Hey, today marks the beginning of the World Cup Of Hockey! Don't you know that? Come on, it's now the biggest hockey tournament in the world for players playing for their country! And you don't know that it's beginning today?
Well ... actually, yes, it is, in fact, quite possible that you didn't know that this is World Cup Of Hockey season. And that is a problem -- not for you or the casual fan or even hardcore hockey fans, but for the WCH itself. The National Hockey League and its Players' Union decided to resurrect this tournament, which has ancient roots in the Canada Cup, because they no longer wanted to abide by the terms the International Ice Hockey Federation mandated for NHL players and the NHL when they participated in the Winter Olympics. When it was announced that there would be a 2016 iteration of this World Cup Of Hockey, I took it to mean that those two organizations decided in tandem to totally pull its players out of the Olympics for the time being. Recent rumblings have hedged that; maybe they'll also go to Pyeongchang two years after this tournament, which will take place entirely in Toronto over the next two weeks just before the NHL season begins.
But if the NHL and NHLPA thinks this is going to be a success, they're fooling themselves. I am a fairly ardent hockey fan, and I love when players from any sport play for country and not club. But this idea, the World Cup Of Hockey in 2016, is a horrible idea, and if I am correct, this will prove to be a total effing failure, one that smart people should have seen coming and one that will have consequences beyond itself.
Why? Here are my reasons, in no particular order.
1) You're doing this right in the middle of football season. Yes, the NHL begins during the thick of football season, so there is no getting around it. Still, this much ballyhooed tournament is like shouting at the top of your lungs into the gale of all those football fans after you tried talking in your indoor voice (in this tortured analogy, that's the NHL season) in the middle of said storm. No one, at least no one in the United States, is talking about this tourney, not at all. (Canada, at least in Toronto, is a different story, if seeing ads for it plastered everywhere in town is any indication.) So the NHL or ESPN, the network exclusively carrying the WCH, is just throwing good money down the drain.
2) ESPN is the wrong network to carry this tournament -- or hockey, for that matter. I remember when The Worldwide Leader broadcast hockey. They did their best to popularize the sport. They even, in an embarrassing effort to bring "rad" teens to hockey, put it mostly on ESPN2 when it had snazzy graphics denoting that it's the "cool" sports channel. But there were howls of protest from diehard hockey fans who didn't think ESPN respected the sport enough to cover it with the dignity they felt the sport was entitled to. I didn't necessarily buy into the whole bone of their contention, but I did feel that the sport was being squeezed when it came to network coverage and appeal from other sports that, admittedly, were more popular -- sports such as football, though it was far from the only one.
When it was announced several years ago that NBC Sports took the primary NHL package from ESPN (which, I don't think, put up much of a fight to retain), those hardcore hockey fans cheered. Finally, they said, a network that would put hockey first. The NBC Sports Network didn't have much of a choice back then; back then hockey was the only sport whose rights it had. But because of that, NBCSN lavished heaps of attention on the only major sports property they had at the time, and they covered the games, and the game, quite well. And they still do.
Now, NBC is the network to go to when it comes to hockey. So why did the league and the players' union decide to give broadcast rights to what they are touting as the premier worldwide tournament in their sport to a network which many people even in the NHL believed was giving them short shrift? NBCSN was the perfect fit: It's been good to the league, the tournament would naturally lead into the start of the season, and most important of all, it doesn't have football or baseball games that would conflict with the two-week tournament. (It does have special events like the Ryder Cup and the Paralympics, but the NHL remains its most visible and reliable broadcast partner, so I believe they would easily make room for it.) It seems like a win-win; the NHL has a broadcast partner that would promote them relentlessly (and probably with some positive spin), and the network has content that would bring in more ad dollars for them.
Instead, the World Cup Of Hockey is being aired by a network with no huge relationship with the NHL in the present, a very rocky relationship in the not-too-distant past, and lots of college football, baseball, and Monday Night Football games that will cannibalize ratings and divert attention away from the tournament, and it doesn't matter that ESPN has ocho channels and could put the entire tournament exclusively on one (it'll be on ESPN2 most of the time, I think). The WWL is going to be concentrating on football when it doesn't concentrate on baseball. This tourney, at best, will be the fourth wheel in coverage and newsworthiness, behind the NFL, college football, and MLB. Why the NHL and NHLPA decided to lay down in this maelstrom, especially when they've been screwed over by this network before, is beyond me.
