The state of the game in 2024

So the universe continues to unfold as it should not. This is because the kind of people who should be in charge of the universe are not. In many professional sports organizations, the wrong kind of people are still in charge, with the wrong motivations.

With women’s ice hockey, the situation has improved considerably in the past year, at least in North America. It is still not so great internationally, meaning with the International Ice Hockey Federation. It is a good time to unpack this a little, because the IIHF women’s world’s are just done and the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) is now almost through its first season.

The last time I wrote about my interest in Women’s hockey, or “Woho” as some clever people call it, was during the last world championships, last April in Beautiful Brampton. This year it is in Utica, New York. You can read that article here, as long as it is there, and I have no plans to move it.

At that time the PWHL had just been launched. The long deadlock about getting a women’s pro league going in North America had finally been broken. No one talks much about this aspect of it, but it seems the thing holding everything up was the idea of some people in the Women Players association that a North American League absolutely had to be run as an offshoot of National Hockey League. (NHL)

The rapid progress of the new PWHL are showing what a garbage notion that always was. The NHL did not like the ‘business models’ of the several women’s leagues which existed at various times. Their own model is not very good, either.

NHL is really a very ‘last century’ organization. It is based on ticket sales, and on the ownership of the really large hockey rinks in each ‘market’. For an NHL franchise to be developed in each potential market, some billionaire with a need for a big tax write off had to buy in.

He usually was expected to do the political leveraging to get a big seating capacity hockey arena built at public expense, which he would then have monopoly control over. Then he could start an NHL team, charge huge prices for tickets, and hold the local government to ransom to keep it going.

For years, NHL has been very profitable. They are not so much any more. Economics of professional sports are changing.

The main revenue source is coming to be from broadcasting games. NHL never was good at that. It relied on TV networks to do it for them. The public had to endure the arrogance of local market blackouts of the broadcasts.

The best run sports leagues are learning to set up their own video networks and sell it to cable nets or into their own internet services. PWHL works with cable companies to create really well produced TV shows out of their games. I am told that in the USA, Woho watchers must suffer very bad coverage of PWHL games, from the NHL network.

In the NHL Network, the women’s games are called by shmooks brought over from the men’s games, who can’t even get the names of the women players straight. In Canada, these games are called mostly by retired players, with a thorough knowledge of all matters Woho.

One drawback with these aunties is that they will cackle on about how things were when they were playing, and had to change in washrooms, endure long bus trips, and hold down day jobs, even suffer “pay to play”. The present players grew up with Instagram and are experts at creating short videos about life as a pro hockey player. The older players, and ex players, are clearly loving PWHL; it is what they dreamed about for two generations.

The older ones still have not quite got over the NHL obsession. They treat it as a big triumph when they ‘take over’ one of the big NHL arenas to hold one of their games. I question whether sports leagues really need huge venues, given the huge costs of these facilities.

Most PWHL games are being played out of ‘regional’ arenas, with smaller seating capacity but adequate facilities. There seem to be more of these around, now. PWHL are filling the seats up even though starting to charge in the three digits for them.

Gone are the days when I could plop my fat old butt into a CWHL or even PWHPL seat for fifteen to twenty five dollars, and watch Spoons, Knight, and Poulin perform live. This is without even considering covid. However, back then women’s games were pretty hard to find on video.

Now, there is an abundance of games, and I can record most of it. More important, I can find them.

The North American rivalry series has come and gone. Canada took it four to three again. IIHF (International Ice Hockey Federation) womens’ championships has come around again. Now there are PWHL games several times a week. Even college girl hockey is getting in front of Cameras.

I do not have the time to watch it all. I now have the luxury of focusing, deciding what to follow.

I have decided to follow the Toronto team. I predicted before the first games were ever played that Toronto would be the strongest team in the league. The core of the Toronto team is essentially the core of the Canadian national team. This includes the coach; all together.

So, Toronto lost the first PWHL game ever played, four to nothing. It then lost the next three.

They seemed to snap together right after the rivalry series. They went on an eleven game winning streak. They went from the bottom to the top of the standings. Spooner leads the league in scoring.

I predict that the Toronto whatchermacallems will win the something or other cup. Oh, wait! They came up with a name for the cup. It will be The Walter cup after the billionaire Mark Walter who was so nice as to put up the core funding for the new league. He and Billie Jean King were very patient to wait while PWHPL people got over the NHL obsession.

They have showed off the new cup. It is a bit weird looking. You would think a smart company like Tiffany would design something like this so it is more ergonomic to hoist and carry around, or even drink out of.

The next pieces to fall together in this new league are names for the teams, and logos. Right now people complain about the unimaginative standard design jerseys. Teams are differentiated only by the strange areas of the visible light spectrum the jerseys are colored in.

There are speculations about eventual team names. Some cunning people have discovered names which several teams have registered with the trademarks office. None are very inspired.

