why that great Olympic hockey game won't help the NHL

In this, like any other issue, there are myriad factors - not the least of which is Gary Bettman's pig-headed insistence that the NHL won't stop work for two weeks in February of 2014 to let the best players participate in the Games in Sochii. That problem will probably work itself out over the next few years but the bigger problem is that the wonderful spectacle that was Olympic hockey in Vancouver this year will do next to nothing to raise the ratings for the NHL.

Why is that?

No fighting in Olympic hockey. That's the main difference - people who don't watch (hell, people who won't watch) the NHL will watch Olympic hockey. The inverse does not exist. Olympic hockey games are exciting because the action is far more fluid than the NHL, in which action rarely goes for more than five minutes without some pea-brained "enforcer" dropping his gloves and pummeling away at some other lout who is equally unencumbered by such quaint trappings as "sportsmanship" and "fair play".

The NHL has players whose known job it is to fight the other team's big guy who does the exact same thing. The NHL also has horrible ratings in comparison to the other major sports and has a tough time recruiting new fans. Olympic hockey teams don't have "enforcers" and Olympic hockey is far more exciting and got stellar ratings, even among non-hockey fans. Some of that is, of course, due to the whole national pride "thing" (which is another issue I have - why would anybody be proud of something that is not an accomplishment? But I digress...).

Another problem? The archaic scheduling system by which each team plays six games versus each of their four divisional opponents; there are 30 teams in the NHL, and each team plays 30% of its games against 7.5% of the teams in the league. With the large number of games on the schedule and the vastly increased number of teams in the league since the scheduling format was adopted, the time for change has long been here.