Fans Will Forgive and Return to NHL

The NHL was back to work Saturday. Fabulous. Now can I go back to cutting the grass.

Don’t get me wrong. I love hockey. And when I sat down to write Thursday after the NHL players voted to ratify their new contract, I swore I was going to come up with a thoughtful dissection of what to expect in the “new” NHL -- until I realized the league will look a lot like the old NHL, if you don’t count the hangdog look on the faces of all the players, who at one point told NHL owners they’d accept a one-time 24-percent salary rollback, but not a salary cap, and instead got shackled with both. Whoops!

It’s all thanks to the “genius” of their union chief, Bob Goodenow, who from the start took an unsustainable negotiating position on the cap even though player salaries were gobbling up a reported 75 percent of league revenues, then stuck to that stance until his constituency lost an entire year’s salary, and he was outmaneuvered, bloodied and flogged into surrender by a lockout that lasted 301 days.

But hey, that’s just how I see it.

And I suspect I’m still working through the 12 stages of grief about the NHL’s canceled 2004-05 season. I’ve already been through Shock, Anger, Channel Surfing, and Heyyyy, this poker show looks kind of interesting ... The Fossilman looks a bit like Denis Potvin, don’t you think?

Now I seem to be stuck on Contempt. If I’m force-fed any more new details about the collective-bargaining agreement, I swear my eyes will bleed.

At this point I don’t want to be talked to by the NHL anymore. I don’t want my hand patted. I don’t want the NHL declaring it’s coming back “bigger and better” than ever.

The one notable change -- and it is huge -- is that by instituting a salary cap of no more than $39 million and no less than $21.5 million, big-market teams such as the Rangers will actually have to show some restraint and front-office acumen. At the start of the 2003-04 season, $39 million was just a bit less than what the Islanders were scheduled to spend, but it bought the Rangers just six players.

Encouraging more parity is terrific. But beyond that? The NHL and its players are also trumpeting how fans should be excited by some proposed rule changes -- the majority of which, let’s be honest, only a Popular Mechanics subscriber would pore over or love.

Ending tie games with a shootout rather than overtime would be hated by some fans, loved by others. Many of the other changes would be fascinating only if you’re one of those people who reads the instruction manual for your new sump pump from cover to cover.

If it excites you, for example, to learn that the NHL might get rid of the red line, or make goalies wear smaller equipment. What? No more leg pads the equivalent of full-size mattresses? Then I need you to come over to my house and sort my socks or change the air filter on my car. That’s right. Go crazy. Just promise you’ll keep it down so the neighbors don’t call the cops.

One of the other “innovations” the NHL is considering -- I’m not making this up -- is having the players wear tighter jerseys, ostensibly to increase scoring by discouraging “clutching and grabbing.” And why not? Pamela Anderson got a network TV show called “Stacked” merely by wearing a tight shirt, which gave her one more national TV show in the United States than the NHL had after ESPN bailed out on the league during the lockout.

ESPN found when it comes to TV ratings, the 0.7 mark that NHL games drew ranked somewhere between what the network could have expected from broadcasting a test pattern and what it pulled in for regular-season women’s softball games. The NHL probably could guarantee itself higher ratings if it forgot about telecasting entire contests and showed its players playing poker for three hours, with live game highlights interspersed between hands.

(It’s not as crazy as it sounds. Not being able to see three-quarters of the action works beautifully for NASCAR fans.)

But again, that’s just my opinion.

And I’ll get over this snit of mine toward the NHL. Sports fans always do. We’re saps. Embedded somewhere deep in our brains, or DNA, are some very personal memories and reasons why we love sports. And no matter how badly the people who run or play the games behave, we don’t go away forever, because, ultimately, our love of sports is not just about them.

It’s about us, too.

Hockey is an interesting endeavor run by flawed people. But you can say that about nearly every other undertaking in life.

So it’s nice to have the NHL back. But fans will decide if it’s better.