I have my own suggestion for a team name for PWHL Toronto; Torontosaurus Rex. T-Rex, for short. Well, that ‘Raptors’ thing worked for the basketball team.

All in all, the new league is coming together with remarkable speed. That they have stayed away from the franchise model has helped. They have a centralized structure, with one owner group, simplifying decision making.

There is already speculation about starting two new teams. There is abundant talent with which to staff them. Many promising people failed to make it in the first draft and team selection.

If you watch the IIHF women’s games you will see there is a lot of talent on foreign teams. Some of them have already made their way to PWHL. Many more would like to get away from the unsatisfactory conditions in their domestic leagues.

One foreign talent who will not be making her way into PWHL is the Finnish goalie, Noora Raty. She did something baffling and is now persona non grata among women hockey players. I think she can still play in that league between Russia and China.

It is like this; she had been playing in the old CWHL when it collapsed. She became part of the board of directors of the PWHPA. This, for those new to the subject, is an association of CWHL players who organized exhibition games and negotiated with NHL and other potential sponsors of a women’s league.

Most of them despised NWHL, which broke off from CWHL and was run by people who thought they were doing a ‘startup’. They were really little more than grifters, treating its players in bad faith. NWHL did have some shadowy ‘investors’ behind them, and kept pressing PWHPA to unite with them.

Noora strongly advised the board to reject any offer from NWHL, then renamed PHF. Then the next year she suddenly quit the board and joined PHF. A few months later PWHPA finally told NHL to screw off, and took the Billie Jean King and Walter group offer.

As soon as it was clear there would be no buyout of PHF, the usual goal for ‘startups’, the PHF did what startup grifts usually do when it becomes clear there would be no payoff. They ‘sold out’ for a small amount and disappeared. In fact, it seems PWHL assumed some debts they left behind, to avoid the bad look.

So Noora may have learned the basic lesson about business, which so many people have a very hard time learning. That is, you deal with people who do things right, and you keep faith with them. Getting mixed up with chancers and hustlers never ends well.

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So, it seems Woho in North America is now in good hands. I remain concerned about the international situation. I am learning more about IIHF and the problems with it.

The problem with IIHF and most of these European national federations, is they are non profits. Without strong government supports and oversights, that is usually not a good thing. This was the problem with ye olde CWHL and its predecessors.

It is that such organizations often come to be about a key person or small group creating permanent positions for themselves. They do not want to be accountable for anything. There is no incentive to expand or improve anything.

In some countries this is changing, but mostly women players play for peanuts and often have to buy the peanuts. There are voices which resent the most effective teams, especially North American women, and try to push them out. This is simply because they do not want to properly support women’s hockey in their own countries.

The truth is, the countries with the best support for women’s hockey produce the strongest national teams. Some countries are now improving in this way. The Czech team has come from nowhere to being a power, simply because the Czech government decided to strongly support women’s sports.

The Czech Czichs do not have the depth to handle North American teams, but they have some impressive players. They have a goalie, Peslerova, with a habit of charging out from her crease and knocking the puck away from the attacker. I would love to see her get into it with Spooner.

The story of the Swiss team is sad. It was once one of the best teams. It is gradually fading out. It is not that they have deteriorated, but that other teams are starting to be better supported. Swiss players, coaches and managers speak with obvious frustration. They talk and talk, that they need more, it takes more these days, and they are not being listened to.

The Chinese chicks are making a comeback. They were good in the nineties, and played for bronze twice. Then they vanished.

China started trying to revive its women’s program leading up to the 2022 Olympic winter games. They discovered that good players do not pop out of the ground. It takes years to develop them, and considerable investment.

We are now seeing the result. Chinese women are in the world’s tournament again. They even managed a surprise win over the Japanese. Then they took Denmark to a shootout. To me, their future seems bright.

There is still a problem with really rotten and often downright suspicious ‘officiating’ in IIHF games. They seem to usually favor the American team. In fact, that seems to be a problem in most international sports.

However, in IIHF, the ultimate was the USA-Finland gold medal game of 2019. The refs on the ice were overruled from ‘upstairs’. The game was held for fifteen minutes, before a totally bizarre decision came down against the Finns.

Last year a strange decision threw the Canadian team off its stride in the last minutes of the gold medal game with USA.

There was nothing really egregious this year, but there was a strange call in a game between Canada and Sweden. Maybe somebody confused Canada with the Americans. It did not alter the outcome of the game, but it made me slightly less proud of being Canadian.

But this year Canada is back on top where they belong. When they play the USA, it is usually very close. When USA/Canada played in the preliminaries, the USA won in overtime. At the gold medal game, Canada beat USA in overtime.

It was wonderful. Overtime means three players to a side, and hockey is best when it is three on three.

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So. In May we shall see who hoists the Walter cup for the first time ever. As I said, I am betting strongly on the firm of Campbell, Spooner, and Nurse, plus Turnbull and Fast.

Then that will be the end of hockey until the fall. The Olympics are coming up. There will likely be something in that worth writing about.