David Scott is a BPL citizen journalist.

Could ice hockey’s golden boy Sidney Crosby have helped cause the downfall of the North America’s National Hockey League, forever relegating it to fourth on the list of ‘games-I’d-want-my-kids-to-play’ behind the dominant trio of American football, baseball and basketball?

That’s the question the NHL must be facing today just hours after Crosby’s Penguins, the defending Stanley Cup champions, were knocked out of the playoffs by the eighth-seeded Montreal Canadiens.

It wasn’t meant to be like this. Crosby, the Halifax, Nova Scotia native had the world at his feet after scoring the game winning goal against an unfancied but up-and-coming US team in the Vancouver Winter Olympics gold medal game. It came hot on the heels of a Stanley Cup victory over traditional powerhouse Detroit in last winter’s competition, making at 21, him the youngest Stanley Cup winning captain ever.

The Penguins were favourites yet again this season, despite coming up against a Montreal side many thought were ripe for the picking, despite a strong win against Presidents Cup winners, the Washington Capitals.

And yet as Brian Gionta knocked in his second goal of the night, and Montreal’s fifth, the NHL was left with quite a conundrum: an Eastern Conference final featuring a Canadian team with a marginal following (the good residents of Quebec not withstanding), and a Western Conference final with perennial playoff underperformers San Jose. This on top of another season of fluctuating crowds, TV schedule blackouts, and at least one club, Phoenix, propped up entirely by the league.

As Crosby said post game “I don’t have an answer”.

Neither, seemingly, does the NHL.

It’s not for lack of trying. Seemingly endless rule changes in the wake of the 2004-05 lockout were supposed to make the game faster and more exciting (perhaps preempting world Twenty20-itis as Kim Crow pointed out on BPL the other day), drawing back the fans it had lost and more. Having players like Crosby, Washington’s Alexander Ovechkin and Chicago’s Patrick Kane was also supposed to help appeal to a broader range of hockey fans, mostly non-Canadians south of the border.

While Crosby and Ovechkin remain talk of the town, neither remain in the post-season dance. It's an infuriating result for a league that looks toward a spike in TV audiences and revenues about this time each year.

One sound theory is that hockey, compared to basketball, baseball, NFL and even soccer, is an expensive sport to play. Where the others require mostly just a ball and a makeshift ground, hockey requires ice, skates, sticks, pads…the list goes on. And the US is not as icy as one might think, leading to a dearth of locations for ‘pick up’ games. As The Hockey News columnist Rory Boylen recently wrote “Every time you add in one of these variables, you lose a group of sporting fans.”

The kids are missing out.

So the league remains in a kind of holding pattern, pro-reform commissioner Gary Bettman unable to move forward, yet not quite pushing the league over the edge. Yet.

It makes for an interesting comparison to rugby league for this humble Melbourne sports fan. Since the Storm salary cap scandal broke last month,

I’ve been bombarded with experts giving reasons why that sport will never work again in this town. Yet unlike hockey, there is a yearning for the game; SEN talkback callers reckon local juniors participation has never been better, and one needs only look at the number of paid up Storm members to see that it’s more than just displaced Sydney-siders who have an investment in this team. And yes, the low barrier for entry won’t hurt it’s long term chances either.

Perhaps it is too harsh to say that ice hockey in the US is dead. But gee, I think I’ll take a salary cap breach over the potential slow, painful, public death in an oversaturated sports marketplace.

David Scott is a freelance journalist who lives in Melbourne.