3rd
Will NHL’s return finally generate interest?
by Derek Strum
The Columbia Chronicle - link
Originally published: October 13, 2005
Oddly enough, the first thing that came to my mind upon learning of the passing of Ronald Reagan on June 5, 2004, was the fate of hockey.
More specifically, I thought of that year’s Stanley Cup finals, in which two small-market teams were entering a sixth game the same night of the former president’s death. Anybody familiar with the agonizing pain of Alzheimer’s disease knows that it is often referred to as “The Long Goodbye,” and just as “The Gipper” fought the disease for ten years, the NHL was preparing to enter its final stages of a decade-long farewell.
Despite a memorable and exciting series of contests that saw the Tampa Bay Lightning defeat the Calgary Flames in a climactic seventh game, the entire series was overshadowed by a bitter labor dispute that had been brewing since the owners and players’ union last rushed to reach a collective bargaining agreement in 1995. That agreement came less than a year after Sports Illustrated declared on a June 1994 cover, “Why the NHL is hot and the NBA is not.” But television ratings for the “coolest game on Earth” ended up being downright frigid.
The gradual collapse of the second-oldest of the four major team sports leagues in North America hit its low point in February when, for the first time in the history of those four leagues, not a single game was played and a lockout ended up costing the NHL an entire season. Worse yet for the sport, a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll of sports fans in January 2005 found that 50 percent of respondents would be “not disappointed at all” if the labor dispute wiped out an entire season of the NHL. A mere 12 percent said they would be “very disappointed.”
And while the NHL returns Wednesday night, what lies ahead for it and the sport of hockey is anybody’s guess. If one thing is for certain, it’s that the game as we knew it—and perhaps the audience that follows it—is about to change.
In addition to luring back its original fan base, the NHL is hoping to attract a new audience with a variety of rules changes, including smaller equipment for goalies and the use of a penalty shootout format to decide ties in regular season games.
Naturally, hockey purists are scoffing at the latter change, or as one fan told me, “You might as well settle ties with a figure-skating contest.” The anger expressed toward such gimmicks has its merits but is still slightly misplaced, seeing as this was the league that once tried to use a glowing puck to attract television viewers.
Stubborn fans could learn a lot from what ultimately was a colossal loss on the part of the player’s union. After originally refusing to accept any form of salary cap, their proposal the day before the season was lost offered a $49 million cap while rejecting the owners’ suggested $42.5 million. Ultimately, they ended up accepting $39 million.
For years the NHL sent many a casual fan home from regular season contests that ended without victors, and it resulted in a sport that few even noticed taking a year off. While ESPN still airs broadcasts of the other three major sports, it decided not to pick up its option for the rights to NHL broadcasts. Now the league has found a new home on the Outdoor Life Network, which—while reaching 64 million homes—specializes in sporting events such as The Tour de France and the Professional Bull Riders. Additionally, the NHL’s lone major network agreement, with NBC, is a revenue-sharing deal only if NBC is able to turn a profit on those telecasts. Bringing people to their televisions will be just as difficult as bringing people to the rinks.
And here in Chicago, “Dollar Bill” Wirtz plans to stand by his asinine decision not to televise Blackhawks home games. The organization has formed an aggressive campaign to try and win back fans it alienated years ago, including having players hand out business cards to fans for free tickets and offering about 8,400 seats in the United Center for $15 or less.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and fans of the past will have to accept that the NHL tried things the old way, and the result was a disaster. Wednesday marks morning in the new NHL, and while the hearts and best intentions of fans of traditional hockey may believe their way is still marketable, the facts and evidence tell us that it is not.
