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OUTBOUND
CHICAGO
RETURN
Number of NHL-capable arenas in Phoenix: 1 (AWA, while nowhere near ideal, was an order of magnitude less bad than Winnipeg Arena)
Number of ownership groups with a plausible business plan in Winnipeg: 0
As I've said over and over, the best comparison for the Jets' situation in 1995 is that of the Seattle SuperSonics in 2006 (pre-Bennett purchase). The fans were more or less present, although not exactly filling their small, outdated arena for some bad hockey teams. Civic willingness to spend money on a modern arena, though, was not.
And that's what makes the continuing "Phoenix stole Canada's team, let's steal it back" narrative so infuriating. It's a pile of ahistorical assertions (and the usual gross misunderstanding of Gary Bettman's actual job) stacked chest high, leavened with ignorance of the demographic stagnation-to-decline of the Canadian prairie, and topped off with misguided triumphalism. Those of us in remaining Sun Belt markets will have to batten down the hatches for more of the same, too. Monday's Ken Campbell column tossing out half-baked assertions about LA and Carolina ownership turnover was just a foretaste.
]]>A hockey game cannot be sliced easily into a series of short events, like ski or luge runs, figure skating programs or speedskating races. If the network cannot chop a sport into two-to-five-minute elements framed with a lot of ads, it is not likely to be shown from 7 p.m. to midnight.
A hockey game lasts at least two and a half hours. NBC never spends two and a half hours on any sport during the Winter or Summer Games.
The catch is that NBC doesn't pay a price for this against the credibility of its mainstream sports programming, because NBC has no such long-term sports programming to speak of. One NFL game a week and the dying gasps of Notre Dame football -- that's it. NBC presents as little NHL hockey as it can possibly get away with, selecting from a seven-team menu, and abuses Wimbledon fans nearly as badly as it does hockey fans.
]]> At this point, I'm openly rooting for ESPN/ABC to win the U.S. Olympic rights, despite my concern with their dominance of the country's sports media landscape and the mistreatment they give competing properties. The reason is that credibility in sports coverage is their raison d'être -- they have to present a sporting event as a sporting event, or risk staining other, valuable properties of theirs. Mainline ABC can still have a clip show similar to NBC's current programming. But I'd expect ESPN to use its other six-plus channels (most of which are or will be available nationwide in HD) to run all event coverage live in its entirety, preserving the integrity of the events, and source its mainline live cut-ins (if timezones allow) or extended highlights packages from these.Event embargoes, though, should be gone in the ESPN/ABC Olympic world, and for that we all would be thankful. Embargoes insult every viewer who takes more than a casual interest in the competition -- and ESPN, unlike NBC, needs these people to be happy once the flame is doused and the flag put away.
]]>Abuse of the presidential bully pulpit aside, I think replacing the BCS with a playoff would destroy college football as we know it. In my perception, three distinct constituencies want a playoff for mostly distinct reasons:
Group one we can give a pass to. They're operating on pure self-interest. The others, though? Not so much.
Be that as it may, I still wanted to get as much connected use out of these guys as I could. So, here's what I've found that this combination can and can't do, categorized by appearance on the Garmin.
Eric Staal (with 06 SCF patch or 2006+ with assistant captain's A), Rod Brind'Amour (2005+ with captain's C), Erik Cole (any age, male wearer): you are a Carolina Hurricanes fan with enough money to invest in a personalized jersey.
Ron Francis, Staal/Brind'Amour (older): the Igor Larionov-in-3OT flashbacks never really go away, but 2006 made them a lot easier to deal with.
Erik Cole (female wearer): helLOOOOOOOO, puck bunny!
Cam Ward: you are eight or nine years old, and your parents have been told that he's the grandson of a preacher and a good role model. Your parents know little about hockey, though, and even less of the common mental state of goaltenders. This will come back to bite them when you reach high school.
Tuomo Ruutu: you'd had your eye on it for about a year, but finally committed the $180 and retired your old Cole jersey to the attic a week before the 2009 trade deadline.
Chad LaRose: look, buddy, when you're 275 pounds, you shouldn't buy a jersey that makes people wonder whether you ate the midget that made it famous.
Justin Williams: you've had season tickets for several seasons, you kept the faith through the lean years, gritted your teeth through injury after injury to your boy, and this is how JR rewards you? People trying to sneak hard liquor through the security checkpoint should ask you for advice.
Brandon Sutter: this isn't your first jersey purchase, and you've watched a lot of hockey. Problem is, nobody who sees you at the rink knows whether the one hanging in your closet is Tanabe (bad) or Dineen (good).
Joe Corvo: Italian or from Fayetteville, quite possibly both. Far, far more willing to resort to physical violence than Corvo himself is on the ice.
Jussi Jokinen: you moved to Raleigh and/or discovered the existence of hockey in the spring of 2009 -- or there's a bit of repressed Dallas Stars fandom in you. You kinda like the shootout, but after the reaction you got from Sutter/Dineen guy, you're careful about who you share that with.
with apologies to the genre-defining Lookout Landing post
(and additions prompted by the comments:)
Tim Gleason: if you ever met Jack Johnson, you'd punch him. That goes for the singer, too.
