The presence of elite young players seems to have been an effective addition, guaranteeing strong interest from hockey fans and journalists and ensuring that both the skill level and the competitiveness of the play would be high. Shanahan, a former number two overall pick, knew that despite the weird game modifications, juniors angling for high draft slots wouldn’t dare sleep through Gatorade-sponsored scrimmages against their best peers in front of hundreds of scouts, reporters and executives.
“We want the game to continue moving in the direction of rewarding skill,” Shanahan says. “Sometimes people say that means more offence, and while that might be an end result, there’s skill in playing defence and in open-ice hitting as well.” With a new head-shot rule already in place for 2010-’11, one major (and relatively likely looking) proposal on display at the camp involved player safety: namely, the “hybrid icing” rule whereby a linesman can use discretion to settle a mismatched race for the puck and blow it dead before the contenders reach the end boards.
As far as possible, Shanahan says, the league wants to keep the game recognizable, respect its spirit, and let the players, as opposed to the coaches, settle outcomes—something that should appeal to fans.
Columbus Blue Jackets GM Scott Howson points out the impetus behind experiments with three-on-three and two-on-two overtime: the number of regular-season games settled by shootout appears to be growing, rising to 184 last year from a baseline of 145 in ’05-’06. “I think there’s strong sentiment in favour of limiting that trend,” says Howson, “since the three-point games [in which the shootout loser gets a point] skew the balance of the standings somewhat.”
Marketing experts praise the league’s attention to game R & D—though a few express the wish that even more energy was devoted to safety, as opposed to the attractiveness of the product. The unusual nature of some items tested at the camp reminded Simon Fraser University business professor Lindsay Meredith of the freewheeling “skunk works” divisions that tech companies create to investigate advanced projects. “Any major corporation should have some kind of skunk works—a bank, a university, whatever,” he says. “An enterprise of that size and sophistication would be foolish not to.”
Shanahan doesn’t yet know whether the R & D camp exercise will be repeated, and if so, how often. “But I don’t think it will be five years before we see the next one,” he ventures. Nobody liked the ’04-’05 lockout, he adds, but it provided a dramatic opportunity to examine and tweak the clutch-and-grab, low-scoring hockey that preceded it. Rule changes have succeeded in opening up the game more, he adds, but good businesses don’t stop test-driving inventions and new approaches when times are good.
Concordia University sports marketing professor Bruno Delorme agrees. “Of the top four professional leagues, the NHL is number four,” he says. “In that position you’ve got to go for it. You’ve got to think outside the box.” The league is not just trying to put down roots in non-traditional U.S. markets, he observes; at “home,” in Canada, there are a quarter-million new immigrants every year. “Most of those people have scarcely heard of Gretzky or Lafleur or Béliveau,” he says. “It won’t be easy to market to their children by playing the tradition card. The hockey business can’t forget that it’s an entertainment business.”
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