The NHL: an arrested development.(My Turn)(National Hockey League)

When I was a crummy teenager, I used to sit in my parents' backyard with my friends and drink beers and fire frozen tennis balls at my little brother. We would gear him up in net, and my buddies and I would have breakaway competitions to see who could score more goals. We were 18 or 19, and he was 10. Poor Chuck got hammered. You get those tennis balls soaking wet and you freeze them, and that hurts. He was really good about it, though ... well, he had to be. He had no choice.

I am a huge hockey fail. I was born and raised in Toronto, so I came by it pretty naturally. If you want to have any kind of life, then you have to like hockey. I am the worst kind of Maple Leafs fan. My life revolves around the Leafs--which doesn't say a lot about my life, considering they haven't won a Stanley Cup in my lifetime.

Hockey is in a really tough spot right now. There are so many problems. Obviously, the league expanded way too much, too quickly. You've got two teams in the hockey "hotbed" of Florida, but you've whittled it down to six teams in Canada. That's just wrong.

We all know from watching the 2002 Olympics that the highest level of hockey can be really exciting, but a lot of that has to do with the bigger rinks they use. I know the NHL has built all these new rinks and can't spend all this money to reconfigure them to Olympic size. But that would make the product a lot better. These guys are big, strong and fast. It's crowded out there. There's no room for the skill players. The Paul Kariyas, who shine in an Olympic or international venue, are completely hindered in the NHL.

Both sides are to blame for the lockout. The players don't want a salary cap, and the owners are crying poverty. I don't know who is to blame for midlevel players being paid $3 million or $4 million a year, but it's not like the players are paying themselves. They're ...