3) Not many people care about hockey. Heck, I'll let you in on a little secret: Not even Minnesotans care that much about hockey, although when it comes to states we probably care more about it than every other state except, maybe, Massachusetts. All this self-generated hype is falling on deaf ears (again, at least here in the U.S. -- I think they're going nuts over it in Canada). So while putting this on NBCSN would probably be the best situation, it's still going to be drowned out by the other sports being played this time of year. Heck, the NHL usually gets the shaft when it comes to the sports fan's consciousness, especially when the NBA season starts up. So I don't think the dividends and impressions the league will actually get from the staging of the WCH will come anywhere close to what they think it will be.
4) The World Cup Of Hockey has no history. The last time it was played was all the way back in 2004, when the seventh and eighth teams in the eight-team tournament were Germany and Slovakia, games were played in several countries on both sides of the pond, and even I managed to attend the quarterfinal and semifinal games played at the Xcel Energy Center. I still have the plastic souvenir cup. (For the record, the U.S. beat Russia in the quarters but lost to Finland in the semis, and gosh, there was this hot Finn chick sitting a few seats to the left of me. I thought Finns were such dour folk, but holding a beer in her hand she looked like a lot of fun, but I digress.) The league is touting this as the next edition of this grand tournament, but it can't be if the last edition if it was a dozen years ago. This obviously is as a dusty trinket hauled out of storage because the league finally decided they wanted to own the profits from a worldwide tournament that they feel they've been giving away to the IIHF whenever they go to the Olympics.
And by the way, before 2004, the World Cup, technically the first-ever World Cup Of Hockey, was last held in 1996. That replaced the somewhat fabled Canada Cup, whose frequency was also all over the place -- going backwards, the last Canada Cup was 1991, and before it were '87, '84, '81 and '76. So that tourney was held with much more frequency, but come on, they do another one in five years and then in three and then three and four and finally five? The constantly changing intervals between tournaments suggest disorganization and, ultimately, an indifference to whether they want to hold a tournament of this type or not.
So, really, this is a brand-new tournament -- and one, like I said, that feels like a ginned-up sham because the NHL and NHLPA arrogantly thinks they can do their own thing and no one would be the wiser. Sports fans who don't have their heads up their behinds can see through it ... and then they'll see past it as they channel-surf to the football or playoff baseball game.
And one other bad reason that isn't specifically about this World Cup but is tied into all of the reasons stated above:
5) The NHL needs the Olympics, and the Olympics needs the NHL. When it comes to niche sports -- and let's face it, hockey is the Shemp of The Big Four Sports -- they need all the publicity it can get. With the introduction of pros playing in the Olympics, and just as important, the fact that everyone knows that the Winter Olympics are held every four years, a cycle of buzz has been established, creating a popularity for this nation tournament that only helps the NHL when its season starts. That has only gotten bigger with each passing Olympiad, and it at least partially led to the burgeoning contracts the league has extracted from NBC Sports when not too long ago its puny TV contracts were an embarrassment to the league.
But there can only be one tournament for a sport whose players play for country. That is the Winter Olympics, whether the NHL and players' union like it or not, and they cannot simply replace that with their own tournament and make us fans think that it's legitimate. We'll be all, "Get back into the Olympics, you hosers!"
This might end up being a lose-lose situation. While the NHL and NHLPA may go down in flames over their contrived contraption, the Olympics (along with the IIHF and the International Olympic Committee) will see popularity on what arguably is the signature sport of the Winter Games (although you can make a case for figure skating) nosedive. No one wants to see college players and scrubs man Team USA, Team Canada, or any country whose hockey federation forbids its players from playing in these games because it has the WCH instead. And if the Americans that trot out to South Korea get hammered so badly they don't even get out of the group stage, the already anemic Winter Olympics ratings, which traditionally pale in comparison to the Summer Games, the most recent iteration of which (in Rio just over a month ago) fell into the toilet, will simply vanish. Then where would the Winter Olympics be?
I still have a soft spot of thinking that the Olympics should be all about amateurism. I have given up that ideal and just enjoyed seeing the best players in the world bearing flags on their jerseys, however -- so much so that if Team USA or any other Olympics squad goes back to sending amateurs because the NHL forbids its best players to play in that tournament, I won't watch.
Don't want to sound like Donald Trump, but this is a disaster in the making, and it'll create nasty ripple effects to the connected parties for years. But go ahead, watch the World Cup Of Hockey and think it's really awesome and stuff. I might even watch it; it's live sport in the daytime, so I can watch it while I'm working out. Doesn't mean it's important, and it sure as heck doesn't mean it makes any darn sense, either.
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