For the past few months, I have been mulling around a question in my head...
Why Stay?
Why would the NHL even want to stay in Phoenix? The team averages under 15,000 fans per game, yet Gary Bettman keeps saying how committed the NHL is to hockey in Phoenix. In Hamilton, Ontario, 12,000 signed up for season tickets a few years ago without even having a team. They didn't just put their name on a list, they gave Jim Balsillie a deposit for them, hoping he would bring them a team.
But this isn't about Hamilton. You could easily replace Hamilton with Seattle, Toronto, Winnipeg, Kansas City, Quebec City, or (my personal choice) Las Vegas.
Why stay in Phoenix? The team is a drag to the owners of the teams who actually make money because of revenue sharing. It is an embarrassment to the league to have a team file bankruptcy.
Are the 14,632 fans they averaged last year really that important to the rest of the league? (By the way, their attendance is dwindling, the year before they averaged 14,820.)
Other cities are begging for teams. Balsillie is intent on moving them to Hamilton, which has been hockey-ready for years. Seattle just lost its basketball team, its football team is garbage, and its baseball team lost over 100 games last year. Las Vegas has said it wants a team, regardless of league. Same for Kansas City, who offered up their Sprint Center for free. Winnipeg wants their team back; Quebec is such a good market that it houses entire leagues in the city. A 2nd team in Toronto would do so good that the Maple Leafs actually had to nix the idea out of greed, not necessity.
Is Gary Bettman really that stubborn to admit his decision to grant a franchise to Phoenix was a mistake? I've made mistakes, and I admit them. Mine don't cost people millions of dollars.
Hockey in Arizona is a joke. For that matter, hockey in Miami and Atlanta is ridiculous also, but that's for another day.
Is it about expanding the game within the U.S.A.? There are better ways to do that then with a 25% empty building, and the four letters for that are E, S, P, and N.
There are probably 13,000 people who would actually care if a young-and-coming team left the desert. A ton more would care if Canada got another team.
Come on, Gary. Admit your mistake. Eat your crow. Stop backing the Coyotes. Sometimes, you have to kill your weakest link. Or at least move them to a place where people want them.
I feel like the Coyotes COULD have very easily been a success with Phoenix fans. Unfortunately, it never happened. First, the team was pretty much awful ever since arriving in Phoenix. I believe they've made the playoffs four times and went out in the first round each time. Second, their shiny new arena is apparently hard to get to. I've heard people compare it to the Meadowlands, which is far from a compliment. Just like we don't want to fight traffic for three hours to attend a Jets/Giants game, Coyotes fans can't be bothered trekking out to an arena in the middle of nowhere to watch the Coyotes lose.
ReplyDeleteOh, and I don't think ESPN is the answer. A deal with ESPN would help in terms of exposure, sure, but they'd still be at the bottom of the totem pole. We wouldn't get every playoff game and the league would still pale in comparison with the usual crap ESPN covers. Now, if ESPN force-fed the NHL like they do with the NBA, that'd be a different story.
P.S. Yesterday on the 12 PM SportsCenter, they finally got around to discussing the Wings-Ducks game at about 12:45. They had to spend the previous 45 minutes discussing Brett Favre, Yankees-Red Sox, and the NBA playoffs. Do you really want to compete with this stuff, or would you rather be on a network that might suck, but puts the NHL on a pedestal?
I wasn't comparing ESPN to Versus, or vice versa.
ReplyDeleteI was saying that Bettman is intent on "Growing the game in America," and maybe that's why he wants them to stay and not move to Canada. But the 50,000 fans in Phoenix are nothing in the grand scale compared to what regular coverage on a different channel can do.
The only way hockey is going to change in the US is by getting more kids into minor hockey. When are you going to see a kid from Mississippi being drafted number one in the nhl draft? Probably never. If you had minor hocky in the states like you do in Canada and Europe, then more people would be interested in going to games and watching it on TV. I think to a lot of americans, hockey is a foreign game. Baseball and Basketball are institutions. And Football? that's a religion.
ReplyDeleteHow are you going to compete with that?
Yeah, it's true, and you never hear about ice hockey leagues popping up in Phoenix. In Dallas, though, the community absorbed hockey. You always hear about how there were like 2 hockey rinks before the Stars came, and now there are like 800 or something ridiculous like that.
ReplyDeleteIt takes a generation to get hockey going... get the kids playing and they'll love it but it takes time.