January 23, 2007
In Defense Of A Golden Age That Never Was
Last Thursday, Mike Chen performed an interesting dissection of the league's attendance numbers, coming to the following conclusion:
In my opinion, for whatever that's worth, attendance should be really driven by performance (with tradition and local economics factoring in too). Even teams with good traditions experience soft attendance when a team is terrible. So with that in mind, I looked at a team's percentage of capacity for this year (because pure attendance numbers are misleading) when compared to last year...
Which led Tom Benjamin to write:
The final six teams are all drawing less than 80% of capacity, and all of them are down again this year. Boston - Boston! - has shown the second biggest attendance decline in the league despite having an improved team. Ted Nolan and an improved team hasn't stopped any bleeding on the Island. New Jersey is effectively relocating. Washington is down despite Ovechkin and a better team. St. Louis is the worst in the league at 60.4%, and has suffered the worst decline, despite an improved team. Florida - the only expansion team in this group and another poster boy for troubled markets - has the best numbers among the six. Chicago is a disgrace.
This is not just about the fact Gary expanded the league to places without any hockey history, to places where one might expect to see struggles. This is about the fact that previously great hockey markets, markets with great tradition are being - have been? - destroyed.
And lest we forget, the Gary Bettman lockout and the Gary Bettman Hockey League were designed to address these problems. More parity and a more attractive (to Americans) game were supposed to fix these problems instead of making them worse. Not only are the attendance issues more serious, media coverage is down all over the US and TV ratings are microscopic.
[...]
What's that smell? Did somebody fart in here? The NHL isn't really having attendance issues, the Americans are winning the war in Iraq and global warming is nothing to worry about.
But wait just a second, here's Chuq von Rospach, who has taken it upon himself to be Tom's personal fact checker:
If you step back and look in perspective, the reality is simple: there will always be franchises in a down cycle, leagues with bad owners (Chicago, ho!!!!), buildings needing upgrades of replacing, challenges to be met.
the NHL has met a lot of challenges very well. It has challenges left. This is real life. you can either look at it in perspective -- or you can be Tom Benjamin, and focus only on what sucks. Or, if it doesn't suck (like Bettman moving average attendance up by 3,000 per game), just ignore it and declare it sucks anyway...
My god, does ANYONE (other than Tom) want to return to the days of Ziegler and Eagleson? That sure sounds like what Tom wants, that's for sure...
Hey, if nothing else, at least this union isn't selling out its players to the league....
Which begs the question: What is it that Tom wants?
Check that, as I should put it more directly: Tom, what do you want? Because as it stands right now, other than the right to complain about anything and everything you want to address (which after all is your right), I'm not sure what it could be.
So lay it out for us. If you could replace the Gary Bettman Hockey League (GBHL) with the Tom Benjamin Hockey League (TBHL), what would it look like? And what are the realistic chances of it existing anywhere but inside your own brain case?
Here's your chance, Tom. Let it all out.
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06:49 AM