from Jack Todd at the Montreal Gazette,
No other major North American sport would tolerate such a dramatic decline in scoring. What is happening in hockey is the equivalent of returning baseball to the dead-ball era, or the NBA to a time before the shot clock. It’s as though the NFL was playing an endless series of 10-7, 7-3 or 3-0 games.
If the NBA’s scoring leaders were averaging around 15 points a game instead of 28, the league would act. If Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers topped the NFL with a dozen touchdown passes in a season, the league would force defensive backs to tie their shoes together. But the NHL looks on, and shrugs, and tries another tweak, and nothing works.
The rules brought in to amp scoring following the 2004-05 lockout (a crackdown on clutching and grabbing, the silly, awkward trapezoid behind the goal, abandoning the two-line pass rule) resulted in a temporary uptick in scoring, followed by a resumption of the long, slow decline.
It’s a measure of the brilliance of Jacques Lemaire that 20 years on the league still hasn’t figured out how to beat the defensive system patented by Lemaire with the New Jersey Devils and copied by virtually every coach since. Lemaire, the great offensive centreman, killed offence in the NHL and all the league’s great minds put together can’t figure out a way to bring it back.
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