Why is the NHL not a Canadian League?

Imagine, for a minute, that an alien was visiting North America for the first time and observed the National Hockey League. They would see:

about half the players are Canadian;

TV viewership in Canadian cities is enormous;

TV money paid by Canadian television corporations is worth hundreds of millions of dollars;

most of the coaches are Canadian;

most of the media interest generated is from Canadian newspapers;

the NHL was founded in Canada and has a headquarters in Toronto;

the championship trophy, the Stanley Cup, is named after a Governor-General of Canada and was intended to be awarded to the best amateur hockey team in Canada;

the teams with the most titles are Canadian (Montreal Canadiens and Toronto Maple Leafs);

the highest-attended teams are Canadian;

for the first several decades of its existence, the NHL Commissioner was Canadian;

the "national" in National Hockey League stood for Canada when the league was founded in 1917, consisting of only Canadian teams;

most of the post-season awards, like the Hart Trophy or the Vezina Trophy, are named after Canadians;

the majority of players in the Hockey Hall of Fame are Canadian, and indeed the majority of the NHL's superstars have been Canadian.

One would think, therefore, that the NHL is a Canadian league whose purpose was to cater to Canadian fans and provide a national sports league as an institution. But the exact opposite is true - the league is made up of 30 teams, only 6 of whom are located in Canada. Players are paid in American money, watched mostly by American fans, whose teams are owned mostly by Americans. The commissioner is an American who has made it the goal of the league to cater to American fans in an attempt to win over enough supporters to garner higher attendance and a more lucrative TV deal, thus earning yet more money for the American owners of the teams.

Clearly, the NHL cannot be called a Canadian league, unlike the Canadian Football League, for example. It is not entirely an American league, either, however, as the prior evidence shows.

But the question is why is the NHL not a Canadian league?

A Canadian league would be maintained and supported with the interests of Canadians and Canadian teams in mind, with goals of developing primarily Canadian talent and providing an institutional framework for a pillar of sporting culture in the country. The reason none of this is the case, as it is in European countries for example, is because the NHL is run as a business whose goal is to make money, not provide a sporting institution.

In other countries, like Germany and England, their number one sport has in the past decade or two become massively profitable. But this is a relatively recent trend, being massively helped out by the invent of satellite, pay-per-view television, globalization, the internet, and foreign takeovers by businessmen. Soccer leagues in Europe were set up around the same time that the NHL was being formed, yet these leagues were designed to be simple sporting institutions, to crown a national champion - not to make money for the owners. Obviously, if a club doesn't make enough money they can go insolvent and thus cease to exist, so money does play some factor. But it isn't the primary goal (or at least it hasn't been until recently) of soccer clubs to make a profit for their owners/shareholders. This is part of the reason why very small countries, like Portugal, Scotland, or Belgium, have their own soccer leagues rather than being a part of their bigger, richer neighbors. The NHL, by contrast, has always had this business-like orientation.

The first American teams were invited to join the league when Canadian teams from smaller cities were unable to keep up profitability. For a while, under the so-called Original Six, one could argue that the NHL was still a Canadian league that just happened to have some American teams in it - much like the CFL did for a couple years when there were a few American teams to maintain solvency. After all, even though Chicago or Detroit might win the cup every now and then, almost all of the players, coaches, management, etc., were Canadians who were winning a Canadian trophy.

But since the mid-60's, the NHL has slowly turned from a Canadian league to a sort of North American league with a decidedly pro-American interest. The reason for that is money. The United States has more cities with big populations and corporations able to support the millions of dollars and huge stadiums necessary to maintain a multi-million dollar salary. The potential TV audience in the U.S. dwarfs that of Canada - if only they can be cajoled into watching the game.

If one looks closer, it's obvious just how oriented towards American interest the league is and how much of that interest is in the desire of making a profit. For example, a Canadian league like the CFL has a website that caters to Canadians; the CFL has two official names and logos for French and English and the official website is in both languages. The NHL website is unilingual English and uses American spelling, rarely posting things that would pertain primarily to Canadians.

The game itself is also designed to generate money, unlike European soccer or hockey leagues. The ice is smaller in North America so the players are able to appear to skate faster, hit each other more, shoot more, score more, and fight more. Fighting is tolerated as it's believed to be a fan-pleaser.

With smaller ice, the stadium can be bigger, thereby bringing in more revenue. TV commercials are allowed, bringing in even more revenue.

More than half the teams are allowed to enter the playoffs, and each series is a best-of-seven, thereby giving the best possible chance of hosting multiple games, which leads to yet more revenue in tickets, merchandise, TV, etc. Ties have been eliminated in favor of overtime and shootouts, presumably because ties are boring and shootouts awesome.

Smaller ice size leads to more frequent confrontation between players, higher quantity of shots, more goals due to ricochets, etc.

By contrast, European hockey leagues have wider ice that provides for more fluid, stylistic play. Fighting is not tolerated and there are no commercial breaks. In places where hockey is very popular, most cities have teams and they are not required to pay a fee or guarantee profitability before entering the top division - all they have to do is prove they can compete on a sporting level. European soccer leagues haven't really changed the rules of the game or the size of the field to directly affect the nature of the game - the offsides rule has been kept in place, goal sizes are uniform, there are no playoffs to determine the national champion, etc.

Does a sports league have to be run as a business? Partly, but it shouldn't nor does it need to be its primary purpose.

