Some of the stuff being said here about the Olympics I find laughable at best. But since neither side will
Ever concede or change their intrenched stance ( that includes stubborn me) it is really quite pointless to argue the matter any further. I will offer this to the discussion, a significant portion of the premium players in the NHL are not from the rinks of North America and therefore not part of the North American program Bettman allegedly has achieved during his reign. They are in fact financed and trained by respective hockey Federation from a plethora of different countries and then snatched up by the NHL to quite a low premium. These Federations of course want to See their best players in the Olympics as it feeds the system that in the End feeds them. Like it or not this has a huge positive impact on the quality of play in the NHL and also allows the league to ice 30 teams of sustainable quality. What would the NHL look like today without the European influx of high end talent??? Cannot have the cake and eat it too. Regarding the. Corruption of the IOK as an organization and their handling of the label professional
in the past - I can only chime in and agree to all the critical points that have been made in this thread on the matter. But when it comes down to it and most importantly - a large majority of the players themselves vehementally want to play The Olympics as this is heavily prized as a special event in their careers that is hard to beat. From all nations. How do I know this you might ask? I know dozens of hockey players that have participated here (my own brother was on the preliminary squad for Team USA to the Albertville Olympics but broke his foot in a pretournament game and did not go) and almost all of them have the Olympic participation as a highlight of their career. Many Gold Medal winners here - from many countries - value that medal higher than a Stanley Cup ring. Like it or not, that is the con census of the players attitude and as long as that is the norm they will be fighting to participate in these games in The future. And they will most likely get their way. And I really think that many of the owners also see the benefit. Otherwise we are back at the cattle and Rancher argument... Which of course is something which everybody fan can support but hardly live after in the reality of their own lives...
Agreed, the positive effects is not something you can touch on and the benefits are to some extent contingent on factors that we never will know for sure.
As a starting point, the game is doing fairly well in the US, but well enough? Maybe maybe not. Outside NA, the game is definitely suffering in several of the traditional markets (Czech Rep, Slovakia and Sweden) and coming along but slowely outside the traditional markets.
The Olympics are huge outside NA and, in the US, it can be questioned how big it will be (and I mean, who knows, maybe the US and Russia are indirectly in war with each other in Syria 3.5 months from now, who knows what impact that would have. A US-Rus final with Putin is in the stands?). Its a lottery ticket too in a postive way.
The NHL was really attractive in Europe 15-20 years ago. In Sweden, you had like 5% of the population check the NHL scores on text-tv the first thing they did every morning of the season. How many pts did Forsberg scored? We have state radio here, and I remember constantly hearing NHL scores on the -- main -- news in the morning when I grew up.
Forsberg scored 2+1 tonight, and now leads the NHL in scoring.
It was the same thing in the Czech Rep and Slovakia.
But the NHL could -- not -- capitalize on that. The technology wasn't there. The games was played night time, few had any cable-tv to talk about. In 99' a few NHL games was played on national TV on sunday night (there were much fewer afternoon games back then). I remember how one of our games (Could it have been against Montreal? It was one of Gretz last games) had a viewing of 800k (20 pecent of all households) and the game started 10.30pm local time on a Sunday.
Now, within three years (I guess) the NHL will have CenterIce in Europe, and anyone will be able to watch any game they want at any time of the day in any form they want.
The NHL and hockey have lost a substansial amount of the glare it had in Europe. For many reasons (I recon the evil Soviets aren't part of the game anymore, Soccer has grown tremendously with the Champions League being unimaginably popular right now, just a thing like the NHL players 10 years ago being the best paid athleets in Europe helped the game, they made more than the biggest soccer stars, hence the public respect them more, but now they probably make like from a 10th to 25% of the absolute best paid soccer players).
But no matter what, you gotta take into account that the NHL got a big market to exploit in Europe. How much money comes from Europe to the NHL today? Its hard to appriciate, but I would be suprised if all in all its equal to one NHL team or 3%. Is it 0.5% or 0.05%? I don't think its completely insignificant (you got people travling to NA buying tickets etc, TV money, merchendise, and advertisements that include Europe in their number to some extent atleast). I am not saying that its reasonable for the NHL to expect like 10% or 20% or 50% to come from Europe, but equal to one team shouldn't be impossible within a reasonable time frame to be honest. Thats 400.000 people gathering 125 bucks a year. If you get local commercials into games etc, it piles up pretty fast.
