Have you heard? The National Hockey League has a problem with its best fans: Canadians. Globe reporter James Bradshaw recently laid out the story, chapter and verse. Hockey has become extremely expensive to play, fewer kids are taking it up, other sports are challenging the puck's dominance with viewers, and at least one survey says that basketball, which barely registered in the national consciousness a generation ago, may now be as popular as hockey among young Canadians. Rogers, which paid $5.2-billion for the rights to broadcast NHL hockey until 2026, is facing soft TV ratings, which plunged further during this spring's playoffs.
Some of this can be explained by one-time disasters, like how zero Canadian NHL teams made the playoffs this season. Others point to long-term demographic trends – namely that most new Canadians are originally from somewhere where hockey is unknown.
What nobody is talking about is the degree to which the NHL is the author of its own fan misfortunes, with the national game's place in the Canadian imagination as the innocently injured bystander.
Even after a dip in viewership, there's still no country on Earth where hockey is even remotely as popular – and that long ago led the NHL to take Canada's fans, and their money, for granted.
As a business strategy for an American-based league, it hasn't worked out badly; Canada's golden goose continues to finance the league's ambitions south of the border. But the league isn't much interested in our game for its national-unity qualities, and that's no surprise. It's not the NHL's business. But for Canadians, it has often been the game's business.
The most popular broadcast in Canadian television history, watched in its entirety by half the country and at least in part by 80 per cent, was the men's gold-medal game at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, between Canada and the United States. Four years later, the gold-medal game in Sochi had nearly as many viewers, despite the broadcast starting at 7 a.m. Eastern time (that's 4 a.m. Pacific) on a Sunday.
When you put a red maple leaf on the sweater, Canadians of all races, religions, ethnicities and genders go bonkers over hockey. The game becomes a shared experience of Canadianness. That's something Canadians, new- and not-so-new, are hungry for.
Consider this snapshot of Canadians celebrating Sidney Crosby's golden goal in 2010. I can't decide what's most awesome: The two Sikh guys dancing for joy in their Team Canada turbans? Or the shirtless white guy hugging the man in the red turban and Team Canada hockey sweater? That's the country I want, right there. In many countries, national traditions and even the national flag are weapons against newcomers. It's the opposite here.
But Canadian national unity is not the NHL's business. It wants to keep the focus on its franchises, which is why the league may not take part in the 2018 Winter Olympics. It says it won't rearrange its season unless it gets financial compensation from the International Olympic Committee; the IOC, which in the past has paid the players' insurance and travel expenses, now no longer wants to pony up. Neither of these multinationals has the game or its relationship to our sense of nationhood at the top of the agenda.
At least our women's team will be at the 2018 Olympics. Unlike the men, they don't have owners, and they don't have a huge audience of paying fans during their regular season. But when they're wearing a maple leaf across their chests, millions of Canadians will get up at 4 a.m. to watch.
The NHL also doesn't much like hockey's World Championships, the other tournament where Canada's men wear the national colours. That European-controlled tournament takes place at the same time as the NHL playoffs, so Canada is forced to throw together a squad made up of players whose teams failed to make the playoffs or were eliminated early. Despite that, this year's gold-medal game (Canada defeated Finland) managed to pull in more viewers than most of the matches in this year's remarkable Toronto Raptors NBA playoff run.
So if the NHL isn't crazy about the Olympics or the Worlds, why not create a world championship of its own? Good news: The league is doing just that. Bad news: It's determined to do so while coming up with novel ways to cheat Canadian fans out of a cathartic national moment.
This fall's World Cup of Hockey could have been a true world championship. But along with national teams from Canada, the U.S. and other hockey powers, the league is also introducing what a recent press release calls "a new concept in international hockey."
That brilliant new idea? Young Canadian stars such as Connor McDavid, the kid on the verge of becoming the world's best player, will not be playing for Canada. No, instead, he'll be forced to play against Canada, on a multinational hybrid team of players aged 23 and younger. Only the NHL could have cooked this up.
So when Team Under-24-And-Mostly-Canadian faces off against Team Canada-With-An-Asterisk, who are we supposed to wave the flag for? Don't ask the NHL. It's not their business.
Tony Keller