Watching hockey is a massive waste of time. The typical "hockey fan" has always been a sad sack of useless non-thinking shit. And most of them will go along with ANYTHING. They are just dumb lemmings.

So don't expect some big revolt against the NHL over this. Typical sports fans are brain-dead anyways. You could tell them it's "cool" to prostitute their wives and daughters down by the docks and they'd probably applaud it.