First off, I'm not Canadian and the sanctity of hockey as well it's birthplace, however real or imagined, is not woven into the very fabric of my being from birth. I like hockey, a lot, and as a kid before our almost daily street hockey games we'd start out with sticks high singing the Canadian national anthem. However you won't find me praying on a Sabres hockey rug in the direction of the "Centre of the Hockey Universe" while clutching a copy of Ken Dryden's, The Game. Hockey is an awesome sport that I've followed since I was a kid and I've generally enjoyed the tremendous advances they've made in nearly every aspect of the game.
Yet, I hold these truths to be self-evident, that after decades of trying to make serious in-roads into the American sports fan's consciousness, hockey remains a very Canadian, very regional sport for the most part.
The NHL has done well to slowly build a rock-solid fan-base, which is admirable, and for years, especially the past 25 years under NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, the league has been trying for a bigger footprint on the American sports scene. Mainly he's tried to do it through expansion into non-traditional hockey markets as well as making for a faster, more exciting product through various rule changes, most notably the recent elimination of the red line. And every once and while Bettman would throw some gimmicks into the mix, like the infamous "glowing puck" of the mid-latter 1990's.
I'm an old school hockey fan who was brought up watching the game on a black and white TV that was grainy at best, a "polar bear in a snowstorm" at worst. If we were lucky the antenna on the roof worked well but adjustments always needed to be made to the rabbit ears on top of the TV set to get the best signal. Sometimes we needed to put aluminum foil on the ends of the 'ears' to help with the signal, sometimes we'd move the channel knob ever so slightly between the clicks and sometimes if we had older brothers, they'd make us stand next to the 'ears' and hold them for the best reception.
Following the puck was difficult and even as color was introduced and television sets got bigger, following a black object that's a mere 3" in diameter on a 200'x85' sheet of white ice where the players hit 15-20 miles/hr. and slapshots were clocked in the 90's represented a rather trying situation. It took a lot of focus and anticipation while also relying upon deft camerawork too keep you in the area where the puck either was or was going to be.
Such was the world of standard definition television and in 1996 Fox Sports and Bettman introduced "FoxTrax." The idea was to have a embedded technology in a modified puck with infrared technology tracked by specialized cameras to help the viewer find and follow it. There was a glow around the puck and you could even see it through walls when a normal camera-eye couldn't pick it up on the near boards. "Star Wars" effects were added in that when the puck was moved quickly a blue comet tail would appear and when it hit 70 miles/hr. or more you'd get a red one possibly causing many to bust out their copies of Sargent Pepper and chill to black lights, lava lamps and glow-pucks...man.
After the initial novelty wore off, which lasted a few games at most for many fans, the glow-puck was seen as nothing more than a stupid gimmick brought on by a commissioner who's approval rating started low and only got lower, to the point were he's still booed at every public hockey appearance, including the presentation of the Stanley Cup to the championship team.
In a recent October, 2017 ESPN piece Greg Wyshynski wrote about that era, "The glow puck lasted only two seasons before the NHL moved on from the network, but the aftertaste lingers on like a gulp of spoiled milk. The glow puck was hideously distracting. The technology wasn't there yet for this kind of augmented reality; the special effects were cheesy enough that it looked like hockey by way of a Mighty Morphin Power Rangers production budget.
"In the pantheon of bad ideas during the Gary Bettman administration, the glow puck is frequently referenced as the nadir."
Ironically, that quote was contained in piece that had Wyshynski, an "unabashed glow-puck hater," finding himself in peculiar dilemma as to "whether he loathed the concept or the execution" and made a case to bring it back in version 2.0.
A lot has changed in the 20+ years since the introduction and quick demise of the glow-puck, most notably the rise of High-Definition TV and a large screen format that makes it very easy to see the puck. Granted it still gets lost at times but there's no comparison between what we have now and the day's of rabbit ears and a dial channel changer on a 15" black and white television.
That 2017 piece where Wyshynski waxed in glow-puck nostalgia came to fruition somewhat last night as the League tested tracking devices with sensors in the puck and on players. What we saw was an in-game computer-generated, grey-scale trail that followed both player an puck movements at various times and at a varying distances before disappearing. Those watching it who remember the mid-90's glow-puck era couldn't help but have flashacks and it most assuredly renewed my disdain for the whole concept. It was still "hideously distracting," to use Wyshynski's words.
Simply put, if I want to see trails, I don't want to see it in a hockey game, I'll simply pack away my Road to Hockey Town and 100 Things Sabres Fans Should Know books and search for buried copies of Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Journey To Ixtlan. Watching that last night was a bad trip down memory lane and I'd rather do something else than being subjected to computer-generated trails in a hockey game, no matter how quickly they may have disappeared.
That was just one of the new technological things Bettman and the NHL introduced last night. The NHL's All-Star Weekend just concluded in San Jose, California in an area known as "Silicon Valley." It's the cradle of high-tech in the U.S. and what better way for the League to introduce some high-tech innovations then at a meaningless (unless your team won the $1 million prize,) non-competitive, on-ice talent show.
The NHL is looking to the future (or back to the future) and is going all-in on the analytics craze and through the sensors in the puck and on the players they will be able to capture all the important metrics the analytics community thrives upon. Although it centers more around hockey ops, most notably the coaching staff who can get data almost instantly (which is a good thing for them if they like it,) the cottage industry that is advanced stats will have a butt-load of additional data to spend hours upon hours making charts of. Apps will allow millennials and any other generation who might be interested, to keep their noses in their phones for instant statistical gratification.
And that's alright, in the eyes of this old-school hockey fan. Just keep it off of the television.
I don't need a drop-down box to tell me that Rasmus Ristolainen's ice-time is 'x' at any given part of a game, nor do I need to be told that Jack Eichel has x-amount of shots and that he's skating at x-miles per hour. I can see who is or is not winning faceoffs and can see that Casey Mittelstadt's line spends an inordinate amount of time hemmed in their own zone. Perhaps if I was intent upon relentlessly pinging social media after gleaning some factoid I may have discovered I might be motivated to pay attention to those types of statistics while simultaneously trying to keep the other eye on the action but there's a game going on and if you're into it, there really isn't much of a need for all that ancillary stuff.
As long as the NHL keeps the broadcasts free from nonsensical bells and whistles that become "hideously distracting," I'm game. If I want trails, I know how to get there and don't need glow-pucks or anything else from the NHL as a substitute. I'm interested in the competitive nature of the game and the most important numbers of all: the final score. Anything else in-game is just noise.
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