Rosters change at an alarming rate in today's NHL, with general managers shuffling players like fantasy league owners. Trade him now, maybe we'll pick him up again next year.  Put him on waivers — if he gets better, we'll re-sign him then. Put him on the IR for a few weeks, call some kid up.

For less-than-diehard fans, that makes following a team a whole lot less personal. And the NHL needs to make return customers out of casual fans if it hopes to grow. It's awfully hard to fill a building without the casual fan demographic.

So here's the logic train I've been riding:

When I watch basketball these days, I can tolerate watching the Cleveland Cavaliers because of LeBron James. Good luck getting me to type that sentence pre-LeBron. And because of that, I've gotten to know who Delonte West is. And Zydrunas Ilgauskas. And now, I prefer watching them to anyone else in the NBA because I know the players. That's the ticket I want to buy when I go watch the Suns play here in Phoenix — because of LeBron, sure, but it'll be a lot more fun knowing who his teammates are, too.

By the same logic, it would be a lot more fun for some random fan of the Nashville Predators if, when they went to nine games over three years, they didn't have to re-learn the player names and faces every time.

You'd be able to see a lot more at a Bruins game if you knew who a guy like Milan Lucic is. Just because the play is heading the other way, you'd know it's worth keeping an eye on the discussion Lucic is having behind the play. Oh look, a fight...

The ever-changing rosters make it harder for fans to connect with their hometown team. They feel less invested.

When you see a guy like Paul Kariya get blasted by Scott Stevens in playoffs years ago, get near-concussed, make it back into the game and score a slapshot goal, it's 10 times more exciting than thinking the play was just a slapshot goal by a random player on the team. It's the human element of that play that you appreciate. What a warrior... 

We have to become personally invested in the players on a given team to feel for them, to want to follow them, to buy their jersey, and to care how they're doing. In this area, the NHL is strides behind the NFL and NBA, where individual players are promoted as brands. Ovechkin and Crosby are the NHL's biggest names, and those hockey markets have turned around and are growing every year. 

Our lack of promotion of elite names, like Kovalchuk and Nash, is a major squandering of opportunity. So is not giving the fans a chance to connect with a "team." Given the chance to discover the nuances of a team-first, hard-working second- or third-line forward, maybe fans buy Matt Cooke jerseys. Maybe they buy the NHL package to follow "their boys" all year. And surely they'd go to more games.

This is one of the reasons why today's game sometimes suffers business-wise. The salary cap achieved some good: It provides parity and sustains the bottom portion of the league that really needs the help. Lord knows the Leafs don't need to sell so much as another button this year to break even — and they happen to be awful. But at the same time, the cap contributes to the perma-shift of rosters around the league that creates a disconnect between players and fans.

We need to find a way to keep players in the same jersey longer. Some sort of bonus ... maybe one paid by the league.

Like every year you play in the same jersey as the year before, you get a portion of your jersey sales. I don't know; just some incentive to keep guys in one place. Work with me on this.

Because Lord knows they aren't running out of Mike Grier jerseys at any team stores this weekend. But if the guy had been a Boston Bruin for his entire 13-year career, wouldn't you see a few in the stands?

I like that the NHL's trade deadline is an exciting event. And I like that things get shaken up once in a while. But for me, it's fun because I know the players, the teams, and the league inside out.

I want my fiancée to know a few of the players on our local team, the Coyotes, so when we go to the next game she can go "oh there's that guy who always scores." (Granted, it's the Coyotes, so that might not be the exact quote, but you get my drift.)

So, whaddya got, hockey minds of the world? Keep your favorite players in the right jersey.

If not, you know what's about to happen. Brian Burke will make him a Leaf.

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Great Article

Very nice article, Justin. As much as I hate the "lifetime contracts," I do have to admit it would be very nice to have some cohesion on teams now.

Do you think that we might see more cohesion in the future because of all of these GMs getting contract happy? Or do you think things will stay the way that they are currently?

Blake , December 04, 2009

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