Josef Vasicek: occasionally, late at night, you go back into the dark corners of your hard drive and find that carefully-preserved set of late-night e-mails from college with the girl you thought you might marry one day. Though it didn't work out the way you planned, and you're not upset with how your life has gone since, thinking back to those more innocent days still makes you smile. You hope she's happy too.
Keith Primeau: while JoVa guy was surviving on Mountain Dew, Ramen and dreams, you were making big decisions about your financial future. What kind of numbskull would invest in an online bookstore named after a river in Brazil, anyway? Pets.com is the kind of business that'll set a guy up for life!
Pavel Brendl: mmmmm, forbidden donut.
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MLWGS AP Environmental Science Students Take Trip
The textbook for the AP Environment Science class is The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman, a book that explores "how our planet would respond without the relentless pressure of the human presence."
With all due respect to the academic rigor of my high school alma mater, the textbook selection should tell you all you need to know about whether the curriculum of this course (almost certainly taught to the test) is based more on scientific rigor or religious faith.
Visions of a Mother Nature figure in an iceberg similar to the Virgin Mary's reputed appearance in a grilled cheese sandwich? Transference much?
I think the treatment that [Palin] has received from the left has been absolutely vile (not talking about the legitimate political criticism), and I hate the implicit incentive that this treatment will draw by Obama being elected. I don't want to see a chunk of my party become as morally unhinged as the Democratic far-left, but the conclusion they're going to draw is that this nasty [stuff] wins elections.
Message 6, Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 10:22 PM
I think we all expected the [early-on] explicitly-sexual stuff [about Palin], starting with the questioning of her kids' parentage, making fun of her 17-year-old daughter getting pregnant, and continuing into the realm of mock-porn videos, to blow over. It didn't, and in fact, it contributed (along with the legitimate attacks, including the ethics stuff -- partially revenge-driven from her Alaska climb, but that's big-time politics) to drive her into the highest negatives of the four contenders. This really depresses me for the future of American political debate, for reasons I've already explained. And I have zero idea how to keep that sewer from backing up. I was hoping the screaming, gibbering hatred faction of American politics would dissipate for a while with the end of Bush's term. Now it's going to reform immediately on the right, because it worked for the left.
Not, of course, that I support the other derangement that has popped up in response: the continuation of the "all criticism of Obama is racist" meme to, alternately, an implicit judgment that all angry Southerners are racist or an explicit statement that all Republicans are racist. Have we validated Victor Davis Hanson's polarization prediction yet? I'd really prefer not.
Message 6 again:
]]>God help us all.
Has it come to this? Do we really need an ad on the front of the Sunday Washington Post sports section to tell us how to find a game on television, lest we forget the function of the "Guide" button?
]]>His latest piece, though? Not so much. He links approvingly to a Wall Street Journal article describing the increase in foreign minor-league baseball talent since the passage of the COMPETE Act of 2006. This law removed professional athletes from the category of foreign workers subject to H2B visa caps, allowing teams to employ an essentially unlimited number of foreign players. Those numbers duly spiked in baseball following the change, from about 3,000 to nearly 3,500 of the roughly 8,500 players under a professional contract.
Krikorian grinds his usual axe in claiming that "it's all about cheap labor." Krikorian either doesn't know baseball or is playing deliberately ignorant for the sake of his political position -- and missing that the Korean Cubs farmhand in the article's lede is making $750,000 out of high school. Highly-talented foreign players signed under competition for their initial contract actually get paid better than Americans, because Americans' freedom to choose their employer is restricted by the MLB entry draft.
The WSJ makes a marginally more insightful observation by noting that Latin American organizational players -- that is, roster filler -- sign for considerably smaller bonuses than Americans of the same age expect as high-school draftees. Again, though, the conditions are different. American kids that sign contracts out of high school aren't commonly at that talent level -- they're better than that, and, as we discussed above, good foreign players are subject to bidding wars that can dwarf draftees' bonuses. The equivalent American player is going to college and re-entering the draft in two to four years -- at which point, if he hasn't improved as a player, his thirty-third round draft selection will get him the same paltry bonus as the seventeen-year-old Dominican kid who doesn't know if he'll ever see another scout. The relevant point of comparison is when both players perceive the offered contract as their last/only chance to play -- and when that happens, players with the same talent sign the same contracts.
Perhaps foremost, though, is the simple fact that professional sports is a meritocracy -- if American players were demonstrably better than the players being signed, they'd be playing. Nats jokes aside, teams don't typically pass over talent for small change, defined in baseball terms as the lower five figures.
Protectionism only protects mediocrity. Sadly, that's what Krikorian prefers over bringing the best to America.
]]>UPDATE 17-Aug-2009: for the benefit of my own writing archive, I've added the text below the jump.
