Who Peed in the Talent Pool: The Over-Expansion of the NHL

Over the past five years, if you sit down with hockey fans, you will hear many of them say that the game is not as good as it was in the eighties and nineties. There is always debate over why and how the game has changed. Not everyone will agree on why the game is different, but most people will agree that it is.

People will point out that the league’s hard stance on removing all the clutching and holding has opened the game back up, but it is still not as freewheeling as it was when Wayne Gretzky scored ninety-two goals in a season. The size of the goalie’s pads is often mentioned. If you look at a goalie from the eighties, he will look much smaller than today’s monsters with their oversized pads. Some people will point out the shift in coaching philosophies that has teams playing defense first. While none of these things are wrong, the one point you rarely hear anyone make is that the level of talent in the league is not the same.

I am not saying that the individual players are not as talented as players from twenty years ago. The teams are not as talented as a whole. From 1979 until 1991 there were twenty-one teams in the NHL. In 1991 the San Jose Sharks were added as the first expansion team since the National Hockey League merged with the World Hockey Association in 1979. After that, eight other expansion teams joined the NHL over the next nine years. This brought the total number of teams in the league to thirty. That is almost a forty-three percent increase in teams. It also means a nearly forty-three percent increase in the number of players in the league.

The NHL was already the top tier league in the world before the expansion. The best players came from hockey playing countries all over the world to be in the NHL. There are twenty-two players on a game roster for an NHL team. There are about two hundred players on current NHL rosters that would not have been in the league twenty years ago. I am not saying that the players in the league do not deserve to be there. They have all worked hard to get where they are, but the truth is, in the old twenty-one team league, many of them would not have made the cut.

Two hundred players work out to be roughly seven players per team. That is one forward line and two defense pairings or two forward lines and a goalie. There are several ways you can divide them up, but it still works out to be about a third of each team. Most teams today are successful if they have two talented lines and a fairly descent third line. Many of the third lines are considered “checking lines”. This means they are put out to try to shut down the opposing teams best players. If these players can chip in a goal, it’s a bonus. Many fourth line players only play a few minutes a game. They are often called “energy lines”. Their job is to go out and get the team and the crowd fired up. Sometimes it’s a big hit and other times it’s a fight, but many times these players will go more than a season without scoring a goal.

Before the expansion, some of the current first and second line players would have been on those third and fourth lines. Teams had more scoring depth because the talent went beyond the top two lines. If you take the top two lines from the nine expansion teams and spread just those players out that would add two top six forwards to each team and still leave some players left. There is not a general manager in the league that would not love to have that talent level.

The NHL Draft occurs every year around the end of June. There are currently seven rounds with each team having one pick per round. Some teams may have an extra compensatory pick for losing a restricted free agent, but that is an entirely different discussion. That means there are a minimum of 210 players drafted each year. In 1979, the draft consisted of six rounds with 21 picks per round. That is almost half the number of players drafted today. With double the number of players being drafted, you cannot help but see a drop off in the skill level of the players.

Now, take a minute to think about goaltending. There are nine goalies currently starting in the league that would have been back-ups before expansion. In a league where the goaltender can make or break a season this is huge. There might be four or five “elite” goalies in the league. After that, many of the remaining top twenty are pretty even. Beyond that you start to see the talent level drop off. Good goaltending hides mistakes the rest of the team might make. If you remove the bottom nine goalies from starting roles and increase the talent up front, the scoring might change very little but the game would be more exciting.

In the late nineties and early part of this decade, the game was slowed down by players holding and hooking as the skilled forwards made their way up ice. The players, the fans, and the league all noticed that the game was going down hill. The NHL lost a full season to a labor dispute in 2004-2005. During this time some players took it upon themselves to try to find ways to make the game better. They concluded that they could make minor rule changes and call for more strict enforcement of existing rules. As a result, after the lockout, the number of penalties being called was noticeably higher. The league took a zero tolerance stance on hooking, holding, and interference. This helped to open the game up some and lead to the end of some players careers because they could not keep up.

Even with the changes made after the lock out, the game is still not as free and open as it once was. The league has tried moving the nets both closer to and farther from the end boards. They have adjusted the distance between the blue lines to expand the neutral zone. They even removed a rule that disallowed a two line pass. This allows for faster movement and quicker transition from defense to offense. All of these things have helped to open the game back up, but not without causing new problems.

The crackdown on obstruction has lead to players moving faster through center ice. This has lead to bigger hits. Unfortunately it has also lead to bigger potential for injury. The players can no longer grab the puck carrier, but they can hit him. This, along with the instigator rule, has lead to less skilled players taking runs at the better players in the league. This tends to lead to knee and head injuries. It seems like a few times a month you hear a player is out with a concussion.

Injuries happen. It’s part of the game and should be expected. The problem arises when a star player is out for several weeks or months because a player that is lucky to play four minutes a night takes a run at him. Now, you have a team missing a star player. A true star player makes the players he plays with better, so teammate’s production suffers. Perhaps the team now loses some games they may have otherwise won. The fans miss out on the excitement that player brings to the ice. Watching games several times a week and the nightly highlights show, “NHL on the Fly”, every night on the NHL Network, you get to see just how often these cheap shots are taken.

Expansion has also hurt minor league hockey. The American Hockey League is the primary feeder league for the NHL. The league currently consists of twenty-nine teams. According to Hockeydb.com, there were only ten teams in 1979. That means almost every player for an AHL team would be on an NHL roster today. This trend flows down to all levels of minor league hockey. After all, if the top league is taking less skilled players, the minor league teams have to take what is left. Now the quality of hockey at every professional level suffers.

There is also the financial burden some teams place on the rest of the league. Several years ago the NHL introduced revenue sharing as a way to help small market teams get by. Many of these teams are in non-traditional hockey markets. Places like Phoenix, Atlanta, Florida and Carolina. Teams that make more money have to give money to teams who have less so they can afford to play better players. There is often talk on the internet of teams moving to more supportive markets, but would that help if the product is not as good as it should be? It would just make more sense to fold the teams that cannot survive and let the better players go to teams who can afford them. Since the salary cap is based on revenue, getting rid of teams who are losing money would in turn allow teams to spend more on better players.

On March 26, 2010 TSN.ca released the result of an anonymous poll, posed by ESPN Magazine, to fifty NHLers. Players were asked several questions such as: “who is the best player in the league,” “what team will win the Stanley Cup,” and “who is the smartest coach.” They were also asked if they thought the league should be contracted and thirty-eight percent believed it should. Only two other questions on the survey scored a higher percentage.

Over-expansion might have brought some revenue to the league in rights and expansion fees, but in the long run it has hurt the game. It’s time for the NHL to get it right and disband a few teams. This would be an enormous undertaking and they would have to work closely with the player’s union. In the end, it would help the remaining team and players. It would also allow hockey fans at every professional level to see a faster paced and better played product on the ice.