You Won’t Believe What Millennials Are Killing Now

A new hockey season is almost upon us, but if it’s anything like the last few years, something will be missing.

Sure, a lot of it will be the same. Beer will still cost too much. The corporate seats in the lower bowl will still be empty until half way through the first period. The referees will still hate your team. But something won’t feel quite right. And it hasn’t felt quite right for a few years now.

You know what I’m talking about. You don’t go to games to watch Corsis and PDOs. You got to see goals. That’s what hockey is all about. It’s why they put them up on the scoreboard. But if the trend continues, we’ll see fewer goals scored than ever before.

And you know who’s to blame for that?

That’s right. Millennials.

Millennials are killing goal scoring in the NHL.

I didn’t want to believe this. But it’s true.

I mean, I’m sure you’ve seen all those articles popping up on the internet about how millennails, or should I say killennials, are killing everything from vacations to cereal to napkins for God’s sake! Is their no end to their bloodlust?

Apparently the answer is no. Because as I’ve discovered, millennials have been slowly, silently killing goal scoring in the NHL for years. When it comes to NHL scoring, millennials are the new smoking.

It started innocently enough. Back in the 1998-99 NHL season, millennials made up only 1.3% of all man-games played in the NHL but by 2003-04 that number had skyrocketed to 35%.

And by the next season played, that percentage shot up to 57% and we had reached the tipping point. I don’t think anybody noticed because it was masked by the lockout year in 2004-05, but it happened. Hockey came back, millennials were the majority, and the NHL hasn’t been the same since.

I ran the numbers and the math checks out.

Ever since millennials made up most of the games played, scoring has been plummeting in the NHL.

 

The relationship is striking. The more millennials play in the NHL the lower the score. I honestly can’t believe I didn’t see this earlier.

 

Maybe you think I’m making this up. That this can’t possibly be true.

But I’m here to tell you this is absolutely real. Look at that correlation co-efficient. The relationship is stronger than any of those other advanced stats that the nerds take as gospel. And really, if I was going to make something like this up, I would have made the R² = 0.69 for god’s sake.

Now, I’m not blaming millennials for this. It’s not their fault. The didn’t choose to be lazy and not really goal-oriented. Really, I blame their boomer parents and all those kumbaya participation ribbons they gave out.

So now that we’ve identified the problem, maybe we can stop picking on goalies and their equipment and focus on real solutions. If we really want to increase scoring, let’s do it in ways that millennials can relate to.

Hockey is already played on ice, so we have the chill part. Now we just need to let them watch some Netflix on the bench between shifts and let their nature take it’s course.

Oh, and if that doesn’t work, take away the water bottles.