Learning to Share

Big showdown in the hockey blogosphere this week over attendance and non-traditional markets, with Tom Benjamin playing Prince of Darkness against usual foil Chuq von Rospach and dean of hockey bloggers Eric McErlain of Off Wing Opinion.

The battle actually started with Mike Chen, when he pointed out last week that the ebb-and-flow of attendance can be most easily explained by paying attention to the local team’s performance. Tom proceeded to cherry-pick statistics and work from absolute numbers rather than trends to get in as many slams on non-traditional hockey markets as he possibly could in a piece ironically titled Inconvenient Truths, and basically blew off the fact that the bottom end of the attendance figures correlates very closely with the bottom of the standings. Chuq tore him up, and Eric followed by challenging Tom to lay out his vision for a successful hockey league, as opposed to merely complaining about everything wrong (and a lot of things that aren’t) with the NHL.

Tom accepted Wednesday with his proposal for Canadian secession from the NHL. Far better than my initial response of a stream of obscenities, Eric responded with an eloquent appeal to history:

Part of me wishes I could pass Tom’s words onto some of the great Canadians who spent the better part of their professional lives trying to win a foothold for hockey in the United States. I’m talking about men like Lester Patrick and Art Ross. Men who left their homes North of the border and took on the challenge of selling the game in regions that had little or no history with it. I wonder what they’d think about Tom’s strategy. […] Then again, men like those loved the game so much, that they were committed to growing it no matter what the cost.

I’ve always found it curious that people like Tom, who claim to love hockey, choose to express it by aiming to strangle the game’s growth. Those guys Eric talks about — they’re heroes of the game because they succeeded in importing hockey to what were once foreign markets and now are considered core to the sport. (Even Tom acknowledges that he’d want those franchises back, once the American remnant league failed and they came bowing in supplication to their Canadian masters.)

Resurfacing

The definitive quote on blog disappearances has to go to Evan Kirchhoff of 101-280, from the title of his post last Wednesday:

I Never Quit, I Just Made 124 Unrelated Daily Decisions To Not Post Something

Well said. I only got into the twenties, but that’s long enough. Let’s review the past month.

• Toronto: quality trip, if too short. There’s nothing that beats going to see the Stanley Cup as a fan of the champs. Also notable was the dress code of the lower level at the Air Canada Centre during the Maple Leafs-Lightning game I attended: a truly shocking number of men in suit and tie. I recognize that (a) Leafs games are the gold standard of sporting event tickets in Canada, requiring both fantastic seniority and fantastic amounts of money to purchase season seats, and (b) Canadian business dress standards are rather more conservative than those in America. But even given that data, I would have expected some of the denizens of the yellow seats to have changed to team attire for the game, as I’ve seen in Montreal at the Canes-Habs games I’ve attended there. Nope — there were more ties there than in the Hoo student section for a football game these days.
• Holidays: fun, if a lot of driving. We did at least two hours of driving every day of Christmas week save Christmas itself and Saturday in Atlanta.
• Oh yeah, Atlanta: well, it was fun other than the fourth quarter! The QB position needs to be open in spring practice, but I think we underestimated how much of a road game this was. Glennon only played in two challenging road environments all season, Boston College and Miami, and his performance in this game showed it. He’s a sophomore, though. He’ll get better — or he’ll get benched.

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