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PLEASE NOTE: The Reality TV World Message Boards are filled with desperate
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"The glacier cliff: countdown to NHL season forfeiture."
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AyaK 10083 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Playboy Centerfold"
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12-27-12, 05:37 PM (EST)
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9. "Overexpansion" |
LAST EDITED ON 12-27-12 AT 05:42 PM (EST)The ongoing problem is one of Bettman's own making: overexpansion. The question is, how do you fix it? Hockey has expanded into a bunch of places with no hockey roots, such as Carolina, Florida and Phoenix. Let's look at home attendance as a percentage of capacity. 21 teams averaged over 95% of capacity in 2011-12. The others? 22 New Jersey 87.4% 23 Florida 86.6% 24 Anaheim 86.4% 25 Colorado 86.1% 26 Carolina 85.9% 27 NY Islanders 81.3% 28 Columbus 80.8% 29 Dallas 76.8% 30 Phoenix 72.5% These are also nine of the bottom 10 teams in per-game home attendance (the other being Winnipeg, which has a small arena for now). I don't care what Bettman does; these franchises are likely going to lose money from now until doomsday. The presence of Colorado on this list is disappointing, since no one thinks of Denver as a poor hockey market. It certainly appears that New York City can't accomodate three teams, since two of them (the Islanders and the Devils) are on this list. And the rest of these teams are just misplaced, especially Dallas, Phoenix and (I'm sorry to say) Columbus. Bettman needs to focus on getting hockey teams in hockey cities, instead of whatever con job he pulled to stick Phoenix with the Coyotes. Metro Toronto should have three teams, not Metro New York City. Until Bettman is willing to embrace a sensible re-pairing of teams and markets, nothing will fix the NHL's long-term problems. (P.S. I include the idiotic Donald Fehr among those long-term problems.)
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Estee 55195 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Playboy Centerfold"
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12-27-12, 07:33 PM (EST)
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12. "RE: Overexpansion" |
The U.S. government is by-and-large composed of idiots. Got it. Who sketched that boundary, Michael Crapo?
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Estee 55195 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Playboy Centerfold"
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12-21-12, 04:11 PM (EST)
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4. "Cup For Sale (Or Rent)" |
Just spotted this in a Bill Simmons mailbag column. Fair Using:"Q: When David Stern finally gets his way and Gary Bruce Bettman kills the NHL, what happens to Lord Stanley's Cup a.k.a. the greatest trophy in pro sports? Will it be rented out for parties? I know that I'd pay top dollar to spend a night drinking booze from it. Or maybe the NFL can buy it and rename it the Lord Stanley's Lombardi Cup. There are implications beyond losing a league and the best live experience from any American pro sport. We should really be planning the fate of the Stanley Cup now before Bettman starts using it as his personal outhouse. — Brandon, Sacramento SG: I like the idea of renting the Stanley Cup — if they charged $25,000 per night, with the caveat "The Stanley Cup cannot leave North America," how many nights could they sell off to wealthy people desperately trying to impress their friends? Maybe 200 or so? But I love the idea of another league buying the Cup. Why wouldn't the NBA (which currently has the worst trophy in professional sports) purchase it for $25 million as Stern's final dagger into the NHL's back nearly 20 years after planting his mole there? The NHL won't truly hit rock-bottom until it hawks the Cup — that would be the league's "Dirk Diggler jerking off in a church parking lot for 20 bucks" nadir. (Shouldn't a few NHL diehards steal the Cup and threaten to melt it by January 15 unless hockey comes back? At the very least, couldn't we make this idea into a sports movie? Like a cross between Ocean's Eleven, Ransom and Celtic Pride? This feels like Kevin Smith's next straight-to-cable comeback movie. I'd call it either Stealing Lord Stanley or Five Minutes for Kidnapping.)" I'll pay five dollars for an hour. And they'll never see it again.