]]> [America has] had, after all, a century of the most extraordinary and compelling sporting stories to savor and reflect upon. [And] America possesses a literary culture that has, like no other, risen to the challenge of expressing them -- a dual heritage I found condensed in Red Smith's homage to the "Shot Heard Round the World"...Ask a baseball fan about the numbers 714 and 60. It's unlikely that the respondent will simply state that they represent the third-most total home runs hit in a career, or just the eighth-most home runs hit in a single season. He or she will describe them as records, despite that they were surpassed thirty-five and nearly fifty years ago respectively. Credit that to the legend of the man who hit them. The numbers are important, but only as pointers to a story. What's the response to 61? Ambivalence*. 755? Respect for not just skill, but perseverance. 70 and 68, followed soon after by 73 and 762? Perhaps not even recognizable outside the cities in which they were achieved, because many dislike the story behind them. If numbers were central to the value of the sport, that wouldn't be the case.
Most writers use only baseball to argue that soccer needs statistics to graft itself onto American sporting culture, because baseball is easily the most numbers-heavy of American sports. ESPN The Magazine's Chris Sprow gets credit for bringing American football and basketball into his argument by consulting Football Outsiders's Aaron Schatz and TrueHoop's Henry Abbott. The problem with the gridiron game in particular, though, is that Schatz's mission is exactly that which Sprow suggests soccer undertake -- and Schatz's new statistics, while useful, still aren't commonplace in American football discussion. For non-kicking plays from scrimmage, six players out of twenty-two on an American football field can accumulate meaningful individual first-order statistics. Most observers judge the other sixteen qualitatively and collectively. For example, does a cornerback accumulate no interceptions and few tackles because of a lack of skill? Or does the receiver lined up against him lack skill himself? Or is his skill such that opposing coaches refuse to throw the ball near him? Or does the opposing team just pass the ball very rarely in its offensive scheme? Postgame, media and coaches alike will usually grade out his team's collective defense (or even specifically passing defense) and call individual plays and players out for discussion. The grading system may not be one-to-ten, but soccer fans can certainly recognize this mode of assessment.
In his seminal work Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism, Andrei Markovits argues that American sporting preferences were set in the 1920s and 1930s as cultural markers. For the native-born population, baseball and American football were the two clear centerpieces -- American-created games that quickly spread nationwide. Immigrant communities, though, pursued three different tracks. Baseball meant Americanization and assimilation. Basketball, particularly in its Northeastern home, offered some ethnic solidarity and identification, but within the context of a game invented in America -- a context that offered an entry point to others as well. But soccer pointed explicitly and completely backwards, to the homeland and the past. The story soccer offered, as much as they enjoyed the game, was a story which, overall, that generation of immigrants wanted to leave behind and that their children did leave behind, and that native-born Americans couldn't access at all. The terms in which the games were discussed -- numbers or subjective assessments -- didn't matter. The story behind each sport did, and the story soccer offered was rejected as foreign by one group and eventually abandoned by the other.
In the 1990s, the wall began to crack. Markovits identifies hockey as the exception proving the rule of early American rejection of foreign sports, but that exception only held in a regional heartland that hugs the Canadian border and barely views that country as foreign (thus allowing hockey to "pass"). Once sporting preferences set, top-level hockey outside this area met little but failure until the 1990s -- the NASL and hockey's first Southern efforts in both the NHL and WHA followed a remarkably similar trajectory. Now in the second try, despite some setbacks, hockey has taken root in such varied settings as Dallas-Fort Worth and the Research Triangle of North Carolina. In Texas, hockey's route toward acceptance has come alongside spectacular growth in youth participation. The Carolina Hurricanes promoted a unique, rowdy fan culture that sprang up once the team moved to its permanent home arena and exploded during the team's first long playoff run in 2002. Both paths should seem awfully familiar to soccer fans.
In neither place did hockey change its mode of discussion (which is itself not statistically heavy) -- what grew was the story behind it, whether that involved ten-year-olds in Dallas aspiring to be like Mike or North Carolinians smoking a whole pig in the parking lot before games. And in the end, that's where the answer lies for soccer as a spectator sport in the U.S. -- not in creating numbers and new evaluative structures that, in the end, only mimic the pointers to the lore of traditionally American sports. Soccer needs its own American story -- and fan culture can be a central part.
]]>In the meantime, go play a game. Or plan a roadtrip. Or read a book.
Or leave a comment -- we haven't had any OFFICERS of MAJOR U.S. SOFTWARE CORPORATIONS pay us a visit recently.
]]>When an entire series worth of uncalled cheap play (high hits, late hits, after-the-whistle hits) by a larger, more physical team boils over, you get this. (The only reason it hadn't happened already was because Carolina kept winning games.)
A hands-off, "let them play" officiating policy only works if you have two teams who play at comparable levels of physicality and respect for the rules. (For Carolina, New Jersey and Pittsburgh would be comparable.) But the whole reason for penalty codes in sport is to allow officials some opportunity to control play in unbalanced situations such as Carolina-Boston. When game officials abdicate their responsibility to do so and resentment accumulates on the part of the victimized team, acting-out happens, no matter the sport, no matter the level, no matter the audience.
Back to Raleigh, and probably without Scott Walker, Wheel of Morality Discipline pending. Game 6 is a must-win for so many reasons. Closing the door on this crap is just one more.