One Fan's Perspective

There is an inherent risk when a coach kicks his team. The team can respond positively and kick back by thrashing its opposition, or the team can become more fragile and more frustrated. What the Coyotes saw last night was the latter version.

Columbus Blue Jackets head coach Ken Hitchcock ran his guys on Sunday and called out players, replaced goaltenders, and had this perpetual scowl that would make Captain Kangaroo look downright evil.

The Coyotes took advantage of the situation, ran them down as well, and set the tone for the homestand. They are making Jobing.com arena a very difficult place to play and the Blue Jackets didn’t have an answer.

After Radim Vrbata scored the fourth goal of the night, his 12th of the season, Jared Boll wanted to take his frustrations out on the winger that is smaller than him and does not fight. Instead of waiting for Paul Bissonette to come out on a later shift, he found the next forward he saw.

I got to hand it to Martin Hanzal – he took a beating, but he stepped up for his teammate. The problem was though, that was not his role.

The book that enlightened me on such encounters The Code: The Unwritten Rules of Fighting and Retaliation in the NHL. I contend that Boll violated that code last night – most likely because he didn’t want to face Bissonette again. He left it up to Marc Methot to clean the issue up for him.

Thanks for Hockeyfights.com, we have video of the bout between Hanzal and Boll. Pay particular attention to Hanzal as toward the end it looked like he was about to capitulate (the linesmen should have stepped in there but were a few seconds too late):

I contend that Hanzal’s injuries were due to him not removing his visor, but he’s not a fighter…never has been a fighter…he does not know to do that.

Also understand that I feel that Hanzal was a willing combatant, he stepped up to Boll for running at Vrbata (which would have ended up being a scrum and nothing else), and Hanzal picked the wrong time and the guy to fight.

However, my concerns don’t stop there.

In today’s game, if someone hits someone else cleanly, it also starts a fight. Possibly the purpose was to respond to the earlier altercation, but when Bissonnette hit the Blue Jackets player, Marc Methot instigated the next bout.

What’s the problem? The hit was hard, fast, and clean. No fight should have taken place. Bissonnette though was more than willing to oblige. Methot clearly looked out of place on this one, but if these guys are going to continue this aspect of the game, Boll was the one who needed to answer the bell, not anyone else.

For the Columbus Blue Jackets, the picture is far larger though than the code questions, the fighting questions, and the conduct on the ice. Their head coach worked them over and they couldn’t respond. Plus, I don’t think the team is very tight as well. Methot knew the situation and chose to respond, but why not Boll? Sometimes, team meetings don’t work out as planned – the Coyotes had several of them last year.

It might be that Mr. Hitchcock should find a better way to motivate his team than by killing them the day before. Sure, these are grown men, but psychology plays a huge role in determining what method works better than others.

It sure looks as though Coyotes coach Dave Tippett has figured it out.

Tags: Columbus Blue Jackets, Hockey, NHL by pbcoyotes
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I heard about this situation last night and Heather McWhorter over at Reflections from the Yotes Diva picked it up from TSN.ca as well, but it appears that Ice Edge Holdings is ready to close the deal.

To write that this is good news would be truly an understatement.  The attendance situation, in my mind, is a direct result of not having an ownership group (the control by the NHL has helped, but it’s not the same) willing to revitalize the brand in the Valley.  Having the Coyotes post a winning record so far hasn’t hurt either.

There are many casual fans out there wondering about the ownership issue and unwilling, at this point, to plunk down cash and invest in a team that, in their minds, “might be gone anyway.”

Darryl Jones said it best with this quote,

“(Fans need to)really believe definitively that the team is not leaving, to be able to open up their hearts again.”

Word….er so true.

People like Heather who fought back against the nay sayers that hockey can’t work here, to the point of setting up a website and an organization to keep everyone focused on the goal.

Or OdinMercer at Five for Howling who, along with Heather, went to court proceedings and reported it for everyone to read, and also had to fight back against those other groups up north that like Schadenfreude.

Or over at Hip Shot where hockey is a passion because it’s the greatest sport on the planet.

Or the other Coyotes blogs that after a summer of potential despair, they can now find even more reasons to be happy, especially as their team is winning.

Note, that I’m not ready to proclaim this as a done deal – far from it.  When they sign the paperwork and take control is only when I will really sigh a relief, because I didn’t want them to go either – I still remember the times when I wondered if I was the only fan of the Coyotes in the blogosphere.

