If the National. Hockey League is open-minded enough to bring. Major. League sports to Las Vegas, then perhaps it. Also. Has. The foresight to. Make the game more entertaining. For. The average. Fan.
How?
By. Stopping. All. The. Stopping.
Have you sat through an NHL game lately? There are more pauses than a William Shatner soliloquy and more restarts than a 100-meter dash at the Impatient Disorder Olympics. The average regular-season contest lasts 2 hours, 20 minutes, not including overtimes. Or shootouts. Or national anthems. Or scouring the rink afterwards to collect missing teeth.
Between the opening faceoff to the final horn, the whistle will blow and play will halt at least 80 times. The main culprits are penalties and infractions and intermissions and pucks flying out of the rink and into the stands.
At full bore, nothing flows like hockey. You’ve got skaters carving their way across the ice, veering from attack to retreat in a blink of the eye and a spray of the snow. You’ve got slap shots and cross checks. You’ve got on-the-fly changes and odd-man rushes. And sometimes, when the puck is hurtling toward the far post, you’ve got a kick save (and a beauty).
Except, of course, for those 80 times when the game sputters to a standstill like a Zamboni with a zucchini up its tailpipe. Then it goes from full bore to total bore.
Hockey needs some changes that, like the 1986 “tag-up” rule, make the game more watchable and expeditious. The tag-up rule allowed players who were offside to get back onside, instead of linesmen immediately calling for a faceoff. The result? Games were instantly 10 minutes shorter. More can still be done, such as:
• No place like dome. Hockey rinks are surrounded by a wood boards and acrylic glass that extend eight feet above the ice. Whenever a puck is shot or deflected over the glass, officials blow the whistle and call for a faceoff. But what if the rink were completely enclosed, like a BattleBots arena?
• De-icing. If brevity is the goal, then stopping the game every time someone shoots the puck from behind the red line to beyond the end line has to go. It has to go the way of enforcer goons. It has to go the way of helmetless heads. It has to go the way of ties.
• Zippy Zambonis. In between each period, it’s sticks down for 17 minutes while the ice is resurfaced. The tool for this job is the Zamboni, a vehicle that looks like the love child of a street sweeper and a riding lawnmower; that is rooted in 1940s technology; and that creeps along at 4-5 mph. It seems the only logical solution to cut these breaks down to 10 minutes is to drop a turbocharger under the hood. Or buy a second one.
Roger Snow is a senior vice president for Scientific Games. His opinions do not necessarily reflect those of Scientific Games.