Fifteen years later, players aren’t bitching about 84-game season
posted in hockey |
Wendel Clark and Rick Tocchet are two of the toughest S.O.B.’s to compete in the NHL over the last 20 years. Yet when it came to playing an 84-game schedule from 1992-94 (part of the League’s "throw it against the wall and please oh please something stick" approach to management and marketing) they sounded like a couple of achy moaners. From The Sporting News, here’s Tocchet waiting for someone to bring him a little Gruyere for his Chardonnay:
"I hurt my back last season because I had to play three games in four nights and I wouldn’t sit out, even though I was hurting …What’s even worse is the wear and tear you get going from city to city. It’s not like baseball where you stay in the same city for three or four nights at a time and can go back to the hotel and get a good night’s rest."
Waaah … maybe he was bitter because it was so hard to find a good sports-wagering operation on the road before the proliferation of the Internet. Despite how grueling the grind was under an 84-game schedule — and that was before the NHL expanded by another four cities - the Players Association has been leading the charge to add more games to the current regular season. The League Board of Governors rejected the idea for next season, as Bill Daly told the Globe & Mail that it was "too late in the scheduling process for next season to effectuate a change." But the NHL didn’t rule out an 84-game docket for 2009-10, when Dominik Hasek will be 45; the fact that it’s an Olympic year could complicate matters, however.
From a marketing perspective, an 84-game season is a no-brainer: Shorter training camp, more games that mean something and, if the NHLPA gets its way, home-and-home series between every team in the league. Western Canada is still mopping up the love from Sidney’s first trip there last December. But the players bitched about travel 15 years ago, they bitched about travel in allowing the overtime shootout skills competition, and they bitched about the grind of traveling to Europe. So why support an 84-game schedule? Guess there’s something about 60 games of extra revenue, the salary cap that’s linked to it and the percentage of it the players earn under the new CBA that they seem to like.
