The 4 Nations Face-Off was huge success ... but what does that mean?

Discussing that, and some other general hockey thoughts.

Before we get too much into the 4 Nations Face-Off and its aftermath I want to share something from PensBurgh this week on Pittsburgh Penguins announcer Mike Lange. What a legend. One of the biggest legends in the history of the franchise, and by extension, the Pittsburgh sports scene as a whole.

I did not have a chance to have many interactions with him, but he was always one of the kindest and nicest people that I encountered in this industry. He is, without question, the biggest reason I got into hockey as a kid.

Check it out here.

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The 4 Nations Face-Off was great …. but what next?

I am going to expand on some thoughts I had on this topic over at YardBarker in the immediate aftermath of Canada’s 3-2 championship game win. (Read them here)

When the 4 Nations Face-Off was first announced I was pretty highly skeptical that it would be a huge success.

I didn’t think it would flop, but I also was not sure how much interest you would get from it. I understand fans and players have been craving a best-on-best international hockey tournament for nearly a decade, but this was not the Olympics. It was not even a lesser, full-scale tournament like the World Cup of Hockey where every major country had a seat at the table and a chance to win.

It might have been four of the best hockey nations right now, but could that generate the same interest?

Would the players give a damn?

In the end, the answers to both of those questions were an emphatic yes.

The players clearly cared — and that was evident from the very first game as soon as they put on their uniforms — and that translated into the fans caring.

TV ratings were off the charts. The re-sale value of tickets skyrocketed. It put hockey on the biggest stage of the sports world with an opportunity to shine all by itself.

There were a few things that helped make that happen.

For one, there was nothing else going on in the sports world for most of the tournament.

Football season is over. Spring training had not really started for baseball. March Madness has not started for college basketball. The NHL shut down its season for two weeks. The NBA was on an All-Star break that nobody wanted to watch.

Thanks to what were basically four All-Star teams playing in a tournament where it was countries instead of teams, you not only had hockey fans tuning in, you had non-hockey fans stopping to watch as well. In some cases, those non-hockey fans were not necessarily tuning in for the right reasons, or because they were finding a new interest in the sport. But they did watch, and that is all the NHL is going to care about. The entire vibe of the tournament shifted when the United States and Canada fought three times off the opening face-off of their preliminary round game. From that point on it was never about hockey, or the United States playing for Johnny Gaudreau, or just sitting back and watching a best-on-best hockey tournament. The people that tuned in because they thought the United States was fighting for the anthem and the flag? They’re not coming back to watch a St. Louis vs. Chicago mid-off, or even a regular season game between two good teams.

It is easy to get people to watch USA vs. Canada.

It is easy to get people to watch when they think there is a larger narrative at play beyond hockey.

It is not easy to keep people tuning in when you no longer offer any of that.

We know this because we have seen it before. This is not the first time the NHL has played an international tournament. It is not the first time a lot of people have tuned into watch a USA vs. Canada championship game.

In past instances, the viewership never really stays. I can’t imagine this time is going to be any different.

That does not mean the tournament was a bad idea, or that the NHL shouldn’t continue to put them on.

It was a great idea, and it should keep putting them on. And it will. It might even be the perfect solution on what to do about the All-Star weekend that nobody takes seriously or wants to take part in.

I don’t know if the NHL can do something like this every year, and I can not imagine it is sustainable for the health of the players to take a two-week break from an already grueling season and ask them to play an all-out tournament where they lay everything on the ice before jumping right back into the season. That is a lot of hockey, and we already saw from this tournament the injury impact it can have.

My initial fear was that if you do this every year it also might become stale, but I don’t know if USA vs Canada (or Sweden vs. Finland; or Canada vs Russia …. assuming Russia ever plays in one of these again) ever truly becomes stale. People will always care about that. Fans will always care. The players will always care whenever they put on that sweater with the flag on it.

But I just don’t know if every year is feasible in place of an All-Star game. But every other year? And mixed in between the bigger World Cup of Hockey and Olympic tournaments?

You might have something there.

I said at the beginning I was going to watch and probably enjoy it if the players cared. They did. And it was enjoyable. It was one of the few big marketing wins the NHL has ever had. I just do not think it will have any long-lasting impacts for NHL growth. Mostly because this sort of thing never has.

Team USA keeps making the same mistake with roster construction, and it keeps producing the same result

The United States 3-2 overtime loss to Canada was an excellent game. It easily could have gone in Team USA’s favor, especially given the chances it had early in the overtime period. But the end result was the same thing we have seen from them in almost every single one of these tournaments — they lost in crunch time, mostly because they could not score.

It keeps happening.

Every tournament.

Every big game.

The offense just completely disappears.