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.