The Bruins-Maple Leafs series, recently completed, presented a brutal Hobson’s choice for fans of the Montreal Canadiens. Seeing our two most hated rivals face off against each other, and with the Habs already defeated and out of the playoffs, Montrealers, with pardonable exaggeration, felt rather like Poles caught between Germany and Russia. You want no one to win, and everybody to suffer. Unfortunately, while this sort of happened (they went seven grueling games), the Bruins’ astonishing last-second comeback in Game Seven, though enabling a few mean-spirited cheers of “1967!”—the last year an aging Leafs team won a Cup, against a young Canadiens team that would go on to become one of the finest ever—also raised the dreadful spectre of yet another Boston Cup. So before the old distaste rises too high, let it be said that the Bruins’ victory, astonishing by any measure save that of historical Toronto ineptitude, was led by a couple of real paladins of the sport, Milan Lucic and Patrice Bergeron, whom any team would be proud to have on board. (And it was, mostly, clean.)

At the risk, though, of being redundant, I have to register to my fellow Rink Rats my ever-stable distaste for what the game has become—a thing certainly encouraged by the N.H.L. commissioner Gary Bettman (whom Habs fans luxuriate in hating on), but not created by him alone. As I see it, the sport had a choice, over the past fifteen years, to go in a direction rather like one that European football (called soccer, here) has taken over the same time, with such success: more and more international competition, for club and national teams; greater incorporation of the high-speed ensemble game the Russian teams of the mid-seventies and eighties had created, and that the Edmonton Oilers teams of the eighties gave a Canadian edge; and maybe even larger European-scale rinks for today’s bigger, faster players. The other way, in the direction of American football, meant creating an ever more brutal collision-concussion sport in which fighting would still be central—what one Boston (!) writer rightly calls “seek-and-destroy hockey” wherein “a culture gone bad” would reign. The choice in retrospect was clear, and, I still think, terrible for the sport, as distinct from the spectacle. (Wrestling and roller derby are spectacles; hockey should be a sport.)

This is a binational failure. One need only recall that “Hockey Night in Canada” was once the home of Howie Meeker, a technical expert who explained the excellences of checking systems, until he was replaced by the dim and genial Don Cherry, whose understanding of how hockey games are won and lost begins and ends with the notion that tough Canadian boys play hard, and lily-livered Russians don’t. (That the results of international play do not exactly bear out this notion does not educate him.) American hockey on television, at the same time, found its voice in Mike Milbury, the ex-Bruins thug who distinguished himself as the single most inept general manager—Matt Millen, formerly of the N.F.L.’s Detroit Lions, aside—in the history of sports, demolishing an Islanders franchise that is only now beginning to rise once again to its feet.

I am aware that many American fans sneer at this account. Soccer? That sissy sport! Seek-and-destroy hockey? Damn straight! But the game as it’s played has become not so much brutal as just dull. Be honest—in nine out of ten playoff sequences, isn’t this what happens? The puck is shot in blindly from the super-clogged, entrapped center ice, and then there is a battle in the corner, right or left, largely invisible to all but a handful of fans, with players whacking at the puck and each other’s equipment. Then the defense either clears the puck back to center ice, or, if the forechecking team lucks out, back to the point, where a shot is taken. This shot is then almost invariably saved by the super-equipped goalie, with a distant hope merely for a rebound. If there is one, then the scrum from the corner transfers to the front of the net, where, the rule book on goalie interference having been lost long ago, everyone crashes the net, six or seven players toppling over each in the blue paint. At last, someone runs right over the goalie, and the puck either ends up (most of the time) under the goalie’s prostrate body for a whistle, or (very occasionally) in the back of the net for a celebration. (Let me add at once that this is how everybody plays these days: Montreal’s Flying Frenchmen have become the Flopping Foreigners; the Habs’ fine rookie Brendan Gallagher alters the formula only by using his non-size to slip between the huge, shoving human pylons, pillars, and posts.) This is called north-south, or blue-paint, hockey, but whatever name you give it, it is hardly the Rocket weaving through center ice with Geoffrion racing up on the wing. Hockey is becoming as dull as—dare I say it?—the last two minutes of a typical N.B.A. basketball game, where everybody fouls everybody and the big excitement lies in which twenty-million-dollar giant is suddenly unable to hit a foul shot that my thirteen-year-old daughter makes routinely.

I have no illusions about the game’s past. For every astonishing Red Army passing play, for every Gretzky seeing-eye pass from behind the net, there were a hundred table-hockey plays: the right winger brining it up, passing to the center, who then slams a shot at the little, overmatched goalie, standing straight and kicking out side to side. (Phil Esposito must have scored two-thirds of his goals that way.) And I understand that scrum hockey is actually a function of increased excellence, not a degradation of skills. Goaltending has reached such a level of technical skill—go back and watch Gilles Gilbert and his generation kicking desperately at the puck—that it is hard to beat a goalie without first running him over. (People in Montreal criticize Carey Price for “playing on his knees” when that’s simply the way the position is now played, the Patrick Roy generation having discovered that it’s a lot easier to cover the net by sliding side to side than by standing up straight and flopping all over.) You do not see end-to-end rushes because those being rushed are less likely to lose their underwear when seeing the same deke for the fortieth time than were defensemen of an earlier generation.

Still, ice hockey, when played well, is the most beautiful and dramatic of games, as I have argued at length, and no one gets more disgusted than I with the flopping and playacting of soccer. But when it is dully played, it is compelling only as a kind of rooting interest. You care if your team does well. Yes, Crosby and Malkin are exceptional, and the Blackhawks play a better game, or seem to—we don’t get to see them much here in the East. The duller game obviously suits Bettman’s interest in attracting fans who are essentially indifferent to the sport, and who like the spectacle. But, Jesus, it’s ugly out there.

_Read more of Rink Rats, our coverage of the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Illustration by Bendik Kaltenborn.