Pennsylvania is Home to the Best Hockey

Since last year’s postseason the Philadelphia Flyers and Pittsburgh Penguins have set the benchmark for entertaining hockey.  In their last three meetings they’ve combined for twenty-four goals and a goals a game average that is 2.7 more than the NHL’s average last season. On top of that their high scoring playoff series last season gave TSN a 56% spike in ratings, where as the Stanley Cup finals took a major dip in television ratings ( down about a million a game) from the 2011 playoffs. Lesson learned; offence sells.

But not too many teams have followed the Flyers and Penguins game plan and instead have stuck to defence first hockey. The mistake these teams are making is that they’re forgetting that professional sports are foremost a form of entertainment, and so it doesn’t matter if a team wins every game because if all they do is block shots and have battles against the boards no one will really care. That’s why LA and New Jersey drew fewer people to watch their games.

The conversation needs to shift from what they should take out of the game (fighting, no visors) and what they should add to it (larger nets, smaller goalie equipment). Scoring may have peaked in the eighties but there is no reason why the NHL can't increase their scoring by an additional two goals a game in the next couple of years.

The Flyers and Penguins should be the standard for how NHL hockey is played. High scoring games are always interesting, and nothing keeps people sitting through commercials more than them thinking that they might miss out on a goal. It would be in the NHL’s best interests, both for ratings and entertainment value, to encourage an offence first mentality..