from John Doyle of the Globe and Mail,

One recent Sunday evening I went out for a pint. In a neighbourhood bar I watched the Pittsburgh Penguins win the Stanley Cup. I was a bit surprised to be witnessing this – I had no idea that the darn thing was still going on. Thing is, in this reasonably crowded downtown Toronto bar, filled with twentysomethings and TV screens, there was me and one other guy paying attention to the hockey on TV. That’s it – two of us.

Hockey is fast becoming a dinosaur sport. The world has evolved and NHL hockey hasn’t. And neither has the TV broadcasting of the game. That makes the issue of George Stroumboulopoulos or Ron MacLean as anchor of Hockey Night in Canada redundant. It doesn’t matter, because hockey has lost its appeal.

Certainly it has lost its appeal to the TV audience that matters – urban youth. Maybe Rogers was onto this when it first put Stroumboulopoulos in place as the new face of HNIC. With his hey-man style of interviews and some distance from the old, old school of CBC’s HNIC, his task was as obvious as it seemed – to make the broadcast more appealing to a younger audience. If that was the case, Rogers bungled the execution of the plan.

The countless ads for the show, in which Strombo was obliged to prove his hockey bona fides, were excruciating. For a start, it raised the question that Rogers didn’t want asked – “What does this guy know about hockey?”

Possibly, it was too late anyway. NHL hockey now exists, and has for some time, in the arena of boomer nostalgia. In the popular culture, its appeal is on the level of progressive rock from the 1970s.

What’s happened is that NHL hockey plods along, in its arrogance and incompetence, as if the digital age hadn’t happened. The manner in which it is televised is calcified, as if social media was still a novelty that was best ignored. While all coverage of all sports has changed, across multiple media platforms, hockey on TV is the same old, same old.

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