Give tradition a kiss goodbye for entertainment

The NHL has belatedly embraced the idea that its games are played as sport but consumed as entertainment.

The hockey rink in Dodger Stadium? That's what's being built as Los Angeles prepares to host one of the NHL's outdoor games on January 25, one of the league's efforts to reinvent itself. Beth Harris / AP Photo
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Kiss is playing at an outdoor hockey game at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles on Saturday night.

That sentence might be an abomination to old-school hockey fans (except the “Saturday night” part, that bit is OK) but it summarises a change in the National Hockey League’s corporate culture.

The NHL has belatedly embraced the idea that its games are played as sport but consumed as entertainment.

For years the league prided itself on the speed and power of hockey, and behaved as if that should be enough to sell its product to the masses.

Baseball remains the same obdurate way.

American football and basketball, on the other hand, have long straddled the confluence of game and show.

Hockey took a long time to join the party.

While outdoor games are the best thing to happen to the league in decades, the gap between the first and the follow-up was oddly long: four years, one month, 10 days.

The first was on November 22, 2003, when Montreal played in Edmonton, which is like Siberia but farther north (seriously: Edmonton, 53.5° north; Ulan Bator, 47.9° north).

The game was a hit in Canada, with a large television audience of 2.74 million viewers.

To this day, that night is remembered mainly for two things: the Habs goalie Jose Theodore wearing a toque over his helmet and Wayne Gretzky’s daughter, Paulina, who nowadays likes to take pictures of herself and show them to people, lip-synching O Canada.

It was such a breath of fresh air (literally) that the nincompoops who ran the league thought, well let’s not do that again.

An NBC Sports executive named Jon Miller pushed the NHL to go back outdoors, but the league was loath to entertain the idea.

It was not until late 2006 that Miller found a receptive ear in the NHL offices and it belonged to John Collins, a league vice president who previously worked for a much smarter organisation, the National Football League.

Once the NHL worked out the kinks (find cold place; drop puck), outdoor play resumed in Buffalo on New Year’s Day 2008.

That game set a league attendance record (71,217) that lasted until this month’s outdoor match between Detroit and Toronto at Michigan Stadium (105,491). Of the five NHL games with the largest US television audiences since 1975, four were outdoors.

This year the league is holding six games outdoors, the most yet.

And so, on Saturday, Kiss is playing at an outdoor hockey game at Dodger Stadium.

Whether or not it is an abomination, at least it will be entertaining.

rmckenzie@thenational.ae

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