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AyaK 10083 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Playboy Centerfold"
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12-26-12, 06:24 PM (EST)
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6. "RE: Cup For Sale (Or Rent)" |
The NHL doesn't own the Stanley Cup. It's actually controlled by a nonprofit trust governed under Canadian law. And I've been wondering if the trustees would award it to another North American team if the lockout causes the NHL season to be cancelled, consistent with the threat they made after the 2005 season was wiped out..
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Estee 55195 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Playboy Centerfold"
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12-26-12, 06:31 PM (EST)
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7. "RE: Cup For Sale (Or Rent)" |
I've seen discussion of awarding to the winners of the world amateurs -- but that's just sportswriters passing time. Handing it to the Frozen Four team will probably come up eventually, but I expect the NCAA to preemptively block it because they can.
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aethelstan 4348 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Jerry Springer Show Guest"
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01-02-13, 12:51 PM (EST)
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13. "RE: The glacier cliff: countdown to NHL season forfeiture." |
LAST EDITED ON 01-02-13 AT 12:52 PM (EST)yep. '94 mostly killed baseball for me but then when MLB wouldn't cough up 50K for September callups for the Expos in 2003 when they were in a tie for the lead in the Wild Card standings heading into September, that was the final straw Now I'm looking at a similar situation with hockey. Two lock-outs in 7 years. While I don't think they'll cancel the season, I am going to be less interested this year than in previous years. Given that I'm not an NFL guy or a baseball guy, there isn't a lot of choice for me out there. CFL is coming back to Ottawa but I'll take me a while to get interested in that again. However, in the past couple of years I've found that I'm spending a lot more time following the careers of Canadian golfers (such as Graham DeLaet, Brad Fritsch, David Hearn (and Weir, obviously)) and Canadian tennis players (Raonic, Wozniak, Nestor, Dubois, Marino and up and comers Peliwo, Bouchard, etc). Maybe it'll be that. But, only having a TV with rabbit ears means I can't get most sporting events on TV. Even the Brier isn't on free TV.
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Snidget 43862 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Playboy Centerfold"
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01-06-13, 11:35 AM (EST)
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15. "RE: Verbal agreement supposedly reached." |
See, threaten to replace them with poop hockey and all of a sudden they start communicating.
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AyaK 10083 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Playboy Centerfold"
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01-06-13, 02:15 PM (EST)
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16. "RE: Verbal agreement supposedly reached." |
The problem is, this new agreement doesn't fix what's wrong with NHL hockey, because there are still 30 teams, with a number of the teams located in inhospitable places. Perhaps -- just perhaps -- this agreement will help the marginal teams like Tampa Bay and Nashville enough so that they can survive. But this doesn't help Dallas and Phoenix, for example, one bit. Those teams just aren't going to survive in their current markets. And Don Fehr, no matter how much of an SOB he is, isn't the one responsible for those teams being in those places; Gary Bettman is. The NHL was victimized by a number of con men acquiring franchises during the last 20 years. That would never have happened if Bettman hadn't been trying to keep the owners solvent with expansion money. In 2013, the NHL finally has a core of responsible, solvent owners. But it won't last unless the NHL can find a way to fix its product location. I still remember the 1978-79 season, before the WHA merger brought in 3 more Canadian teams (Edmonton, Winnipeg and Quebec City), when a 17-team NHL had only 3 teams in Canada: Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. Detroit and Buffalo counted as "proxy" Canadian teams because of their location on the border, but that still showed a disregard for the importance of the real audience that was amazing. Today, there are still only 7 NHL teams in Canada: the only location change is that the Quebec City team is gone and there are teams in Calgary and Ottawa. Even taking the two border teams into account, that's too low a percentage in the main market. Bettman's mistake was in trying to position NHL teams to increase the chances of getting a national TV contract. After all, the NFL doesn't have a team in the U.S.'s second-largest city, but that doesn't affect its TV ratings. Anyway, now that Bettman has a solid TV partner in NBC (due to Comcast's takeover of NBC), he needs to focus on creating stable franchises in their home markets. -- even if those home markets are outside of the U.S.
