Day-after Stanley Cup column

Re column: the writer should have focused more on the positive, such as how the team is not unlike many of the state's citizens, in that each is thick with heavily bearded men missing lots of teeth.

Re Bobcats: The team gives away 7,000 FREE tickets a GAME? That's what it looks like, unless my math is wrong. I'd be curious to see how many other teams are papering the house on such a high level.

 

More like 1/1000th.

After Tampa won the Cup, reporters were saying that once you got three blocks away from the rink, you wouldn't have known anything happened.

On the other hand I understand (at least from a TV piece the other day) that youth hockey is slowly making headway and new arenas are being built. Any truth to that?

 

Coke all over my keyboard. Classic.

 

You think it's bad for hockey? You should read what is being written about soccer and the World Cup.

 

JR: New arenas in Tampa? Or in the South, in general? I couldn't say.

As far as youth hockey building in the South, that's definitely true. Metro Atlanta, for one, has two large ice-skating facilities (one of them is the Thrashers' practice rink in suburban Duluth). There's been at least 1,000% growth in the youth leagues at those two rinks since the Thrashers came into the league in '99. Still don't have many, if any, high schools forming teams, but there's a few more club teams around.

It's growing. It won't ever be part of the culture -- it can't be, due to weather -- but there's a niche.

 

I do. And it's just as bad. But soccer has never caught on as a mainstream sport in the States, and it never will. That's fine. It's a niche -- but it's a strong niche that won't ever go away.

Hockey, OTOH, used to be one of the Big Four. It used to be a big, big part of the sports landscape. Now they don't even have a real TV deal, and they barely get more than a million viewers for the finals. It's becoming a niche, and it didn't used to be that way.

 

But a large part of this is the Charlotte/Raleigh dynamic. People in Charlotte don't like something because it's in Raleigh, and vice-versa. It's nowhere near Calgary-Edmonton, but it's the same dynamic.
Besides, it really chaps the ass of all Charlotte-ians that the first major sports championship is in Raleigh, not with their beloved Panthers or Bobcats. Oh, btw, the Redskins are still more popular in Raleigh than the Panthers.

 

When was this?

Growing up in Florida, I'd never even heard of hockey prior to the late 80s. To this day, big-times sports fans I went to school with couldn't tell you the difference between Bobby Orr and Bobby Hull.

By the time the sport finally caught on in the Sun Belt -- Gretzky to LA -- and expansion diluted everything, a lockout ensued and any momentum towards credible "Big Four" ended.

Since then, even with national TV deals, it's never been a U.S. sport. Ratings, beyond abysmal this year, have been below cheerleading/poker/arena football even prior to OLN.

And I'm just guessing, but I'd venture than even with all the youth players in Mass., Minn. and Mich., soccer still draws more of those U15 athletes.

When exactly were the NHL's salad days, nationally (U.S., I mean) speaking?

 

You blinked, and you missed them.

I like how there's all this panting about trying to reach a sliver of the audience with coverage of a rapidly declining sport.

Only a rapidly declining industry would obsess about trying to push hockey onto Billy Methmaker as he tools down the highway between Raleigh and Charlotte in his Dodge Ram, loaded with pseudoephedrine pills, Marlboros and Casey Kahne memorabilia while Toby Keith pumps out a remake of "You Spin Me Round" by Dead or Alive.

 

Who said it was "rapidly declining"? What do you base that on? TV ratings for the first year after an entire season had been shut down.?

The lack of TV contract was obvious fall-out from the lock-out but it'll go back and probably surpass it's pre lockout numbers.

I'd say that given the quality of the on-ice product this year, hockey has never been in better shape.

 

See, said the blind man as he picked up his hammer and saw.