Post-Qual Post.
I'm updating; now everyone can just chill.
I'm sorry to say that my sports blog has missed arguably one of the greatest months of sports ever. Technically, this would make me disqualified to be a sportswriter in any meaningful sense. We've had the Stanley Cup playoffs, which have gone "the literal distance," as we should say. For some reason, Edmonton, the eighth seed in the playoffs, decided to prolong the playoffs for two more games after being down 3-1 to Carolina. Watching Game 7 tonight helped me reaffirm why:
Hockey's popularity is limited.
Let me try to explain. After all, this is a tough argument to make. If hockey can survive in Carolina, it should be able to survive anywhere, right? Look at all the fans!
Well, we see the fans in Carolina, but we also see that the team is winning Stanley Cups. So maybe the Carolina Hurricanes aren't the best example of a true NHL story.
So I'll put my readers to the test: name three Hurricanes.
You can't do it; I can't do it either. I should know something about it, but the only guy I can name is Rod Brind'Amour, who's been in the NHL for roughly 30 years. Apparently Mark Recchi is on this team too, which is something I looked up to write this. Again, Carolina just won the Stanley Cup.
This probably shouldn't be the case, but it has been for years. When Tampa Bay won the Stanley Cup (if anybody remembers that), they had the talented Martin St. Louis and Vincent LeCavalier, players who were great and have noticable skills. But the LIghtning have come and gone, and the NHL couldn't cash in on its success in any place but Tampa Bay.
One thing hockey has always struggled with is brand name; that is, people can't quite get their heads around who plays where, and it has suffered mightily because of this fact. I looked up the true star of the 'Canes- his name is Eric Staal, and he's a 100-point scorer. And his picture should have been plastered all over Raleigh, and his face should be in NHL commercials next year. But my educated guess is that Staal, the second pick of the 2003 draft, isn't getting much. The NHL has just barely managed to adequately pitch Sidney Crosby, who many consider to be second coming of Gretzky, and his Lemieux-ian counterpart, Alexander Ovechkin, who had an unreasonably great season for the Washington Capitals in his first season.
Would this happen with Ichiro, LeBron, or any NFL player?
No. We would see them on video games; we would see them on TV, and we would definitely hear about their performances on ESPN every chance we got. But this doesn't happen with the NHL.
Can you make people like hockey? Sure. After all, minor league hockey works really well in the South, where rinks and ice aren't exactly common place. Why does minor league hockey work? Well, it's probably got something to do with the fact that individual entrepreneurs are trying intensely to maximize profit; they've got death grips on reasonable venues, and they pitch the teams to their cities with ferocity. In some sense, the same idea has yet to translate to the NHL.
Let's look at another case study: the Columbus Blue Jackets.
Going to see a Blue Jackets game at $30 is a little too much for a college student, but Columbus has 65,000 college students. Offering moderate discounts to see crappy teams isn't exactly a great solution, and by and large, the Blue Jackets have sort of left out their potential base, who easily substitute to college hockey in the same town. Now, Columbus has Rick Nash, another player who's young and ludicrously talented. And there's a great chance that many of us don't know Rick Nash from John Nash or Kevin Nash. That's just the way things are with the NHL right now, but that's not necessarily the way things should be.
The NHL would be much better off if it pitched itself as the ultimate hockey league, in an accept-no-substitutes style. People shouldn't think college hockey is a reasonable substitute for pro hockey; after all, nobody substitutes the Buckeye tennis team for professionals. There is a notable difference between pro and semi-pro/amateur hockey, and it's a difference that the NHL, for whatever reason, has no interest in marketing. This type of rationale should naturally extend toward the NHL's promotion of young stars: I want Staal, Crosby, Nash, Kovalchuk, and Ovechkin on every bulletin board in NHL cities next year. They're the future of hockey, and if the NHL wants a future, it had better start showing that future off.
To be fair, a couple of teams have understood this idea; the Detroit Red Wings and the Colorado Avalanche have kept stars on their teams and have built not only the concept of hockey up (which needed no introduction in cold-weather climates), but have built the concept of star players up on their teams, which is something that pretty much every team in the NHL should learn from.
So why did tonight's game re-affirm why hockey has limited popularity? It's simple; the game looked nice, but I didn't know anything about it, so I was tempted to flip the channel. And the fact that I didn't know anything about it is strictly the fault of the NHL.
