tarheelhockey
Offside Review Specialist
At least you’re on the right track here, even though you seem to have an odd inclination to roll out conspiracy theories in every post.
Yes, the price of hockey equipment has gone through the roof over the past 30 years. Who does that benefit? Does it make the game more entertaining to watch or more fun to play? Not really. But there’s a lot more money in $300 sticks than $50 sticks, so the equipment companies are naturally going to stop making $50 sticks in order to create a more profitable market for themselves. Some of that profit comes back to the NHL as sponsorship dollars, so Bettman and the owners have a conflict of interest in addressing the effects that this has on the health of the game as a whole.
What can be done? Well, what if Hockey Canada banned composite sticks under age 14? With a stroke of a pen, that eliminates an accessibility barrier for millions of people. And because wood sticks put less velocity on the puck, that eliminates the need for an 11 year old goalie to have $1000 of pads and NHL-quality mask just to be safe playing. Medical incidents go down, which eliminates bills and also drops the price of insurance. What could stop this from happening? Lobbying from the equipment companies, who have a vested interest in keeping equipment expensive. Wouldn’t it be nice if an organization of NHL players *cough cough* used their media spotlight counter-lobby on behalf of the rest of us?
On a related note, probably the single biggest accessibility barrier is the scarcity and cost of ice time. One of the major reasons that hockey became a heavily blue-collar sport between the 1920s and 1990s was a concentrated effort in Canada and Europe to build a large number of community rinks. That peaked out in the Boomer years, when virtually any cold-weather town had some form of indoor or outdoor community rink. Many of these have closed or fallen into severe disrepair, and private companies have moved in to fill the void. Unsurprisingly, many of them turned out to be unprofitable and the typical pattern of consolidation has left us with fewer, cheaper rinks in those traditional heartlands of the sport. Even in new markets, where rink access is increasing, it’s largely in the context of corporate expansion which prioritizes high-dollar private league play at the expense of general access.
What’s stopping the NHL from making a serious effort to lobby for public investment in rinks? We know they are able — we see them close ranks and browbeat municipalities every time an owner needs a new rink for his team. What if they put a modest fraction of that effort into offering to support public efforts build and refurbish rinks? Currently their efforts are limited to CBA-mandated annual $100K grants for the bottom 5 markets, which collectively adds up to less than a league-minimum contract per year. What if that number was big enough to actually move the needle on participation in a place like Miami or Seattle? That’s how you diversify the game in a meaningful way.
Those are just a couple of ideas. They have in common an important element — pressuring the hockey establishment to give a damn and do something about these issues. Pressure them enough that they risk losing face if they keep taking the easy dollar at the expense of the general community. Ordinary people can’t do that, it takes leadership by recognizable figures. That would all be a far better use of their time than having a one-off promo event here, a press release there, and then quietly getting ignored by the real decision makers.
