[Ed. note: this FanPost originally ran on Aug 12, 2012.]

I have been a Caps STH for 5 years, a partial plan holder for a couple of season more, and have been going to caps games for most of my life (around 25 years or so). I used to get very excited for the regular season, but after the last two seasons I have come to the realization of a couple of things:

The NHL regular season is too long & The NHL regular season, for a large part is relatively meaningless. Don't get me wrong, I had a great time going to all the games at the end of the year but 82 games is a little more than we really need. It just gives our players more of a chance to get injured.

The only thing the regular season helps with is determining who makes the playoffs. Playoff hockey is a hugely different beast and playing at home doesn't matter like it does in most other sports. So while I am looking forward to hopefully another playoff run, I won't be disapointed if the league doesn't start up until December or January. Its less games that two or three months down the line, no one will remember. We have baseball and football to get us through the fall and early winter. Maybe if hockey was the only sport I cared about, I would feel different. However there are other sports out there and as long as there is playoff hockey come April, I don't think most people will care too much at the end of the day if the NHL missed 20 unmemorable regular season games. Hell it would even make the season tickets more affordable

What are other people's thoughts and how many games a year do you go to?