Two for Elbowing: How I learned to stop worrying and love the goonery….

Two for Elbowing: How I learned to stop worrying and love the goonery….:

But to be blunt about it, I got really pissed at hockey for a while, and I just didn’t feel like spewing about it on the blog. Or talking about hockey — or watching it very much.

Now that I’m back and a hockey fan again, I think I understand the core reason why hockey has struggled to catch on in the U.S. and why, if things don’t change, hockey is going to continue to be a marginalized sport south of the border.

Hint: it’s not fighting. At least, not directly.

I was already thinking my way through this before I hit the wall — it’s been a rough year for the league in terms of injuries, and more importantly, injuries caused by non-hockey action and action that is generally detrimental to the game. I even brought up the phrase “stop the stretchers”, which I realize now was an early indication that the league was heading in a direction that I was very uncomfortable with, very quickly.

But what finally put me off hockey were two situations — the Chris Simon/Ryan Hollweg problem, and the Mike Modano/Jordan Tootoo/Stephane Robidas problem.

But probably not for the reasons you expect.

FWIW, I haven’t forgotten. I needed to do more research, and think it through, and I ended up deciding the playoffs was a bad time to start up this discussion, so I put it on hold. We’ll return to it (as one of the off-season projects I plan for this blog) once the Stanley Cup is awarded. For now, I’d rather simply focus on the hockey…

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