Posted on 06/18/2017 12:10:45 PM PDT by Yaelle
Yeah, no snow on the ground here ever. Went to the outdoor hockey game at Dodger Stadium with Kings / Ducks on New Years or around then, and never put on the down costs we brought. Hockey in June is just fine although for me waterproof mascara is a must - I’m emotional around that Cup.
Coats
Edit feature would be nice
I remember reading a Sports Illustrated pre-season article back from the days of 21 teams, and it had a section with a line to the effect of “and here we have the five teams we predict witll not make the playoffs, which in hockey is like not making the telephone book.”
I also recall at least one season where the team with the second worst overall record made the playoffs, because they happened to be in the same five-team division as the worst team.
Yeah, it did diminish the regular season when ~75% of the teams got to go to the playoffs every year. If there was an upside, it did mean almost every year the same teams would be playing each other, which created intense rivalries that have faded with more teams and the wildcard. Boston v Hartford, Chicago v Minnesota, Calgary v Winnipeg. You’d think LA and Anaheim would be a great rivalry, but they’ve only played each other 1-2 times in the playoffs in the last 20 years.
A few head-scratchers: Marchessault, Jagr, Mrazek, Vatanen left unprotected. Pysik, Howard, Bieksa, Reaves protected by their respective teams.
Vegas won't be a 70 game loser. Parity rules.
When I was in Connecticut, I used to go to Goldie Howe’s restaurant. I played against Kevin Dineen, when his dad was coach of the Whalers. Also, my family business had a few Whalers players as customers, too.
Been sitting here reading it. Love the history and the stories. Thanks. When my oldest was a little hockey player we read so many books and bios and stats but I have forgotten so much.
For the life of me, I’m trying to figure out why the NHL insists on pursuing this losing strategy of putting teams in cities that have no fan support for an NHL team.
I would prefer to see the NHL playoffs end by the time the World Hockey Championships begin in early May.
Other unprotected players are those who their team expects to lose in free agency anyway. Jagr, for example, has been playing under one-year contracts over the last few years -- and he'll be a free agent on July 1st, so Florida stands a good chance of losing him to another team anyway.
Something else to keep in mind is that any player who has a no-movement clause in his contract MUST be protected in the expansion draft unless he agrees to waive that clause (like in the case of Marc-Andre Fleury of the Penguins).
You mean like Ottowa? Some places have trouble because they made bad decisions about things like their arena. Phoenix, Florida and Ottowa seem to fall into that category. These teams play in arenas that make it hard to be a fan.
Las Vegas won’t have that problem. They’ll live or die if Vegas can rally around them as a real community. So far it looks good with sold out season tickets and a waiting list.
I agree with Bettman’s push into the sun belt. That’s where the young(er) people are. The entire north (and that includes Europe) aren’t having enough children to keep their countries going much less a sport.
Las Vegas will attract fans as long as its a novelty, and if they improve over time and become a winner they'll do very well. That's not the hard part, though. The real challenge is after they've become a winning team and then they have to go through a rebuilding period. Sun Belt teams are notorious for having fickle, fair-weather fan support. It's easy to draw fans when you're a winner, but it takes a strong hockey market to get 15,000 or more fans to come out to see a mediocre team. There are a lot of places in North America where a team can do this, but it's not going to happen in the Sun Belt.
I’ve read that about Ottawa. Also that they recently rescinded the ability of government officials to use taxpayer money for hockey games. It sounds like this may be a team on the move if they don’t make the situation more fan friendly.
As far as Las Vegas, I’m going to give it time. It seems like a Columbus style situation to me. I was reading the Vegas web sites when the team was announced and most remarks were about the team being for the people of the city. Most outside fans were saying this was a tourist attraction hence unstable. I think the season ticket holder base suggests the reality is the former not the latter.
Most American cities will support teams on a fickle basis. Win and they will come. Lose and they don’t. I live in the Pittsburgh area, we just had 650,000 people at the parade. The moment the team looks shaky you won’t be able to give tickets away. Yet, at the moment it’s one of the most stable US franchises. It’s just the way sports fans are.
Yep, brain fart. Wrong ‘dale came out. Thanks.
There are a few things coming into play here that have wreaked havoc on NHL franchises:
1. With its strong push for national television revenue that began in the 1990s, the NHL made a decision that effectively put a higher value on large cities with few hockey fans over small cities with many hockey fans. The relocation of the original Winnipeg Jets to Phoenix was a perfect example of this. Winnipeg had about 400,000 hardcore hockey fans among about 600,000 people at the time -- but Phoenix was considered a better NHL market because it had about 4 million people, even if hardly any of them were hockey fans.
2. There are many smaller cities that might be great hockey markets, but the NHL has simply priced many fans out of the game. This is why teams from large cities with a lot of corporate support have the most traction in the NHL, because that type of support doesn't get priced out as easily.
3. As strange as this may sound, some metro areas have enormous fan bases but aren't very strong NHL markets. This is because these places simply have too many other less expensive options for hockey fans. The Twin Cities of Minnesota is a perfect case in point. That may be the best hockey market in the world, but they lost the North Stars to Dallas back in the 1990s because they didn't have the support of fans who didn't want to pay NHL prices when they could attend NCAA games, high school games, and even children's games for a lot less money. The Minnesota state high school hockey tournament will often attract 18,000 fans to the Exel Center in St. Paul for days at a time every March, but when the North Stars were there they didn't have a strong fan base at all.
I don’t think the “original six” are immune to losing . Toronto lost their sellout streak a couple years before Matthews was drafted. Chicago couldn’t draw flies during the last years of “Dollar Bill” Wirtz’s ownership. Even Detroit while winning had plenty of tickets available during the last Stanley Cup runs.
The other points are about the NHL being a business. The percentage of hockey fans is only part of the big picture and apparently not enough to make the business viable. That means they want corporate support and the high prices they can pay and a population high enough to have people pay season ticket prices . If the population doesn’t want to pay, it isn’t an NHL hockey market.
After all star players are rightfully well paid, the cost to run a winning franchise is high. Also the value of the Canadian dollar plays a huge roll in the viability of markets up north. The pay is in US dollars (or indexed to) even in Canada.
For those who don’t want to pay NHL prices, there’s juniors, the AHL, the ECHL, college and high school. I’m lucky I live in an area near all those. There is also free. Hockey players practice and scrimmage in the summers.
Tease!
Right — those old teams aren’t immune to losing, but you really have to run a dysfunctional franchise for years before your fan support starts to erode. Detroit is probably a function of a different factor: the team was so good for so long that anything short of a trip to the Stanley Cup Finals was seen as a failure. The New Jersey Devils faced a similar problem in New Jersey after the early 2000s, too.
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