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byoffer 15808 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Playboy Centerfold"
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01-07-13, 04:24 PM (EST)
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19. "RE: Verbal agreement supposedly reached." |
LAST EDITED ON 01-07-13 AT 04:35 PM (EST)Only 7 teams in Canada? Wait, didn't the Jim Ballsilly of RIM move Phoenix to Hamilton or Waterloo?? Contraction is the solution. The problem with teams in, say, Phoenix is lack of market for the product. The problem with adding more teams in smaller Canadian cities is that even if there is a population who will watch the games, there is not more corporate dollars to fund the teams (through adverising, corporate seats, etc). Canada's economy just isn't big enough. Sadly I think the NHL relies on a lot of ticket sales coming from corporations, and Canada's economy just won't support that in more markets. Here are population numbers for the largest Canadian cities: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_100_largest_urban_areas_in_Canada_by_population As expected, the top 7 have the 7 NHL teams. The next few on the list are not much smaller, but all would steal from existing team markets (Toronto, Buffalo, and most people in London cheer for the Red Wings I think). Just for reference, here is a similar list for the US. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population If the number can be trusted - is Boston really smaller than Hamilton?? But this actually proves my point that even if the Boston population is similar in size to Hamilton, the economy is probably 20x the size.
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PepeLePew13 24731 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Playboy Centerfold"
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01-07-13, 04:43 PM (EST)
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20. "RE: Verbal agreement supposedly reached." |
Boston is more or less the same city size as Hamilton (575,000-600,000), but the metropolitan area is around 4 million or so. There's Lexington, Cambridge, Quincy, Framington, Peabody, Salem, etc. etc. etc. that are big places on their own within the Boston area, plus you could theoretically stretch the metropolitan area to include Providence, Worcester and Manchester, which stretches the population of the greater area to 7 or 8 million.That's certainly far, far more than the Hamilton area which is considered to be part of the Maple Leafs' primo area. Still, while Boston would have 20x Hamilton's economy, I think there's a greater percentage of people who would call themselves true-blood hockey fans and would be able to support a second team on the outskirts of the greater area, i.e. the Hamilton-Guelph-London triangle that includes Kitchener, Waterloo and Brantford (Gretzky's hometown).
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AyaK 10083 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Playboy Centerfold"
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01-08-13, 01:58 AM (EST)
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23. "RE: Verbal agreement supposedly reached." |
I tend to doubt that there aren't enough businesses to support a team in the Hamilton-Guelph-London area. I remember the old days of the NBA, when you couldn't get businesses to sponsor teams for love nor money. Frankly, that was because no one cared about the NBA before the "great breakthrough": the Bird-Magic rivalry, followed by the rise of Jordan.The real issue for the NBA, though, was that no one was buying tickets. It's hard to believe, but NBA teams didn't always play in front of Jack Nicholson, Spike Lee and their ilk. They used to think they were fortunate just to sell out. Well, that's not an issue that a Hamilton-Guelph-London team would have. Add on the national sponsors who would want to show up on Hockey Night in Canada, and there wouldn't be any problems for a franchise there. Of course, the RIM people are no longer in a financial position to afford a franchise, but there are plenty of rich people in the area who would like their own franchise to show Larry Tanenbaum that it doesn't take sane people 40 years to build a winner.
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AyaK 10083 desperate attention whore postings DAW Level: "Playboy Centerfold"
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01-17-13, 12:08 PM (EST)
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26. "RE: Verbal agreement supposedly reached." |
The largest U.S. sports advertiser (by far) was Anheuser-Busch. Formerly HQed in St. Louis. Now part of AB InBev, HQed in Leuven, Belgium. That makes a difference in terms of political pressure and in terms of charitable contributions. But it shouldn't make a difference to corporate advertising.
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