One Fan's Perspective

Professional sports suffer from an image problem. We have athletes:

• who let dogs fight
• who implicates himself in crimes
• who fight in casinos
• who cheats to win races
• who connects himself to possible steroid involvement thus tarnishing a record that many thought would never be broken.

In addition, we even have an official “working” games so that his gambling interests could be realized.

Even Rick Tocchet was smarter than that.

The only scandal the NHL had this summer, was a couple of kids get too rowdy at their bachelor party and get caught. I would assert that they were arrested because of who they were. I’d wager that there are many of us that were placed in a similar situation and were lucky enough to avoid spending the night in jail. It’s fortunate that in the Staal party, no one got hurt.

So, one could reasonably think up an angle whereby getting the NHL to improve its reach into the United States television market by promoting the fact that we have wholesome athletes within our sport.

Even though I think hockey athletes have better characters overall than their professional counterparts, I assert that promoting a wholesome image is a bad idea. In fact, I would rather have our current situation now of being seen as the “fourth” professional sport (a distant one at that), than to have marketers choose an image that is next to impossible to uphold.

Because the minute the NHL launches a “watch the NHL, we’re good people” campaign, two situations will occur. Either the enemies of the NHL (what, enemies? pshaw!), will dig up stuff that shows the NHL in a very negative light, or someone will do something so stupid because he couldn’t help himself and doing so would push the NHL further back than we are now.

Instead the NHL’s reach to U.S. households could improve by:

• educating the fan base of the game
• creating television commercials with a national advertising campaign that feature hockey players and show them during times other than hockey games
• Influence advertising executives to push their sports related products using hockey players (it worked for Michael Jordan, right?)
• highlighting the personalities of NHL players and their community outreach programs
• create a syndicated NHL highlight show (a la This Week in Baseball or HBO’s Inside the NFL)
• create a production arm that resembles NFL Films and create highlights of NHL games that tell an incredible story of competition or choose to follow a team on the road(like…ahem…ESPN’s The Season)
• standardize the production value of televised games
• be involved in the grassroots hockey development systems (especially U.S. born players so that the young learners of the game here in the U.S. can see that the NHL can be a possibility)

I’m sure there are more ideas out there.

The NHL should avoid the temptation of marketing the wholesome value of the sport and its athletes. Because while it has been virtually quiet around the NHL, and the scandals mitigated, Greg Wyshynski points out there are image problems with the NHL too.

Tags: Hockey, NHL, Sports Industry, Sports Scandals by pbcoyotes
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Thanks to Kukla’s Korner, we learn that ESPN is talking with the NHL to bring hockey back to one of its channels. How nice. The ESPN family of networks left their relationship with the NHL because they could not justify programming a league with an undetermined period of possible inactivity. When the lockout concluded, they still didn’t want the NHL or its programming back and Versus (then OLN), picked up the ball…er puck…and ran…um skated away with it.

Say what you want about the Versus network, and I agree with the complaints of no one knows where to find the games, not all cable/satellite households carry the station, the schedule is not well known, and on and on, but they were the only national programming company in the States to regularly air hockey games. NBC had its coverage too, but they didn’t air the same amount of games due to their commitments with the NFL. Versus picked up the slack when the other sports network did not.

Due to the fact that they needed to fill air time, ESPN used to be that renegade sports network that showed anything remotely related to competition. Years later the channel morphed into a sister station of ESPN2, created ESPN News (because SportsCenter aired at very inconvenient times for most of the country), and even acquired a Classic Sports channel so that we return to the nostalgic times of sports yore.

Now Versus, who acquired college football programming rights, could be using the same model that ESPN used to use before they became corporate – schedule as many sports as possible and just maybe consumers would clamor their cable companies to add Versus thus increasing their Nielsen footprint.

After the NHL’s departure from ESPN, SportsCenter aired 29 fewer minutes of NHL highlights than they did in 2004, leading many to believe that if it’s not on ESPN, then it’s not sports. Now the influential World Wide Leader of Sports wants to return thus increasing hockey’s exposure.
So, in terms of economics, hockey then must relevant enough for ESPN to crawl back. The numbers prove it to be true: increased merchandise sales, and increased attendance.

What do I say when reading the news that ESPN is interested again? Big deal and thanks for helping out. ESPN did they real heavy lifting here, and we’re better now that ESPN wants to come back. [/sarcasm]

If were Versus, I would demand that in order to drop the exclusivity, ESPN must enter the same arrangement that it has with TNT and the NBA – cross promotion. Without that aspect to the deal, if I were running things at Versus, I would not give up exclusive rights that I negotiated to a league that was on life-support.

Clearly both parties, Versus and the NHL, needed something with the current business relationship, and that point is still taken with me. However, if I were risking my business model on anemic United States Nielsen ratings, whereby the NHL hasn’t solved to improve fan and viewer support, I would figure since I offered something to commissioner Gary Bettman that no other company did not, I should be thrown a bone here.

Therefore, if the NHL returns (and notably John Buccigross, and Barry Melrose with it), I guess Bill Simmons will begin to care after all.

Tags: Hockey, NHL, Sports Industry, Sports Media by pbcoyotes
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My brother and I used to coach high school softball. I was the JV coach of a highly successful varsity team where the head coach would state, “Winning is important. I’ll need two-to-four of your best players. Run my system and everything should work out fine.”

The head coach and I were pretty good friends, and we would spend hours talking strategy, softball, and sports. I hated the practices, like the athletes I coached, but liked the games. It was competition and I enjoyed it immensely. My brother kept me sane.

I had 23 athletes on the JV team, nine too many. So, when a particular player made several errors costing the team games, and since the mantra was to win, I had to bench some of them. One athlete that made three errors in one game lost the starting position. It was difficult process for everyone and I didn’t relish it in the slightest.

When I grew up, my dad taught us that there will be people who were better, and people who will be worse. The lesson was to keep us humble and to encourage us to do better.

So in the next game, I chose to sit the error-prone player on the bench. During that game, the parent of the athlete poked my brother (who sat at the other end of the bench) through the fence and yelled at him to put her kid back out there. She complained to the school, to my head coach, to my athletic director, but never spoke to me. To their credit, they all said, “Your child is not as good as you think,” but she never relented. It turned into a very trying season.

There are more examples like this one from that season, and because of those negative parents, it’s the primary reason I stopped coaching and I only lasted a year.

Parents can do a great deal of damage to young psyches, building them to be what they are not.

Now, imagine this scenario: Dad plays on a non-contact recreational hockey league and emotions get so heated that he swings a hockey stick, a la Chris Simon at another player. The injured player goes down, has convulsions on the ice, and has a major artery in his neck almost completely blocked; the artery blockage could have caused a stroke.

The response of the stick-swinging dad was only, “I hope he’s OK.“

He is a church going father of two. So, what lesson does that teach, exactly?

The former AHL player that was injured played his last hockey game, not because of his injuries, but because of what happened. There are many more examples of this type of thing happening, the Eric Francis article just caught my eye this morning.

It’s a shame that people forget that in competition, there is one thing that matters most in winning and losing…

It’s just a game.

Tags: Competition, Family Examples, Hockey, Sports Industry by pbcoyotes
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