NHL hoping to attract NFL fans by increasing stoppages and coach's challenges

The Elbow staff

stadium-663584_1920.jpg

NEW YORK, NY – Eager to expand its fanbase in traditional NFL markets, the NHL today announced that it will be taking steps to increase the frequency of stoppages and coach's challenges next season.

A spokesman for the league said the test run of coach's offside challenges over the past two seasons has been a huge success.

"The challenges have gone better than we could've imagined," Brett Vettle said in New York today. "They've succeeded in slowing the game right down, and have made large portions of it completely unwatchable."

"As such, we feel that we're now at a level to aggressively chase viewers in several NFL markets, so we're going to increase the number of reasons for coach's challenges."

As of next season, coaches will have an unlimited number of challenges each game, and will be able to challenge all penalty calls, icings, and opposing team's timeouts. They will even be able to challenge opposing team's challenges.

The end goal for the league is to stretch each period out for around an hour each.

"We're hoping to give fans what they really want and grind play right down," Vettle went on to say. "As a fan myself, nothing beats 20 seconds of action broken up by a minute and a half of watching the refs decide if a play was offside or not."

"If you've ever been to an NFL game, you'll know that the tension in the stadium during a referee's review is palpable. Fans can't control themselves. They're up in their seats yelling along with the action. We want to bring some of that to our arenas."

As added incentive for coaches, the league plans to give them the same special little flags that NFL coaches get to throw on the field when they're angry.

Like us on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with all the latest news.