All I’m writing now about this development is that it’s a cool thing to see some movement, and to see some interest in a team that is playing exceptional hockey.  Hopefully, if it does go through, they’ll find ways to generate interest and promote the team that is performing ahead of expectations.

Because hockey can work here.

Tags: Coyotes Hockey Blogs, Financials, Hockey, Ice Edge Holdings, NHL, Phoenix Coyotes by pbcoyotes
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My apologies to Sting.

The remarkable issue from last night’s game against the Ottawa Senators is not the fact the Coyotes have a four game winning streak, second one of the season, or that they finally beat the Senators (the last time coming in 2002), or that they are six games above .500 (sixth in the conference), or even the fact that this time last year they were a measly 13-14-2.  No, it’s not any of those things.

What we had was that a team that has been in financial trouble twice in their history, playing against another that has had the same misfortune.

Can you guess which one is which?

Well, if you are aware of history (see the link above – whether the song fits, I don’t care, I just liked it), the Ottawa Senators, as a hockey franchise has been around a long time.  Sure, the new version was the result of expansion (some say southern) of 1992 that brought the Tampa Bay Lightning into the NHL at the same time.  However, the Ottawa Senators has been around for many, many decades.

Starting with the NHL in its inception, as history will tell us, that the Senators were around long before the NHL was a figment of anyone’s imagination; the Ottawa Senators helped found the league back in 1917.  They were a pretty successful franchise having won multiple Stanley Cups between 1918 – 1927.

Then, disaster struck.  In the first expansion to the United States, coupled with an economic depression, the Ottawa Senators could not turn a profit and ended up closing the team in 1934, and would not be resurrected until 1992.

The economic conditions still did not improve, even with the newly formed Senators.  The Senators were a very competitive team, but then it turns out that they filed for bankruptcy protection in 2003.  It looks like they were having attendance issues then as well.  It didn’t matter if the team was winning or losing, people just didn’t want to come see the Senators play.  The team was a complete financial mess.

Eugene Melnyk rescued the team by purchasing them soon after the club entered bankruptcy, and the links between these two franchises, the Senators and the Coyotes, continue to grow thicker.

Jim Balsillie, the Canadian businessman who wanted to uproot the Coyotes and transport them to Canada, had thoughts about the Ottawa Senators as well.  We learned this summer that Balsillie tried the same tactics that he used with the Coyotes with the Senators.  Eugene Melnyk felt then that Balsillie was not conducting himself properly noting,

“And I told him right off the bat that I thought it was … that it’s not the way you go about things. There’s a professional way. You meet other owners, you get to know the business, but you don’t … I don’t think you knock the door down to try to get a team.

“I think the way they have gone about it has got to be the most bizarre way of trying to enter professional sports.”

quoted in The Star

So, what happened?  Four years later, the Senators went to the Stanley Cup Finals only to lose in five games to the Anaheim Ducks.  Could that happen here?  Not sure, but anything is possible.  The best part is the Coyotes have been playing excellent hockey and may be the NHL’s best kept secret.

What still persists is the perception that the market does not work down here.  Well, it initially didn’t work in Ottawa either, but that team didn’t move anywhere.  It would have been extra painful if it had.  For some reason though, the critics don’t seem remember those times, the time when the Canadiens were struggling, the Senators, the Canucks, and so on and so on.

When the Coyotes arrived here, they were in the playoffs, the building was full (even when it wasn’t built very well for hockey), and people had a buzz about the team.  Now?  Losing breeds contempt and the casual fans don’t want to be jilted again.  Couple that with a horrible economy that Arizona has, the situation gets even more bleak.

Canada lost two of their teams to the lower 48, the Quebec Nordiques and the Winnipeg Jets.  Now, with a franchise that had history, that had a renewal, it looked very bleak and it could have changed the business of hockey.  Commissioner Gary Bettman didn’t wrangle the Ottawa Senators from the market, he waited until the situation resolved itself.  With Melnyk, it had.

These articles north of the border documenting the attendance woes of the Coyotes franchise doesn’t help matters in changing the perception (of course, fans filling the building would help more).  What’s lacking down here is an owner because thanks to Balsillie and company, they wrecked what was already a challenging market.  The fans need to know that they are staying here and the only way to insure that is to have an owner to purchase the team with that commitment in mind.

The best thing that the players can do is to continue winning hockey games.

Tags: Financials, Gary Bettman, Hockey, Jim Balsillie, NHL, Ottawa Senators, Phoenix Coyotes, Sports Industry by pbcoyotes
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