Lockout Shortened Season: A Good Thing?

The NHL season is set to start a week from today. By all accounts, the Winnipeg Jets will be hosting the Ottawa Senators at the MTS Centre on January 19th (the scheduled has not been officially released yet). There will be a 48 game schedule with no inter-conference games; in other words, the Jets will only play against other Eastern Conference teams.

Now, a lot of fans were very frustrated with the lengthy lockout and rightly so. It’s hard to be sympathetic toward millionaires and billionaires and their squabbles over money. But I’m thinking that this shortened season might not be such a bad thing after all.

The standard NHL season length of 82 games is too long. Now, some might say that 48 games is too short, but generally I’d rather have fewer games. It’s unlikely that the NHL will reduce the number of regular season games (in a typical year) purely due to economic reasons, but it would be ideal if they could find a middle ground of, say, 70 games.

A lot of casual hockey fans only really start to follow the NHL once the playoffs start in mid-April. (Last year was likely an exception for a lot of Winnipeggers as they had a true home team to cheer on for the first time in fifteen years, and every game seemed like a celebration of sorts.) But this year the playoffs will be here before we know it and each regular season game will seem much more important. In a normal NHL season, it’s conceivable that a team could go on a ten game losing streak but still bounce back to make the playoffs; the chances of that happening this year are virtually nil.

So, strap on your helmets, fans, this will be a wild race of a season.