Dryden Brings Sense To The Table

Nothing like an NHL legend like Ken Dryden to weigh in with some god dang reason and intelligence.

This article exposes once and for all the NHL is run by "brain dead" drones.

In one part of it, Dryden talks about the "nature of the game." My cousin and I talked about this very subject only last night and how using this argument is a myth. Games evolve and the "meant to be played" line is hollow bs. I hear that in soccer over and over. That this team and that team play it like it was "meant to be played."

Hogwash. From the onset, the game was blessed with great tacticians and countries who instilled their own interpretations of the game. We confuse and believe what it "aesthetically" pleasing with a "true" interpretation of the game. It's a fallacy.

From the 1920s on, England, Scotland, Austria, Hungary, Uruguay, Italy, Brazil, Germany, Argentina, and Holland all offered their brand of soccer reflecting the specific realities of their players and national thinking. None is more true than the other. Still more nations are represented when great managers left an imprint on the game.

To me open, fluid soccer is equal to a counter-attacking style to a "total football" one. Each demands talent be used and deployed in different ways. Brazil mastered the art of the fluid, Italy counter-attack and Holland 'total.' FYI.

I digress.

Dryden says:

Hockey began in Montreal in 1875 because some rugby players wanted a game for the wintertime, and they wanted to hit each other. But the rugby players couldn't skate very fast, their bodies were smaller than ours are today, and they were playing on a smaller ice surface where they had little room to pick up momentum. With no substitutions allowed, the game moved at coasting speed.



Bigger ice surfaces changed the nature of the game; so did the forward pass; so did boards and glass; so did substitutions, shorter shifts and bigger bodies. Helmeted players in today's game are far more vulnerable to serious head injury than helmet-less players were in generations ago.


We choose to ignore the fact that the “nature” of any game is always changing. Today's hockey – in terms of speed, skill, style of play and force of impact – is almost unrecognizable from hockey 50 years ago, let alone 100. Likewise, helmets, facemasks, 300-plus-pound players and off-field, year-round training have transformed football."

I'm not a fan of the "wrong side of history" assertion (Obama recently used it in regards to Libya), but in some cases I'm willing to make an exception.

The NHL is on the wrong side of history. Worse, its logic and excuses for defending what is no longer defensible, it only cements the view the NHL needs to put more "progressive" minds in their ranks.

***

About the pic. Dryden's iconic stance between whistles. Dude was thinking all along.