NHL playoff hockey is more boring than mowing the lawn

Article content

Who loves watching modern NHL playoff hockey? I mean, truly loves this brand of air-tight checking, shot-blocking majesty and superstar-neutralizing hockey?

Article content

Can you honestly say you do?

Article content

Even if your team still is alive?

If you’re under the age of 35-40, surely you’re just as tired of watching this kind of muckey — muckers-proliferated playoff hockey — as the rest of us. Where seemingly 20 shots a game are gloriously, courageously, heroically blocked by guys who all look like Kevin Youkilis of the Boston Red Sox, circa 2004.

Article content

Where goalies in their outsized equipment look like overinflated incarnations of the Michelin Man, ready to blow over if someone sneezes in a luxury box.

Where it’s rare for any superstar, let alone any forward, to ever cross the blue line with puck still on his stick, unmauled.

Hell, where it’s rare to watch a bona fide superstar do much of anything, anywhere, unmauled over three periods.

Article content

Yet that’s what the NHL has given us each spring since the early-to-mid 1990s.

By which time even later-career Wayne Gretzkys and Mario Lemieuxs — and prime-of-their careers Eric Lindroses, Mats Sundins, Steve Yzermans and Mike Modanos — all got marked, mucked, manhandled and mauled in the post-season and, most of the time, offensively weren’t able to do jack-squat.

Ditto the 2000s, ditto last decade, ditto this decade.

Watching NHL playoff hockey over the past 30 years — at least for the average sports fan, and probably even for most puck-head hockey lovers — amounts to this: Waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and waiting — almost always in vain — for superstars to do anything of note, let alone exciting. Anything.

Article content

Article content

But like good Will Hunting, it’s not their fault. And the longer the playoffs go, annually, the less of that we see.

Then, once superstars’ teams inevitably are bounced from the playoffs, the cries of outrage ring loud from all local corners, that those underperforming stars are lazy-ass wimps.

All of which has parked the sport at this counter-intuitive, polluted place — where we all hail the beloved, beard-growing playoff grinders and disparage the heartless superstars who don’t back-check enough.

James Worthy in the NBA in the 1980s never gave a rat’s ass about defence. Magic Johnson too, really. But did you ever hear an announcer, or Lakers fan, or ANYONE criticize them for it? Or give two turds about it? No, because they still could do what they did — in the post-season.

Article content

That’s the difference. Stars are still permitted to be stars in the NBA playoffs, to this day. When play got too defensive-minded a few post-seasons ago, the league opened up the game in a finger-snap.

But in the NHL playoffs? Ha. Drudgery. Trudgery — and that’s not even a word, but you get the point.

For a livin’ fact, an NHL playoff team’s stars of the show, for decades now, are not the superstars but rather the muckers. It’s as bass-ackwards as ever this playoff season.

A team stacked with such players — average-skilled, average-sized (and thus not too slow) yet high-energy forwards who always give no less than precisely 110.45% on every shift, and don’t give a damn about taking yet another slap shot off an open hand, as another sacrifice left on bended knee at the alter of team pluck — is far likelier to win the Stanley Cup than any team with two, or probably even three, lines of star skilled players.

Article content

Hello, Toronto Maple Leafs, dispatched five games into Round 2. And hello, Edmonton Oilers — a team with bygawd the most thrilling hockey player to pop onto our TV screens since Wayne Gretzky or even Bobby Orr, in Connor McDavid. And with one of hockey’s most-skilled snipers since Mike Bossy, in Leon Draisaitl.

Yet the Oilers just got turfed in the playoff quarterfinals in six games, a whopping 10 victories short of capturing the Stanley Cup.

So what! There are feisty forecheckers the likes of Aaron Ekblad and Brandon Carlo still playing that we can watch!

Maybe the NHL actually likes this. Maybe loves this. And, surely, 30-odd years later, wants all this to continue.

Otherwise it’d do something, anything, meaningful to try to change it, right? Which it hasn’t done.

Article content

To be sure, larger ice surfaces might have helped back when clubs from coast to coast come the 1990s suddenly began building new arenas, rife with cash-cow luxury boxes — to a size somewhere between the tight North American dimensions and the enormous European ice sheets.

