from Rock Westfall of GetMoreSports,

The American masses continue to reject a self-described, “Three-two shutdown league” as evidenced by last Saturday night’s abysmal prime time failure on NBC. A reasonably attractive matchup of the Philadelphia Flyers and New York Rangers produced an entertaining game that was worth watching and won by the Flyers 4-2. Yet the game could muster nothing more than a 1.0 national rating.

There have been too many times in the past that American’s have clicked on boring 1-0 and 2-1 games that have turned them off from giving the NHL another chance. On far too many nights, guys watching basketball games see 1-0 third period NHL scores on the bottom crawl, giving them little reason to flip over to the NHL and give the game a chance.

The problem remains the real men of genius on the NHL competition committee that continue to tailor rules to cover each other’s rear ends and team needs, rather than open the game up. The game continues to be the stranglehold of shutdown clod general managers and head coaches that eternally plot its suffocation with insufferable misery.

continued