Exactly forty years ago a 22-year old kid from Parry Sound, Ontario, launched himself vertically 5 feet above the ice after scoring the winning goal for the Boston Bruins in the 1972 Stanley Cup championship game.  The splendid photo that caught Bobby Orr in mid-flight on that spring evening, also caught the thrill of the fastest of all sports which back then  rewarded the most-skilled skaters and shooters with names that are remain legends in the world of hockey, which at the time extended across Canada and in some major cities in the US northeast.  Bobby Orr was by most calculations the greatest of them all, but  he wasn’t the last.  Guy Lafleur, Bobby Hull, Phil Esposito, Wendell Clark, Bobby Clarke, take your pick and add the Europeans that followed Bure, Mogilny,  Näslund, the Sedin twins.  Now try to add the name of anyone playing in this year’s playoffs.  40 year old Jaromir Jagr is the only name that might show up on the list (goaltenders excluded), and he too is now gone after returninng from several years in Russia.
In his place we have the no-name behemoths who are willing to throw themselves in the face of dangerous pucks and hit and try to stop anyone who enters their half of the ice.  And the formula works if the only things that counts is winning.  If any puck manages get through the crowd of big men standing in front  of oversized goalies with grotesquelly-oversized equipment, it may well prove to be the winning goal in an otherwise goalless tie.   However for the paying audience it is a real trial to actually sit through 60 minutes of skaters plodding around in glue, rarely even getting a shot on a bored goalie.  As the semifinals now begin all the leading teams have been eliminated – Detroit, Chicago, Boston, Vancouver, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Jose)  and the semifianls  will be played by no one you ever heard of in the hockey hotbeds of Nashville (Tennesee), Phoenix (Arizona), Newark, (New Jersey),  Los Angeles and Washington or New York.  It is now perfectly possible that for the first time in the history of major-league sports, the finals will be between two bankrupt teams (Phoenix and New Jersey), and nobody will be watching.  It is the consequences of letting the league be run by people who do not come from the places where hockey counts and insist on setting up teams in places where few want to see them.  In these places it is not a question of watching skilled fast players flying down the ice and outguessing a superbly-trained goalie.  The point is to  not let someone who can do that get anywhere near the goal. Take another look at Bobby Orr flying like a bird 22 years ago, because you won’t see it again, at least not until players like Orr, Lafleur or the Sedins (or for that matter the still-active Ovechkin) can fly down the ice and score rather than being  dragged into the muck or even concussed and driven out of the sport, by large players who are unlikely to ever score a goal.  Hockey runs the risk of becoming unwatchable if someone doesn’t do something about it – and fast.