from Bruce Arthur of the Toronto Star,

“Do you go to a movie and hope you’re not entertained?” says TSN analyst Ray Ferraro, when I called to ask. “If the game is no fun — let me put it this way. An assistant general manager told me they should change the name of the game from ‘hockey’ to ‘work.’ ”

To be clear, the sharp-eyed Ferraro — who scored 408 NHL goals as an undersized winger from little Warfield, B.C., — is not opposed to work. He just thinks goals are fun. In the post-season, teams averaged 2.63 goals per game, a shade under the playoff average of the last 10 post-lockout years, 2.67. In the regular season it was 2.71 — all of this includes empty-net goals — which was the fifth-lowest scoring year since 1956. We said that exact thing in 2012 and 2013, too. Since expansion in 1968, the league had 25 seasons of teams averaging at least three goals per game. There has been one since 1996.

“I think the problem, if you want to say that, is so multi-layered that there’s not one fix to it,” says Ferraro. “As the game has gotten faster, what I thought would happen was there would be more offence. But what I’ve learned is speed is the absolute detriment to offence, because there’s no time to make a play anymore. There just isn’t. You can be the most skilled guy in the world. There’s no time.”

Others around the game echo this, or offer other options: restore the red line, or Scotty Bowman’s ringette line, maybe some kind of illegal defence? Goaltending equipment is shrinking, and one NHL official recently said, “All we need to do next is ban the coaches.” A smart front-office man echoed, “Hockey is not willing enough to realize that we’re in the entertainment business, and not willing enough to do something to get the coaches under control.” It’s like Wayne Gretzky told the New York Times last year: “All in all, it’s sort of a grinding game now.”

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