March 16, 2004
NHL Roundup
What would the NHL be like if every game could be as meaningful as last night's Sabres-Maple Leafs matchup from Buffalo last night? There was hitting, wide open play, scoring, fluke goals, freak goals, defensive breakdowns, shoddy goaltending and spectacular goaltending. And when it was all over, a crowd that sounded like it had been imported from Toronto had been treated to a stirring 6-5 OT comeback victory for the Leafs that saw Alexander Mogilny record the 1000th point of his NHL career in the city where it all started for him.
Unfortunately, the Sabres lost more than a game, as captain Chris Drury suffered a concussion after a brutal hit by the Leafs' Joe Nieuwendyk. Sabres head coach Lindy Ruff was livid after the game:
"I thought what Nieuwendyk did is on the lines of a suspension," Sabres coach Lindy Ruff said. "The guy has his helmet off and he fell on him and pounded his head into the ice.
"It was a gutless play on his part."
It was the second heartbreaking OT loss in a row for Buffalo, who blew a 5-2 third period lead to let the Leafs back in the game. On Saturday, Buffalo led Boston 2-0 before yielding three unanswered goals to lose 3-2 in OT. With Buffalo chasing the Islanders for the final playoff spot in the East, these are points they can ill-afford to lose. Buffalo has 72 points, four in back of the Islanders, who have one game in hand. As for the Leafs, they're tied for fourth in the East with Ottawa with 90 points, just one behind Boston in third.
Up in New York, the Rangers got one game closer to the golf course after losing to the Devils, 3-1. For the Devils, success has come off the stick blades of linemates Patrik Elias and Scott Gomez. Elias has scored 14 goals in his last 14 games, while Gomez has four goals and 22 assists in his last 15 games.
In an otherwise dismal season, the Atlanta Thrashers got something to cheer about when Dany Heatley scored the game winner to give the Thrashers a 1-0 victory over Carolina. Atlanta's Parsi Nurminen had 31 saves to get the shutout.
How does news of violence in hockey affect television ratings? Apparently, North of the Border, they rise. South of the Border, nobody notices. From today's Toronto Star:
In Canada, Hockey Night In Canada scored its highest regular-season ratings in almost a year. In the U.S., NHL broadcasts took enough of a dip to place second to taped curling.
The Toronto-Montreal game on CBC Saturday night was watched by an average per-minute audience of 1,604,000. That was the largest regular-season audience for the show since March 15, 2003, when 1,689,000 watched the Toronto-Vancouver game.
The second game of Saturday's doubleheader, between Vancouver and Ottawa, averaged 942,000 viewers, the third highest late-game audience of the season.
But ABC's Saturday afternoon broadcast of three regional games scored a 1.2 rating, the lowest-rated sports event of the weekend, finishing behind NBC's U.S. curling championships and Sunday's Arena Football League games (1.3).
In the final year of its five-year deal with the NHL, ABC is averaging a 1.3 rating for its two broadcasts, about the same as last year.
As for the fallout from last week, Tom Benjamin has some thoughts we should all consider -- like eliminating no touch icing, outlawing blows to the head, increasing penalties for high-sticking infractions, and:
Eliminate fighting.
This is the tough one for hockey fans. Very few of us will deny enjoying a good scrap and many of us can buy into the rationale that allowing fighting prevents worse than fighting. Even if that is so, and even if Don Cherry spouts reality, the battle for wider public opinion has been lost. Perception is reality.
The mainstream media piled on hockey at least in part because the sport allows fighting. In one sense that is fair because Bertuzzi was surely trying to provoke a fight with the sucker punch. But the more important point is that because fighting is permitted the perceptions about the incident were blown all out of proportion. The Bertuzzi moment happened, but it doesn't very often.
Hockey shouldn't kid itself. It is an emotional, violent game. Even without fighting, a Bertuzzi moment will happen at some point down the road. They can't be entirely eliminated. If Don Cherry is right, more of them might even happen if frontier justice is stamped out.
It doesn't matter.
Read it all right now. We've got some serious thinking to do.
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A rousing debate about hockey violence is happening over at Off Wing Opinion. Check it out. Colby Cosh responds with his views here. As near as I can tell Colby believes: 1) The reason hockey is not popular in the... [Read More]
Tracked on March 17, 2004 05:28 PM
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