A move to expand the ice surface then probably would have prevented the neutral-zone trap and other clever space-clogging strategies, from even being thought of.

Timing couldn’t have been worse, too, as the 1990s coincided with the time when younger players entering the league all of a sudden eschewed the time-honoured practice and mindset of hanging up the ol’ skates at season’s end to just go golfing, boating and partying at the cottage, before slowly getting back into shape during training camp each September.

Article content

Instead, the new breed of NHLers in the 1990s, by and large, stayed in insanely great shape, year-round. On the ice, the game understandably got quicker, the shifts shorter. Now, Energizer Bunny grinders could keep up with the stars and clog lanes all over the ice, woo-hoo.

The great Phil Esposito always says he didn’t even get warmed up on a shift until 30 seconds in. Now the average shift for forwards is only slightly longer than that. It’s an entirely different game, where all players are figuratively running the 100 metres, all out, rather than pacing themselves over 800.

And so, after 30 years of “Muckers, Baby, Muckers!” playoff hockey, one of two things must be correct: Either the league and its greatest thinkers are powerless to dream up any schemes or ways to change the current MBM means of winning a Stanley Cup on these too-small ice surfaces. Or they don’t care to.

Article content

Maybe that’s it.

Maybe the league’s powers-that-be watched the “Bad Boys” Detroit Pistons teams, circa 1986-92, and saw a new and better mould for its own championship teams.

Not great talent mixed with a few Neanderthal brutes who offered little offensively, such as the Philadelphia Flyers’ Broad Street Bullies in the early 1970s. No, not that. But, rather, ample championship talent across the board, packed to the brim with endless energy, an unquenchable thirst for the fray and, yeah, utter ruthlessness.

If you’re under the age of 40, you might not know much about those Pistons teams that reached three consecutive NBA Finals, that ended the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers dynasties, and that postponed the start of the Chicago Bulls’ own dynasty en route to capturing consecutive NBA championships at the start of the 1990s.

Article content

The Pistons did it by playing ferocious defence with an overflowing measure of meanness and sometimes sheer dirtiness mixed in.

If you weren’t in or from, the Detroit area (raises hand) you absolutely despised those Pistons teams, which starred Isiah Thomas, Bill Laimbeer, Dennis Rodman, Rick Mahorn, Joe Dumars, James Edwards and Vinnie Johnson.

Those Detroit teams, en masse, had championship-level talent, no matter what bitter Celtics or Lakers fans, Jordan apologists and millions of Bulls-fan whiners will tell you. So did other teams. But those Pistons played defence perhaps like no NBA team ever, to this day. And their ruthlessness put it all over the top.

NBA fans hated it. Stars couldn’t be stars, well, other than Michael Jordan, who typically made up for teammates being shut down by dropping 40 a game on the Pistons, which usually wasn’t enough.

Article content

Those Pistons teams had absolutely no time for pretty-boy, non-mucking scoring specialists, and not just on other teams such as Chicago’s Scottie Pippen. Indeed, with locker-room support Detroit’s front office dispatched star scorers Kelly Tripucka, then Adrian Dantley, before the Pistons started winning titles.

Hey, agree or not, the point is the Pistons essentially won NBA championships in the exact same way that MUCKERS BABY MUCKERS! NHL playoff teams have done pretty much ever since.

How was Scott Stevens of the New Jersey Devils blindsiding Lindros in the ’90s any different from Pistons centre Laimbeer clothes-lining Pippen?

Article content

You get it now.

Alas, the choices for sports fans for years now, nearly evening from late April to mid June, is this — so long as you don’t have a personal investment in a particular team.

That is, in descending order of excitement, you can: (1) Watch an NBA playoff game, where the stars always are permitted to shine, (2) mow the lawn, or (3) watch an NHL playoff game where bruised, battered and bearded Muckers, Baby, Muckers! prevent star players from doing much of anything for 2½ hours. With the league’s blessing.

JoKryk@postmedia.com

@JohnKryk

Check out our sports section for the latest news and analysis. Care for a wager? Head to our sports betting section for news and odds.