Obviously, nothing is going to change the NHL from its current format, composition, or business interests. Most fans cannot imagine not having American teams, American fans, or American money. And if the NHL had never allowed American teams to join, then the all-Canadian version would certainly have smaller payrolls, less attendance, and possibly a lower standard of play.

But, it would also be a league where the champion was guaranteed to be a true national champion of Canada - unlike the past 18 years or so where an American team has won a Canadian trophy. It would be a league where it wouldn't matter how small your city or town was, if your team was good enough to play in the top division, it would. Unlike when Winnipeg and Quebec City lost their teams because the Canadian dollar was doing terribly against the American and revenues could not keep up with expenditures. Canadian fans wouldn't have to fume about having teams in places that don't like hockey, like Nashville or Phoenix.

It would be a true national hockey league that would be there for Canada and Canadians, not Americans and profit.

In Praise of Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche died over one hundred years ago, yet he remains one of the most well-known philosophers in the world. Despite being a household name, not many people are familiar with his works. For those who have read his books, his views often elicit strong, fervent emotions among people - both positive and negative, love and hate. Some parts of his philosophy are controversial, but like much of the discipline, his views can be interpreted in many different ways leading to many different conclusions.

For example, the Nazis took Nietzsche's concept of the will to power and the Übermensch, or superman, and used it as a way of justifying anti-semitism and their belief in Aryan superiority. In reality, Nietzsche in his own time had been exceptionally against pan-Germanism, nationalism, and anti-semitism, going so far as to break off a friendship with Richard Wagner over the latter's nationalist and anti-semitic views.

This is just one example of the ways in which a certain interpretation can lead to a radical conclusion, but it's also obviously not the only valid interpretation or meaning of what Nietzsche meant with his Übermensch. Indeed, much of what Nietzsche wrote can be seen in a better light, in a way that can be used in a positive manner.

Take, for example, Nietzsche's views on human nature. To him, there were two differing aspects of human nature: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian aspect is a person's rational side - a natural yearning for order, tranquility, peace, harmony, etc. By contrast, the Dionysian side of human nature is irrational - our passions, dynamism, chaos, unpredictability, etc. Nietzsche believed that the best life is one lived with a fusion of these two aspects; a life of controlled passion. In other words, one should live their life with passion: take chances, do what you normally wouldn't, constantly strive to achieve something more, don't settle, don't become stagnant.

Nietzsche's declared that "God is dead" and we had killed him - we, meaning the philosophers and scientists of his time. By relying on God for so long as the ultimate example of morality and meaning, we had killed him and now had nowhere to look for meaning or moral ideas. The same could be said for the scientists who had shown that the earth was not a special place, and humans were not unique. Nietzsche believed that there was no God who was there to protect us, and that without Him, religion, science, and metaphysics had abandoned their traditional roles as moral guidelines, leaving humans alone to fend for themselves. Nietzsche was criticizing the reliance on one source for all of life's convictions and meanings; unchallenged convictions were, according to him, what had caused unthinkable tragedy and bloodshed throughout history (religious or otherwise).

This belief led to Nietzsche's concept of the "will to power", what he believed to be the most basic human motive, trumping even Schopenauer's "will to live". The will to power is somewhat controversial, again with several different potential interpretations. But one way it can be understood is that it is a way of self-examination to delineate active from reactive forces within oneself; that is to say, instincts should not be repressed, even ones that may be negative (such as aggression), and that by doing so, humans should attempt to become something more than they were. In this manner, "power" can be understood not necessarily as an aggressive trait, but rather a means through which one can grow and expand one's own abilities/tendencies to gain mastery of oneself and achieve individual growth.

This ties into Nietzsche's concept of the Übermensch (translated as superman or overman), or the state of being whereupon one has strove so far and long so as to achieve their full potential. Nietzsche felt that ordinary, mundane experiences in a human's life had been partly a result of an over-reliance on religion and science, and in order to discover new moral foundations, one had to embrace one's will to power and overcome their former self to become a superman. Nietzsche emphasized a critical awareness of one's surroundings and beliefs - never be content, constantly seek to become more passionate, more wise, more erudite.

This belief in individualism and the ideas of the will to power and the Übermensch can be seen in Nietzsche's saying "what does not kill me, makes me stronger." Each breath a person who survived a horrific tragedy takes - a soldier in the trenches of World War I, or a Holocaust survivor, for example - is more cherished and beautiful than any taken before then. A man who loses a leg from gangrene while attempting to climb a tall mountain should embrace this and become a stronger, more capable climber and strive to achieve even more goals, not wallow in gloom and doom. The meaning of one's own life comes from within oneself - we must seek it out ourselves, and not rely upon others to do it for us. A life in pursuit of becoming more than what you once were is a life of creativity, passion, perseverance.

In a way, this type of self-growth can quite easily be related to Carl Maslow's humanistic theory of self-actualization, at which point a person experiences harmony and elation with the aspects of one's life, called "peak experiences". For Nietzsche, every person should strive to achieve their full potential and then live their life in accordance with that moralistic underpinning; we should constantly strive to become a better artist, a better writer, a better father, a better sports-player, a better guitar-player, a better fireman, policeman, etc.

Though these are only small parts of Nietzsche's monumental amount of philosophical work, it is at least evident that there are certain aspects of his views that can be interepreted and applied in a manner designed to benefit the individual. Despite claims of social darwinism or racial superiority, Nietzsche is like what many other philosophers are, whose meanings can be derived by the interpretation you wish to take from them, and much good can be taken from Friedrich Nietzsche.