Hockey. The only sport that believes ugly sells.

It’s spring in Toronto, the time of year when hockey becomes nasty and brutish, and the Toronto Maple Leafs’ hockey season gets cut short. The Leafs thought that skill actually matters and signed four of the world’s most talented hockey players to contracts that ate up half their cap-restricted payroll.

A second round defeat at the grabbing hands of the Florida Panthers means the trail of Leafs futility that goes all the way back to the year Elvis married Priscilla will continue for at least another year. Fans are tossing their Tim Hortons’ coffee cups in fits of double-double disgust, but they've misdirected their anger. They’re mad at players and management rather than at the game of hockey itself that at its highest level has become totally unwatchable.

Watching playoff hockey is like following a pinball as it bounces back and forth and up and down and occasionally veers close to a goal net where it pings off several sticks, a bum, and a blade then bounces in past a man dressed like a tire mascot. Much elation ensues, but over what? Only a super slow-motion instant replay that traces the erratic journey of the puck can figure out how it managed against all odds, like the drunk lurching for the bathroom, to reach its destination.

And, as if the frenetic yet frustratingly random pace of the game isn’t bad enough, players with knives on their feet and weapons in their hands know that the worst that can happen when they press their weapon to the throat of an opposing player or try to turn them into a shishkabob isn’t a charge of assault with a deadly weapon, but a two-minute minor penalty for cross checking or spearing.

In this vicious game, nice guys don’t win. Concussions abound, especially of naive players like the Leafs’ Matthew Knies. Knies, fresh out of the University of Minnesota, thought that good grades matter and that his team had a chance to win the Stanley Cup. That belief was shattered and his brain rattled when Florida’s Sam Bennett smashed him hard into the boards then horse collared him to the ice and out of the series. 

During the regular season, the Leafs’ Mitch Marner brings Cirque du Soleil to the ice with flashes of breathtaking hockey brilliance, but in the playoffs he grips his stick like an amateur trapeze artist holding on for dear life. He’s not, like many armchair Leafs psychologists say, “overcome by the moment.“ Marner is scared that someone with a beard large enough to host an extended family of bald eagles will sneak up behind him and send his 160-pound body with its three-weeks of facial peach fuzz hurtling into the glass. His nightmares aren’t of yet another Leafs playoff debacle, but assorted involuntary excretions from his face splattered on the glass behind the net in hockey's version of a Jackson Pollock painting.

Imagine a playoff baseball series in which opposing players with pieces of horseshoe-shaped plastic dangling disgustingly out of their mouths try to hit the ball at ace pitcher Shohei Ohtani and knock him out of the game. Now imagine base runners being tripped, tackled, and impeded in every way imaginable as they try to make their way around the bases. This is playoff hockey. And it’s painful to watch.

If your game is niche yet you yearn for a mass audience, why do you make your product so unlikable? Why do you make it so difficult for your best players to get the best results? There’s a real possibility that Connor McDavid, arguably the most talented hockey player in the world, won’t make it out of the second round. His Oilers are one loss away from losing to a stifling team from the place where hockey is just another dinner show.

Here’s the solution for you from a recovering MBA and frustrated hockey fan. Reduce the number of players on the ice from five to four so that skill is given the space to create spectacular highlight reel plays that find their way to social media and attract new fans.

And don’t blame highly skilled players for disappearing in the playoffs when the National Hockey League rewards those who neutralize talent and make the game ugly.