The fact is, the NHL needed P.K. Subban, more than P.K. Subban needed the NHL.
Personality - or rather the lack of them - is what's sorely missing in hockey today.
Back before the endless media/ad blitzes that NHL games are today, people used to see and determine a player's personality just by watching them play the game. That is, the way they played on the ice said pretty much everything one needed to know about them.
Maurice 'The Rocket' Richard was but one example.
Now I get it - times change; things evolve. And so it was that when the 1967 expansion took place, so too did the opportunity for more revenue courtesy of television advertising.
And I knew it'd take a few years for it to take affect, but by the time the Habs won their last Cup in 1993, I already thought the ads all over the place was too much.
On the boards.
On the ice.
It was already in the sponsors of the program, and the commercials.
But then with the advent of the Internet, so came the floodgates getting opened, and all of a sudden hockey wasn't so much a game to watch, as it became one huge fucking branding event.
But unlike other sports that understood there's a balance between 'brand' and 'sport', the NHL has never seemed to figure this out.
All that 'branding', ads, marketing (whatever the fuck you want to call it) mean nothing it the players cannot play, and the game cannot be watched.
This where guys like Subban came in. He was the perfect balance between personal 'brand' and hockey talent. This was the guy who could've bridged the gap, and for awhile he did.
Now he's gone from the game - I pity the game now.
They were pretty much unwatchable due to the endless ads. Now I don't have a compelling figure to follow in the games now.
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