Fans of the WCHL unite!

The WCHL has a reasonably long history, with many ups and downs, but its been an interesting story, and quite allot fans have come to love the league for this very reason. As mentioned earlier in this season, the "fun" has been scaled back in the league, at least as far as the Games played goes. lets take a look.

Like every league, rules are changed and tweaked to provide for the best possible experience for the fan when he shells out the big bucks for Tickets to a game. That customer now expects to be entertained. Goalie pads may be reduced in size to provide more scoring, or the centreline taken out of the picture to provide for longer and more exciting stretch passes out of the defensive zone, are some such changes. The WCHL now faces a dilemma (in our opinion). The game has become too stale. Much like the days of the NHL Devils, or later on the Wild, the trap brought down the excitement of the game, and the lack of goal scoring in the WCHL make leagues like the NHL look far more preferable.

This year saw a sharp dive in our scoring, and in high flying games pretty much all together. A record number of games have gone to OT and much more often than not, to the shootout. On average, each team has had 15 shootout game so far this year, plus another 6 OT games per team means more than 25% of WCHL games go to OT or beyond. This is actually consistent with the NHL as well (as of 2013) though slightly higher. This is a bright spot for the excitement factor, but back to the lack of goal scoring.

The NHL provided us with about 3370 goals to watch in 2013-2014, from the mundane empty netter, to the through the legs short side Hertl style (since he was the last one to show it off so incredibly, We personally like Pavel Bure's version of it better). 1230 games played, and 2.74 goals per game. The best of the offensive teams, the Hawks, notched no less than 267 goals, followed closely by the Ducks with 266. The WCHL however, is lucky to have their top team breach the 200 goal mark. In fact, there is likely to be only 7 or so teams that will have a chance at 200+ goals, whereas the NHL sports 26 of 30 teams breaching the 200 goal barrier, and of the teams that didn't hit it, 3 were within 3-4 goals. This is a goal differential of about 25-30% between the two.

Perhaps the shrinking of goalie pads is warranted, or perhaps we need to clamp down on interference to allow fleet of foot skaters to break out more often, or at least draw a penalty if held up. There are many a suggestion that could be made, and we encourage discussion on the topic if its an issue. The Fans of the WCHL deserve more, they pay cash money to see an electric product, and we are not currently delivering the most exhilarating version of the WCHL that we can.

We chalk it up to a learning experience, one that we know how to correct, the question is, will we?

Of course we will.