I'm sorry to say that my sports blog has missed arguably one of the greatest months of sports ever. Technically, this would make me disqualified to be a sportswriter in any meaningful sense. We've had the Stanley Cup playoffs, which have gone "the literal distance," as we should say. For some reason, Edmonton, the eighth seed in the playoffs, decided to prolong the playoffs for two more games after being down 3-1 to Carolina. Watching Game 7 tonight helped me reaffirm why:
Hockey's popularity is limited.
Let me try to explain. After all, this is a tough argument to make. If hockey can survive in Carolina, it should be able to survive anywhere, right? Look at all the fans!
Well, we see the fans in Carolina, but we also see that the team is winning Stanley Cups. So maybe the Carolina Hurricanes aren't the best example of a true NHL story.
So I'll put my readers to the test: name three Hurricanes.
You can't do it; I can't do it either. I should know something about it, but the only guy I can name is Rod Brind'Amour, who's been in the NHL for roughly 30 years. Apparently Mark Recchi is on this team too, which is something I looked up to write this. Again, Carolina just won the Stanley Cup.
This probably shouldn't be the case, but it has been for years. When Tampa Bay won the Stanley Cup (if anybody remembers that), they had the talented Martin St. Louis and Vincent LeCavalier, players who were great and have noticable skills. But the LIghtning have come and gone, and the NHL couldn't cash in on its success in any place but Tampa Bay.
One thing hockey has always struggled with is brand name; that is, people can't quite get their heads around who plays where, and it has suffered mightily because of this fact. I looked up the true star of the 'Canes- his name is Eric Staal, and he's a 100-point scorer. And his picture should have been plastered all over Raleigh, and his face should be in NHL commercials next year. But my educated guess is that Staal, the second pick of the 2003 draft, isn't getting much. The NHL has just barely managed to adequately pitch Sidney Crosby, who many consider to be second coming of Gretzky, and his Lemieux-ian counterpart, Alexander Ovechkin, who had an unreasonably great season for the Washington Capitals in his first season.
Would this happen with Ichiro, LeBron, or any NFL player?
No. We would see them on video games; we would see them on TV, and we would definitely hear about their performances on ESPN every chance we got. But this doesn't happen with the NHL.
Can you make people like hockey? Sure. After all, minor league hockey works really well in the South, where rinks and ice aren't exactly common place. Why does minor league hockey work? Well, it's probably got something to do with the fact that individual entrepreneurs are trying intensely to maximize profit; they've got death grips on reasonable venues, and they pitch the teams to their cities with ferocity. In some sense, the same idea has yet to translate to the NHL.
Let's look at another case study: the Columbus Blue Jackets.
Going to see a Blue Jackets game at $30 is a little too much for a college student, but Columbus has 65,000 college students. Offering moderate discounts to see crappy teams isn't exactly a great solution, and by and large, the Blue Jackets have sort of left out their potential base, who easily substitute to college hockey in the same town. Now, Columbus has Rick Nash, another player who's young and ludicrously talented. And there's a great chance that many of us don't know Rick Nash from John Nash or Kevin Nash. That's just the way things are with the NHL right now, but that's not necessarily the way things should be.
The NHL would be much better off if it pitched itself as the ultimate hockey league, in an accept-no-substitutes style. People shouldn't think college hockey is a reasonable substitute for pro hockey; after all, nobody substitutes the Buckeye tennis team for professionals. There is a notable difference between pro and semi-pro/amateur hockey, and it's a difference that the NHL, for whatever reason, has no interest in marketing. This type of rationale should naturally extend toward the NHL's promotion of young stars: I want Staal, Crosby, Nash, Kovalchuk, and Ovechkin on every bulletin board in NHL cities next year. They're the future of hockey, and if the NHL wants a future, it had better start showing that future off.
To be fair, a couple of teams have understood this idea; the Detroit Red Wings and the Colorado Avalanche have kept stars on their teams and have built not only the concept of hockey up (which needed no introduction in cold-weather climates), but have built the concept of star players up on their teams, which is something that pretty much every team in the NHL should learn from.
So why did tonight's game re-affirm why hockey has limited popularity? It's simple; the game looked nice, but I didn't know anything about it, so I was tempted to flip the channel. And the fact that I didn't know anything about it is strictly the fault of the NHL.
posted by mike at 9:12 PM
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