Dropping the Puck

In case you hadn’t heard, hockey is failing fast, bound for oblivion. But then again, wasn’t it always?

Ask any old pro a couple of years beyond his prime, and he’ll tell you straight up: the game today isn’t what it was when he was young and chasing pucks. The Hall of Fame defenceman Eddie Shore had been retired for almost a decade in 1949 when he bewailed the players who’d succeeded his generation of NHLers. “They have no guts,” he railed, “and they don’t know how to skate.” Gordie Howe lamented, in 1980, that “the animosity is gone.” For Wayne Gretzky in 2016, it was the fun that had fled: kids who weren’t having any were losing their creativity on the ice, and that, in turn, was the reason for the latter-day lack of scoring.

There’s also the memoir Maurice Richard published in 1971, which devoted a whole bleak chapter to hockey’s demise — the one not-so-subtly headed “Hockey Was a Better Game in My Day.”

Maybe so. What we do know, with...