The NHL Playoffs have been a mixed bag this year. I’m not going to complain too much, since they are actually going on, but the final four seems like a worst-case scenario for the league’s newfound salary cap–enforced parity. For all of the griping sportswriters did in covering Calgary and Tampa Bay in the 2004 finals, those teams featured Martin St. Louis, Jarome Iginla, Miikka Kiprusoff, Vincent Lecavalier, and Nikolai Khabibulin, among others. These names may not roll off the non-fan’s tongue like Gretzky or Lemiuex, but they are star players nevertheless. Who’s left among the final four teams this year? Chris Pronger, Michael Peca, Chris Drury, Daniel Briere, Teemu Selanne, Scott Niedermayer, Erik Staal, Doug Weight. I have nothing against any of these players—Pronger and Niedermayer are certainly among the top defensemen in the league—but this league needs a Thornton, a Jagr, a Crosby, or an Ovechkin to put on an absolute show and pull fans back. I don’t care if Ovechkin is playing for Moose Jaw; if he’s on a team good enough to be in the finals, sports fans would take notice and start watching games. I love the heart and timely scoring of Chris Drury, but he is the league’s most electrifying player.

The other solution is for a big city—e.g., New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles—to actually make it to the finals, thereby meriting national coverage. I look back to the Rangers’ Cup run in 1994 and to the 1993 finals appearance for the Kings for times when those outside of the loyal cadre of hockey fanatics cared about the playoffs. I’m sick of people heralding the excitement of playoff hockey and then admitting to not watching any games, primarily because they don’t care about Buffalo, Edmonton, Carolina, or Anaheim and aren’t pulled in by the hype over a single player. Anyone who’s watched a Buffalo game should enjoy their speed, their heart, their creativity, but unfortunately, a good product isn’t necessarily going to come with an audience.

I can’t say that I particularly enjoy watching professional basketball, but there’s a definite benefit from being such a star-oriented team sport. Not every star pulls fans in—see Tim Duncan—but the effect of LeBron James’ stellar first playoff appearance has been noticed in higher playoff ratings. Cleveland may not be New York or Los Angeles, but the NBA system allows the city to matter far less than the player, if the player is a dominant star. Conversely, the Knicks are better at being a complete failure than any team in the NHL, constantly generating headlines and debates. Furthermore, the good teams stay in the NBA playoffs. The Spurs lost, but they lost to the Mavericks, the second best team in their conference. Every higher seed in the Western Conference lost their first-round match-up in the NHL playoffs. If this happened in the NBA (so unbelievably unlikely), David Stern would absolutely lose it.

Meanwhile, Gary Bettman manages to spin any event positively (well, maybe not the cancellation of an entire season or the Todd Bertuzzi debacle), so I can only imagine that a press release about the “fresh blood” in the finals is forthcoming. I’m rooting for the Sabres at this point, thankful that Drury is no longer on the hated Avalanche, but this season appears to be headed for a whimpering, not thunderous close. There is no national cry for a long-awaited rectifying of the Sabres’ finals loss to the Stars. The Oilers have won more than enough Cups in relatively recent memory and lack the urge for a Cup for the Maple Leafs or Habs. Even if the Ducks make a miraculous comeback against the Oilers, half of their local fan base still won’t catch the games on TV. And the Hurricanes must become a yearly power for a Cup victory to be anything other than a passing fad.

The rule changes have been somewhat effective in putting the emphasis back on scoring and skating, but it hasn’t fixed everything. It’s hard to ignore how effective the Oilers’ trap has been or how quickly they’ll slide into it (a one-goal lead to start the third period). I’d hate to think that this is the second coming of the 1995 New Jersey Devils, a team that sadly dictated the style of play for teams lacking offensive firepower. The frequency of penalty calls shouldn’t be a permanent trend, if players finally allow those tendencies to leave their systems. But if tons of penalties continue to be called, they must be the right calls. I’ve seen completely innocuous plays be whistled down, while infractions leading directly to goals (specifically, Ryan Smyth toppling over Toskala without help from the Sharks defense, allowing Samsonov access to the top shelf) have been ignored. Enforcing new standards takes compliance from both players and referees, which won’t happen overnight. I’m excited to see how NHL playoff games are played three years from now, but right now, they’re comprised of equal parts frustration and excitement.

The subtext to this entry is that my team, the Detroit Red Wings, bombed out of the first round, preempting a dream ending to Steve Yzerman’s career. At this point, I’m somewhat used to the Wings either winning the Cup, running into a blazing team, or merely not showing up for their first-round match, and I wasn’t sure whether the Oilers deserved the credit or the Wings deserved the blame for the outcome of the series. Yzerman’s injury had surprising impact—the Wings lost the 2OT game after his exit (despite appearing to win it on a Justin Williams magic trick), upon his return he was the best player on the ice—but much of the blame went to Manny Legace instead of the other offensive players who didn’t step up their games in the absence of their captain. Granted, Legace isn’t a long-term answer, particularly given the number of young goaltenders who have blossomed in this year’s playoffs, but his work in the final few games should have been enough to win those games. My dream scenario is that the Wings manage to steal one of the Ducks’ young goalies (Giguere’s stock rose with his win tonight, but hopefully he’ll be on the block anyway), Yzerman comes back for one more go at it, Jiri Fischer is cleared to play, and another young player steps up on the third or fourth lines for additional scoring, but the far more likely scenario is that none of those things occur. The Wings did an excellent job of filling in the gaps after the lockout ended, but it may be difficult to acquire a starting goalie, a power forward, and a top-four defenseman with the limitations of the salary cap.