from Damien Cox of the Toronto Star,

Seven goals. That’s the number.

Well, that’s my number, although I’d settle for six.

But seven is the perfect hockey number. Seven goals per game on average provides enough oxygen for the offensive side of the game to breathe while also permitting defence to stand up and be counted on some nights.

To me, 4-3 is the perfect hockey score, particularly if the winning team trails 3-2 before storming back to win. But an average of seven goals per game means you’ll have 2-0 one night and 7-5 the next, with a few 6-4 games thrown in to balance the 3-1 scores.

Some recoil at this kind of hockey math, and Gary Bettman of the NHL certainly does whenever the issue of scoring in the game comes up, as it has again this year with a close-checking regular season and a suffocating Stanley Cup final that apparently Canadian television viewers weren’t as drawn to as American ones.

If you say we need more goals, these folks will scream foul, saying they don’t want 14-13 every night and 1-0 is beautiful and if that doesn’t satisfy go watch lacrosse.

Bettman doesn’t say this, of course. He patiently explains trends and warns against snapshots, preferring always to praise the state of the game. His approach, extraordinarily successful for more than two decades at the helm, has been that negative analysis of anything unhappy in the game disparages the game, and therefore must always be quashed.

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