Smallball

Last night, while I couldn't sleep, I discovered TSN was showing Futsal, the indoor form of soccer. For those of us of a certain age who remember indoor soccer in North America, no, this isn't the same thing. It's played on a something akin to a basketball court, with hard surface, small dimensions and no walls.

Why doesn't this happen more often? After all, TSN has five channels, they don't all have to show endless repeats of SportsCentre all night. I assume the Canadian rights to the Futsal World Cup  didn't cost much.  It was probably less than TSN pays the guy who keeps pressing the button to replay SportsCentre all night. Why not show unusual sports from elsewhere in the world: This particular game was Morocco vs. Azerbaijan, which adds to the sense that I've stepped into a parallel earth.

I have to say, it's a pretty entertaining sport. It's fast-moving, there's a lot of individual skill involved, and the tactics are easier to see than they are in regular soccer. I guess you can think of this as like Arena Football: a concentrated version of the big sport.  If you're willing to stretch the concept a little, there are several other sports that are "mini" versions of other sports:

• volleyball - beach volleyball
• tennis - table tennis
• speed skating - short track speed skating
• Rugby - Rugby Sevens

Looking at what they mostly have in common, it would seem that the general idea is:

• fewer players
• less space
• less time
• faster action and quicker reaction times
• common sense fixes that can't be made in the big sport because of tradition

I wonder if other sports could use a small version. Basketball is already a small indoor sport, so I don't think you could apply the formula there. Mini baseball? You'd have to create a way of preventing the ball from going far; perhaps use a badminton shuttlecock.

As for hockey, it could use a small version. A while back I saw an article about how the TV ratings for hockey in the US were not much better than those of Arena Football. That made me wonder: if you invented a smaller version of hockey, one more easily marketed to Americans, could it get bigger than hockey? If it was, you could pay more than NHL teams, and start drawing players away. And so that's been my fantasy that I go back to whenever the sport's dark side shows up: destroying not just the NHL, but the whole sport, and forcing Canada's beloved hockey heroes to play by my dorky rules for the benefit of Americans.

But putting aside my sports business revenge fantasies, I think you could make a fun alternate version of hockey on a basketball/futsal sized court (so presumably on rollerblades.) I'm thinking:

• three-on-three
• much shorter periods
• smaller rosters
• bigger nets

It'll be like watching the All-Star game all the time.  Fans of physical play won't like it, but it should be entertaining. Any crazy Canadian billionaires out there interested in bankrolling it?