Hockey is the only sport where I see this trend of people being upset about growth........with hockey, it's like "Screw you desert-dwelling cactus jockeys, or tropical palm-tree humpers, you don't DESERVE hockey!"
I know the Jets and Nordiques leaving play a large part of that, but SUCCESSFULLY GROWING the league allows it to GROW AGAIN. It makes absolutely ZERO SENSE to be rooting for anything other than Tempe jamming thru an arena deal, get the shovel in the ground and get the Coyotes a new building ASAP. Because Florida, Carolina and Nashville have been playoff teams the last few years, Tampa's going for a three-peat, Vegas was a breakout success and Seattle sold out every ticket this year.
Ain't no way I'm typing everything out that
I typed in this thread again because I know you read it. And this post, just like that one requires a
TL;DR: I'm not rooting for the Tempe project to go forward or not go forward but if you're tired of generalizations about fans in non-trad markets, maybe stop generalizing that every "traditional" fan automatically must think you don't "deserve" hockey just because they have a different perspective from you.
While I'm very sympathetic to fans in non-traditional markets, they make a lot of mistakes that irritate me to the point of wanting to throw a laptop through a television screen and then setting both on fire...
1--- Saying "growing the game" is good as an ipso factor and assuming anyone who doesn't agree is EEEEVVVVVVIIIIIILLLLLLLLLLLLL. If you believe that (
I happen to believe it myself, actually), that's great. But a lot of non-traditional fans just love to pull it out like an ace card without acknowledging that A) there might be other ways to grow the sport besides simply putting NHL teams in markets that don't care about it and B) that not everyone has to agree that the main objective of the NHL should be to grow the game. And that doesn't make those people rotten fans or bad people. Just people that disagree.
It's become an inside joke between me and my brother to say "This grows the game!" whenever we see a sports related business development that we don't feel like extrapolating on, no matter the sport. The joke essentially being about how people throw it out as some sort of argument stopper like "if you're not down with growing the game, then you're with the terrorists!!!"
2--- It's never fully explored or extrapolated if teams with consistently low attendance actually hurt growth more than help it by essentially downgrading the sport. Again, it's just taken as ipso facto that the Coyotes are a success "because Auston Matthews": Congratulations sport of hockey, exactly *one* superstar player that can't ever get out of the first round is your reward for a team bleeding buckets of money for a quarter of a century...that doesn't make this sport look bush league at all!!!.
Much of this "must have NHL in <insert non-traditional market, Arizona in this case> or sport won't grow" defense is rooted in fear that if the team relocates, the league's not ever coming back (
understandable) and that sports leagues should probably try to minimize relocation anyway (
otherwise you have chaos, also understandable). But think for a moment...
Imagine a universe where the Tempe arena doesn't happen and the Coyotes move: Does that necessarily have to kill growth of the sport in Arizona? What if they moved to Houston (even more southwest) and got better management, were more competitive, played in a packed arena that actually came across exciting on television (
see Point 3)? Given that TV ratings are negligble in Arizona now, wouldn't that improve the odds of a casual sports viewer wanting to flip their game on, instead of turning on a half-empty arena that might be in their town but has all the atmosphere of an AHL game? Again, not necessarily saying this is true but I feel like it never gets explored. It's all just "
must have team in this city and it
must be the major league version of the sport or else city will never get into said sport." Hell, if that's the attitude we have to take, must suck to be a soccer fan in the U.S. since apparently the only way anyone is going to get into that sport is the Premier League moves half of its teams over to the United States......
3--- To the post I made on the Quebec thread, for traditional fans but *especially* for Canadians, it's not a matter of who "deserves" the NHL, etc. but one thing that definitely hurts is when the sport isn't treated in every NHL city like the major league sport we see it for. Things like "you gotta see it in person to understand it" (
that's the type of *#!& that people say about novelty sports...we don't see hockey as a novelty sport and get offended at those that do and by people who profess to be "huge hockey fans" that yet also see it as such). Things like a packed arena for a Stanley Cup victory but a parade a fraction of the size that the other Big 3 sports would attract.
It's not even a matter of people from cities like Quebec City being offended......if you come from a small northern American or Canadian city (think population less than 100K), you know you're not getting a major league version of anything and you're fine with it. But boy, you daydream about what it would be like if your town could have it and how it would appreciate it. The least you expect from your favourite sport is that every city that *does* have such a team has enough residents that truly appreciate that privilege. It's like being the ugliest guy in school that knows you can't date the prom queen....but if you really adore the prom queen, you still want her to have a boyfriend that will respect her and understand what he has in her.
The sport of hockey and even the Stanley Cup specifically are huge parts of our heritage so forgive us if we take it slightly personally when we see a city get 25+ years with a franchise most of our cities would love to have, only to see it be treated as an afterthought. That kind of **** can get to you after a number of decades.
So yeah, again: blah blah blah, I went on and on (I'm the worst messageboard interloper of all time because I type like I talk: I never shut up). But yeah, we have the JMROWE cranks of the board that are just "get it out of Phoenix at any cost" but there are plenty of people that would love this franchise to go elsewhere that aren't evil maple-syrup guzzling Don Cherry sycophants sticking pins in Coyotes voodoo dolls. Many of them just think there's a better way: for *both* the NHL and hockey fans in Phoenix. If someone like Stealth1 posts that "the US has never cared for hockey and they never will," you don't have to automatically make the leap from that to "Stealth1 hates Americans that want more hockey, writ large." He's no more anti-American than someone who says "Brits have never cared for the NFL and never will" is anti-British.
And yeah, to reiterate: don't care if the Tempe project moves forward or not. But if it *does* move forward, I hope it's a rousing success.
That lying weasel and his evil ne'er-do-well minions who made the game so much more popular than it was in Colorado, Dallas, Orange county, Tampa, Nashville, Las Vegas, Columbus, Seattle...and yes even Miami and Phoenix.
