximal bottom line. McIndoe reminds us that in the early ’90s, the league’s collective bargaining agreement with its players union expired without triggering a lockout; today the dynamic between labor and management is so toxic that many fans have physically priced in the inevitability of months of the season getting cancelled every few years.
Meanwhile scoring is down compared to the ’80s and early ’90s, but that’s partly a result of the talent pool’s improvement, which is itself partly a result of the sport and the league’s growth: Third-line defensive pairings could often barely skate backward in the high-flying ’80s. Of course, like the much-derided “loser point” in the standings that’s awarded to teams on the wrong end of an overtime loss, low scoring makes for greater parity across the league, which keeps more teams competitive for longer into the season. Thus the current NHL can prosper even from its most frustrating shortcomings.
The lack of an NHL team in Quebec City is one of hockey’s ongoing scandals, but from a profit standpoint Las Vegas and Nashville were probably better bets, despite the Cool Runnings-esque feeling of pro hockey in Nevada. Like other businesses, the NHL saw the potential in emerging American cities, many of them in low-tax sunbelt or Midwestern states: The Nashville Predators are now a locally beloved institution that’s averaging 101.2 percent attendance this season. Last week, the league announced that its 32nd franchise would play in prosperous and NBA-less Seattle, once again snubbing Quebec City and reminding everyone that the current NHL doesn’t think it owes much of anything to hockey’s traditional heartland.
The age of great dynasties and line brawls in the playoffs — one of which, a legendary mid-’80s tilt between the Montreal Canadiens and Quebec Nordiques, McIndoe recalls in loving detail — might be over, but the soon-to-be 32-team league has a gaudy national TV deal and collects $4.5 billion in annual revenue. The genius of an Alex Ovechkin, Sidney Crosby, or Connor McDavid tends to dull whatever critical faculties wonder at when, how, or whether some dynamism can be beaten back into a product that’s defense-heavy and whose results often feel meaninglessly random.
McIndoe’s book ends on a hopeful note: Today, there’s more hockey in more places being played at a higher level and for more fans than ever. Fighting is down and violence-driven on-ice enforcement is slowly being weeded out of the league, a development McIndoe — whose column and book are named after an iconic 1992 showdown between the Leafs’ Sylvain Lefebvre and the Blackhawks’ Rob Brown — rightly welcomes. Nasty Ryan Reeves-type blindsiders still crop up with queasy frequency, but they no longer trigger the tit-for-tat cycles of on-ice violence or full-on brawls that endangered players and repelled anyone with a normative moral compass.
The NHL has lost much of its exhilarating potential for total barbarism, but the decline of fighting is one area where business rationality has made for a more enlightened product. Hockey doesn’t need to be thuggish to be compelling, and there’s plenty of beauty and weirdness on offer in today’s more sanitized NHL, as anyone who’s seen Zdeno Chara play in person can attest. The league has made a series of often-discomfiting bargains with modernity — but at least it’s the cost of success, rather than failure, with which fans will be reckoning for decades to come.
Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter-at-large for Tablet Magazine and lifelong Washington Capitals fan.
