Wade, Frank, and I have used this space in the past to express our love for professional hockey, in particular for our hometown Buffalo Sabres. This past summer, the NHL announced that on January 1, 2008, the Sabres will play the Pittsburgh Penguins on an outdoor ice surface at Ralph Wilson Stadium, home of the NFL's Buffalo Bills. (The Sabres typically play their home games at HSBC Arena, which holds about 16,500 people). There's been a pretty solid buzz about this event in both Buffalo and Pittsburgh since news came out that it was in the works.
Tickets for the event went on sale this morning at 10am. Considering the size of Ralph Wilson Stadium (about 75,000 capacity), I figured I could afford to wait until my classes ended at 3pm to call my friends and order tickets. As it turns out, the tickets sold out in 14 minutes.
While I was surprised about how quickly the tickets went, I'm pretty confident I can scrounge up tickets between now and then. And while I generally think that outdoor games are both a nice homage to hockey's roots and a good for publicity purposes, I feel like the NHL is totally screwing the pooch on this, and their ineptitude speaks to larger issues of why the popularity of hockey has declined so greatly in America over the past decade.
(1) The NHL - not the teams - organized sales of tickets. Out of the approximately 75,000 available seats, only 42,000 were available for sale to Sabres and Penguins fans today. The rest are reserved for Sabres season ticket holders (fair enough), friends and family of the players (fair enough), Buffalo Bills Club Level season ticket holders (hmm...), Toronto Maple Leafs season ticket holders (wtf?), and Toronto Blue Jays season ticket holders (oh HELL no).
I understand that Toronto is a big hockey town - perhaps the biggest - and it's relatively close to where the game is being played, but fuck that. In a league suffering from fan apathy/lack of attendance, Buffalo and Pittsburgh currently have two of the most devoted/rabid fan bases in the league - why antagonize them by giving tickets to their biggest regular season game to fans from Toronto?
(2) Further, on Ticketmaster this morning, the NHL placed no limits on the number of tickets an individual could buy with any particular order. While there are obviously ways around such restrictions, at least it would have taken some work get around them. I can only wonder how many people signed onto Ticketmaster this morning, bought a shitload of tickets, and plan to sell them at inflated prices on EBay and Craig's List for the next three months. Awesome.
(3) The date of the game: why January 1st? Does this make any fucking sense at all? First off, contrary to popular belief, it hasn't been below freezing on New Year's Day in Buffalo for a few years now, which is a problem, considering they need to sustain a large sheet of ice outdoors for 4 hours. On the weather front, late January or early February would have been a much better call.
Also, if the NHL is trying to expand it's viewership, why place its most important game of the regular season on a day which EVERY sports fan across America reserves solely for watching college football bowl games? At this point bowl games on New Year's Day are the new NFL on Thanksgiving - how the NHL doesn't realize this is absolutely beyond me.
PS - While it breaks my heart that Chris Drury won't be wearing a Sabres uniform next season, I wanted to post this to show you why I can't wait to be in a stadium with 75,000 other Sabres fans (also, why Rick Jeanerette is the most exciting sports announcer out there).
Video evidence:
4 comments:
you guys got hosed in free agency. you should kill you GM and maybe your owner. i understand putting the penguins in this game. but arent you guys going to suck this year? why not have them play detroit if you are trying to do a "two american teams" thing? i think they are less concerned about TV than about finding some other time when 75,000 people have the time to watch hockey. and welcome to the hatred of toronto. it is a big club in canada, and i am glad to see some US membership. the NHL is in toronto's pocket, which makes it all the funnier that they lose every year. drop me an email if you want to join a good fantasy hockey box league full of canadians.
The Drury/Briere situation was obviously ridiculous, and the subsequent overpaying of Thomas Vanek almost as bad. It's a shame, because Sabres management had been so good in recent years, to the point that ESPN rated them the best franchise in any major sport just a few months ago.
Will we suck this year? I guess it depends on your definition of "suck." We pretty clearly won't have the most points in the league this season, but I still think this is a playoff team (maybe a 5 or 6 seed) if we can avoid injuries. We still have a number of good young front-line players, one of the league's best goalies, and a coach who has proven very resilient when faced with significant personnel changes in the past.
Also, I think at least part of the point is to have a big TV audience, and I think the main justification for picking Pittsburgh due to Sidney Crosby's marketability.
And the Toronto thing - uncle. So retarded. I don't think it was even that many tickets if I remember correctly, but it's more the principle of the thing.
All you need to know about the decline in hockey's popularity is that, in 1993, Snoop Dogg wore a Pittsburgh Penguins jersey in the "Gin and Juice" music video.
Think about that for a minute - one of the coolest guys in America, a young black guy from a city with almost no history of professional hockey, wore the jersey of a hockey team that played 2500 miles away. Today, nobody follows the NHL outside of Canada, with the exceptions of the cities of Buffalo and Pittsburgh and the states of Minnesota and Michigan. Its too bad, really, because hockey is way too good of a sport to languish in obscurity like it has in recent years.
com on. it was because the pens have a black-dominated color scheme. do you think a californian Dr. Dre really enjoyed the big-hurt-era white sox enough to name check them.
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