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.)

Carolina's Cup flies high

Thanks to David, I managed a ticket to last night’s sold-out NHL season opener in Raleigh, where the Carolina Hurricanes raised their 2005-06 Stanley Cup banner before falling 3-2 to the Buffalo Sabres in a shootout. Doing ten hours of driving in a twenty-four hour span becomes a worse idea every time I try it, but some things are worth the misery afterwards.

It’s the beginning of the season, and both teams’ play reflected that. Carolina was moving pretty quickly at the beginning of the first, and registered an 11-1 shot disparity early, but didn’t have many good chances out of that flurry; when they did, Sabres goaltender Ryan Miller stood tall. Though neither team was in midseason technical form, the competitive level picked up where the Eastern Conference finals left off just four months ago.

Of Carolina’s new acquisitions:

• Tim Gleason earned the second star, and justifiably so. He was all over the ice with speed and didn’t look out-of-sync with this teammates even on four days’ practice. I’m still hesitant on the Jack Johnson trade, but if Gleason becomes a key to this team making another deep playoff run, Jim Rutherford will look pretty smart again.
• Eric Belanger will take more time to evaluate. Fast forwards tend to look bad early in their tenure with a new team, because their excess speed puts them further out of position before they understand what their teammates are doing; Justin Williams had this problem for several months in 2003-04. Style-wise, he fits this club, but he needs to find a steady line and learn his wingers’ tendencies.
• Scott Walker came advertised as a heart-and-soul guy, and two high-defensive-zone blocks did nothing to shake that reputation.
• Trevor Letowski looked like the generic third-line forward he is. I suspect either he or Walker will be trade bait when Cory Stillman returns in December.
• David Tanabe has been a polarizing figure on the message boards, and Wednesday night won’t change that. Positionally he was OK, but I counted at least three times in his zone when he dodged contact. I’m going to pay close attention to him on Saturday night in Washington against a harder-hitting team; how he handles the Caps will help me decide whether, like David, I’d rather give Anton Babchuk the slot.

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Chris Pronger and culpability

What’s this button up here to the left… oh, hey! I have a blog! Maybe I should post something on it.

Chris Pronger is one of the top three defensemen in the National Hockey League. Last summer, he signed a five-year contract in Edmonton after playing eight seasons in St. Louis, and marrying a St. Louis native during that time. After leading the Oilers to within a game of the Stanley Cup with nary a hint of discontent, Pronger requested a trade for “personal reasons” and explained no more; the most credible sources available suggested that his wife didn’t take well to moving 350 miles north of Montana. Edmonton fans reacted viscerally to this news, suggesting marital infidelity all the way up to a rumor Pronger had impregnated a local TV reporter that she was eventually forced to denounce on her own website. Pronger eventually got his trade to the Anaheim Ducks, but Edmonton didn’t do badly on the deal, pulling in rising star forward — and hometown boy — Joffrey Lupul.

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Loyalties and Motivations

I could have been a Mets fan. In late 1988, I took notice of Gregg Jefferies (talk about mistakes) as the Richmond Braves’ season ended, after seeing baseball in person for the first time that summer. For Halloween, I demanded to be the Mets’ rookie shortstop, and my mom dutifully ironed a number 9 onto the back of the pinstriped shirt we had bought in the mall a few months before. A year later, though I would decry the injustice of Jerome Walton winning the National League Rookie of the Year award, I really couldn’t have cared less about the pride of Flushing, Queens. I was a nine-year-old kid. Easy come, easy go, I guess.

Sports team loyalty is like that. Though people try to establish rules for sports fandom, the actual practice of choosing and holding an allegiance varies quite a bit. Just take a look at the hockey blogs riffing on this theme:

• Penalty Killer Chris kicking off the topic, with his team loyalties following a combination of parental and personal moves
• Abel to Yzerman demanding some geographic loyalty, after seeing too many out-of-state Wings fans line up with the Yankees, Cowboys and Lakers to boot
• Acid Queen (from whom I found the topic) just asking for honesty about your motivations

So here goes. Read More »

Can't believe it

The next time I do this…

I’ll be wearing red.

Carolina Hurricanes
2006 Stanley Cup Champions