Yes.
Yes.
Sorry to the hockey fans for my comments ;)
It's a perfect example of what greed, pride, and stubborness can do. There's nothing more exciting than NHL Playoff hockey, it should be super-easy to sell, and these guys have just squandered millions of dollars and all the marketing momentum the game had for nothing.
Hockey?? Don't know much about it, all I've heard is it is a "sport" watched by a great majority of some irrelevant and wuss country on Monday nights.
Like I've said before: THIS is why unions are bad.
well as they are seemingly NOT going to agree on anything contrary to reports of a salary cap agreement, I think the NHL is totally screwed.
Eventually, however, somone will pick up the slack. If you have a viable business model, Hockey can survive in the US...
I grew up a major hockey fan, but I have to say I enjoyed watching women's college softball games on ESPN and ESPN2 this year a lot more than I enjoyed watching their NHL coverage in seasons past. Of course, it's not that fun watching hockey when you have to try to find the puck on a TV screen that has the entire bottom strip constantly covered by scores and news of other sports. And ESPN's hockey announcers were never my favorites.
The author of this article misses a very critical point here. Pro hockey never "matured" from a cult sport at all -- the NHL simply gave the appearance that it had become popular on a national level by relocating and expanding into U.S. television markets with large populations but no real hockey fan support. In their NBA-oriented style of TV-based marketing of the 1990s, the NHL -- through former NBA executive Gary Bettman -- decided that a Phoenix market with 20,000 casual fans among 4 million people represented a more lucrative opportunity than a Winnipeg market with 500,000 die-hard fans among 600,000 people.
NHL execs should recall that Major League Baseball--which, besides being the national pastime, has always had a much broader fan base than pro hockey, along with a ubiquitous TV presence--didn't recover its pre-strike popularity until the McGwire-Sosa home run race in 1998.
And Weekly Standard writers and editors should note that Major League Baseball did nothing more than hitch its wagon to a steroid-enhanced home run race in order to recover its pre-strike popularity. When you consider the role that steroids, juiced-up baseballs, and a miniscule strike zone played in baseball's offensive explosion of the 1990s, the sport really only recovered its popularity by pushing itself across that thin line that separates "competitive sport" from "staged event."
If that's what it means to be popular on a national level here in the U.S., then I'll take the cult sport any day, thank you.
I remember when this happened, and I remember thinking, "Why do they want to go hide themselves on this little cable network?" Nobody could find the games unless they wanted to pay for what was at the time premium cable TV. You weren't going to run across a game flipping channels on a weekend afternoon, which was how I discovered hockey.
I love the game, and I really missed being able to watch it this year, but the NHL has become a prime example of how not to run a league. They either need to gut the structure and remodel from the inside out, or just tear the whole thing down and start over.
What's hockey?
Actually I think ESPN telling the NHL to take a hike may have helped bring to 2 sides closer. Now they know that their $$$pie of even smaller. I suspect that just as the baseball strike killed baseball in Montreal and severly damaged it in Toronto the NHL strike will kill pro hockey in a few US cities.
ESPN couldn't cover hockey for jack#%it anyway. That's why when the same game is on ESPN and CBC, 1/2 of Michigan watches CBC instead.
Dump the networks and go CBC and local. They know how to cover the game. Fox Sports Detroit does a great job with Ken and Mickey.