from Damien Cox of the Toronto Star,

As soon as this World Cup ends, we’ll go right back to the low-scoring, tight-checking style of competition that dominated play last season and made the playoffs and the Cup final between Pittsburgh and San Jose (27 goals, six games) anything but memorable.

But in this World Cup, through Team North America, the league has shown once again what it actually has in great supply back in the warehouse but chooses not to make available to the public except for special occasions.

Not that all 30 teams could muster the talent to consistently play to that same level of the Young Guns, but quite clearly an emphasis on scoring and offence would produce a fundamentally different league rather than one that has allowed the 50-goal scorer to become as rare as a Cleveland Browns victory parade.

Back in the 1992-93 season, the Detroit Red Wings scored 369 goals and 14 other clubs scored more than 300 goals. It was a wonderful season, and a wonderful time to enjoy the game.

Last season, by comparison, Dallas led the league with 267 goals scored. Incredibly, for an 82-game season, four teams couldn’t even score 200 goals.

That’s an extraordinary amount of offence lost over a quarter-century, hundreds of ‘he shoots, he scores, ‘how-did-he-do-that?’ moments that never happened.

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