If you were voted for NHL Commissioner for a day, how do you market the NHL?

[cowboy82nd]

Protect and promote your stars and unique personalities. Aggressively punish players who play to injure the opponent's skill players. Pursue rule and equipment changes that promote free flowing, high scoring hockey. Institutionalize student rush and other discount ticket programs to grow interest in the game. There should never be an empty seat in an arena.

Does that mean you give star players preferred treatment? Rules are different for different players?

 

[cowboy82nd]

1. Free TV and online broadcasting, no pay Walls for at least 25 percent of all games.
2. Real partcipation in the olympics, and Real World Cup of hockey every 4 years.
3. Total ban of fighting
4. Find a technical solution to make the puck more visible for the Audience. Both in Arena and on Screens.
5. Start the Season in September and have the Playoffs finished by the end of April.
6. More Regular schedule. Games Are only Player on 5 days a Week, With a similar number of games on each day.
7. Ban Playoff Beards

2. How are you going to force players to play in the Olympics, if they don't want to? They signed a contract with a certain team (i.e. Dallas, Toronto, Philly, etc) not the Olympic committee.
3. No. Fighting has still a place in the game.
5. I don't think that can happen and keep the same number of games.
6. I don't understand this. Are you saying that the NHL is only playing hockey five (5) days a week? If you are, I think that is wrong. Hockey should be on TV seven (7) days a week.
7. Why? Unless your team has grooming standards (I'm looking at you, Lou), grow whatever you like.

 

[BruinDust]

Change the annual schedule so that training camps open the Wednesday after labour day and the Stanley Cup is awarded before the Victoria Day/Memorial Day weekends. Might have to shorten the regular season by a few games (maybe go to 78 instead of 82), shorten exhibition schedule too. But it would be worth it not to have your season run into mid-to-late June and go head-to-head sometimes with the NBA finals.

Do more to market the true stars of the league. Go watch NFL Sunday Countdown or any other NFL analyst show. 98% of what they talk about are Quarterbacks. The NFL makes billions by essentially focusing on the 5-10 best Quarterbacks. I'm a casual NFL fan and I could name most starting QBs in the league, but would have trouble naming another 10-20 players. Barkley, Cooper Kupp, Kelce, George Kittle, Derrick Henry, Flowers, McAffrey. I'm start to struggle now coming up with more names. Not sure I could name a defensive player or special teams.

Pick out 10-15 top-end players to heavily promote. Use social media and streaming services. If clowns on Youtube can make millions having people follow their lives on their Youtube channel, why not your top NHL players? And if you have a top player whose personality really doesn't suit that type of marketing, choose someone else. Instead of specials following entire teams around, have a special following one or two top players from a team.

 

[Bring Bak Damphousse]

You’d have to change the league first in a radical way in order to market it. I can’t market this garbage. I am already an established fan so I still watch, but how can you market this to new viewers?

Get rid of the local blackouts, how are you supposed to get into hockey if you can’t watch your home team.

 

[Bruins4Lifer]

I want more bad blood and heated rivalries in the regular season so I'm doing a division re-alignment and changing the schedule.
- go to 8 divisions of 4 teams
- schedule 8 games vs division opponents, 2 games vs non-division opponents (80 game season)
- playoffs the 4 division winners have home-ice against the next top 4 non-division winners in the conference (1v8, 2v7, etc). First round doesn't need to be a divisional round anymore, its always good no matter who plays who

 

[DesertPenguin]

Does that mean you give star players preferred treatment? Rules are different for different players?

Honestly, yeah. In the old days, the star players (Gretzky, Lemieux) were left alone because there were goons on the ice who would end your season if you started taking liberties with those guys, and the league more or less condoned that. 5 min major and move on. Now the goon is all but gone from the game and that type of behavior is met with long suspensions. So, if that mechanism is gone, DOPS has to be more active. Dangerous hits have to be punished severely. Even the ticky tack slashes and cross checks, especially if they're done intentionally to target the other team's star players, have to go. And BS like that McDavid suspension being twice as long as the precedent, cut it out. Enforce the rules aggressively and severely, especially when the game's most marketable players are the target.

 

[kingsholygrail]

Just flash NHL on the screen for 15 seconds and don't elaborate further.

 

[Celly4Celebrini]

1. Move to the 3-2-1 point system. The artifical parity unfortunately keeps more teams in the playoff race. More teams out means more teams will make trades leading up to the deadline. as you can see with the NBA, trades often invoke a news cycle, particularly when bigish names are involved (i know the Luka deal will never be replicated)

2. Removal of the instigator/aggressor. dont shy away from broadcasting the big hits, following fights.

3. Friday night is hockey night. All 32 teams play. Unfortunately, CFB and NFL dominate Saturday/Sunday in the States so we had to make an adjustment. Once those seasons are done, move this to Saturday ()or just start in January). This is weekly. Not a one off. Stagger start times.

4. Promote more TNT like commentary teams. We need more Biz like personalities. The NFL/NBA benefits from MacAfee, Stephen A, Skip and all the other dominate sports talk shows keeping them in the news cycle. Fund the development of teams to do this for hockey.