The 07-08 National Hockey League thread

[SkyePrizm]

Total heartbreak.  

Next year, boys.

Now i begin watching baseball.....

[freddiewaht]

tough game
pens got quite a team and deserved to win it.
to me,nothing better than the sportsmanlike shaking of the opponents hand after a hard fought battle.
congrads to the pens.
jagr said he wants to play 4 more years and names the strangers being his first choice.
great season...

[tyzack]

Well, I stayed up for the entire first OT period, but called it quits before the game ended.

So, onto the conferance finals:

Stars vs. Red Wings - I\'m going O6 on this one.* I was cheering against these two teams in the semis, and would probably still cheer for dallas had they never moved. Also, has anyone else noticed the poor camera positioning in the dallas rink? There are always a few rows of heads infront of the mid-ice camera.

Pens vs. Flyers: LETS GO FLYERS! That\'s really all I have to say about that.

Looking ahead:
Flyers vs Red Wings - The Red Wings will win, but I will be cheering for the flyers.

*O6 is what cool cats call the orginal six.

[kindm's]

Well. A decent season for the Rangers I suppose. The weakness during the season (Power Play) came back to haunt them big time during this push for the cup. If only the Rangers were able to convert a power play here and there I think they would still be alive.

I think they need to get a little bigger upfront. And they really need another quality defensemen or two. Sanguenetti (sp ?) is supposed to be pretty good.

I made it to the 3rd OT last night but fell asleep.

Oh well now I can catch up on some TV.

[tyzack]

So...is anyone going to be watching Flyers vs Penquins tonight?

[SkyePrizm]

So...is anyone going to be watching Flyers vs Penquins tonight?

I may. Nothing else going on tonight....

[tyzack]

I would put money on Detriot vs. Pitt...

Detriot all the way.

No way dallas is coming back, and philly will probably push it to 4 or 6 games, but not win.

As for the Cup, Detriot wins in 6.

[kindm's]

I would put money on Detriot vs. Pitt...

Detriot all the way.

No way dallas is coming back, and philly will probably push it to 4 or 6 games, but not win.

As for the Cup, Detriot wins in 6.

I think your being too kind to Pitts. If it is Pitt v. Detroit I just dont see them competing at all.

Detroit is putting on a clinic and has been with teams with much better D than pitts. I really think that Philly has been playing awesome considering they have lost 2 defensemen and probably their best player. Pitt has not dominated them IMHO they have made the plays when it counted.

Now Detroit on the other hand is missing Franzen and is still kicking ass. I was really feeling sorry for Dallas. They were really playing with an edge and getting chances and then Detroit would just counter and score.

I am not sure anyone can stop the Detroit train at this point.

If it is Detroit v. Pitt Detroit in 4

[tyzack]

Goal: To Make Fans Love Hockey
After Canceling a Season, Bettman Isn\'t
Obsessing About Growth Anymore
By MATTHEW FUTTERMAN
May 23, 2008; Page B1

For National Hockey League Commissioner Gary Bettman, rock bottom arrived long before he watched three of his teams go bankrupt and canceled the 2004-2005 season.

 
It came in 1999, when Mr. Bettman looked at his major moves during his first seven years heading the NHL and saw that they were going to wreck professional hockey in North America. For one thing, the gap was widening between rich and poor teams, especially those in smaller Canadian cities and in the Southern and Western U.S., where Mr. Bettman had pushed the league to expand. Salary growth was also out of control. Worst of all, a once lightning-fast game was slowly turning into a boring grind.

"I watch the game -- 70, 80 games a year," Mr. Bettman, now in his 16th year heading the league, said last week. "You could see what was happening."

As the Pittsburgh Penguins and Detroit Red Wings face off in the Stanley Cup finals, which start Saturday, Mr. Bettman, 55 years old, is that rare top executive who was behind the wheel when his business went over a cliff and now has the opportunity to put it back together. He is doing so by making a classic management choice: Instead of obsessing over growth, he is concentrating on keeping the league\'s existing customers happy.

By certain measures -- notably television ratings -- the National Hockey League still has a long way to go. The average audience for this year\'s playoff games on the cable network Versus -- a second-tier channel a lot of people don\'t know they have -- has grown 50%, but only to about 700,000 households. That is minuscule compared with other major sports.

"The games are invisible," says Rick Gentile, a former executive producer of CBS Sports and the director of the Seton Hall Sports Poll, which tracks fan interest. "The NHL doesn\'t have a national profile, and it desperately needs one."

 
Hockey games on NBC this season garnered a tiny 1.0 rating, according to Nielsen Co., up 11% largely because of the big audience for an outdoor game played in Buffalo, N.Y., on New Year\'s Day. Next season, for the fourth year in a row, the NHL will receive no rights payment for its games from NBC, a unit of General Electric Co., and will instead share advertising revenue with the network. (NBC broadcasts select games during the season and the playoffs, which began in early April. Versus shows many season and playoff games.)

But using the measuring stick most important to Mr. Bettman\'s bosses -- the league\'s 30 owners -- Mr. Bettman is riding a hot streak, restoring value to franchises and raising overall league revenue to a record $2.5 billion from such sources as ticket sales, sponsorships, TV rights, licensed merchandise and concessions. Attendance has hit records in each of the past three years, based on tickets distributed, the NHL says.

Certain teams in the Sun Belt continue to struggle, notably the Phoenix Coyotes, but the days of fire sales -- such as B. Thomas Golisano\'s acquisition of the Buffalo Sabres for $70 million, including tens of millions of assumed debt, in 2003 -- are over. Last fall, Wisconsin businessman Craig Leipold sold the Nashville Predators for $192 million and then turned around and bought the Minnesota Wild for $265 million. Bill Davidson will soon close a deal to sell his Tampa Bay Lightning for $200 million.

"You can\'t talk new capital into chasing bad money," says Dave Checketts, a principal in Sports Capital Partners, a New York investment fund that bought the St. Louis Blues for $150 million in 2006.

Mr. Bettman moves quickly, whether he is striding across his office to pull a book off a shelf or fetching a cookie for his wife on the other side of a Madison Square Garden luxury suite. He grew up in Queens, N.Y., and even in one-on-one conversation, he often speaks as though he is yelling on a street corner.

Mr. Bettman made his name as the bulldog general counsel for the National Basketball Association. Mr. Checketts, the former president of the Utah Jazz, recalls a meeting in 1984 at which Mr. Bettman first met with representatives of a prospective buyer of the team named Adnan Khashoggi, then a local real-estate developer rumored to have other business interests, notably freelance arms dealing.

Mr. Bettman, then 32 years old, lectured the men for nearly an hour, telling them Mr. Khashoggi would have to account for every dollar of income and every asset he owned to gain entrance into the NBA.

"You do whatever you have to do to protect the asset your owners have invested in," Mr. Bettman says.

And that\'s true even if it means shutting down your league for a season. Looking back, Mr. Bettman now sees how the combined effects of his actions those first years created nearly irreparable cracks in the NHL. For example, he helped to broker a labor agreement in 1995 that provided stability but eventually allowed salaries to skyrocket until they were eating up 74% of league revenue.

 
The Pittsburgh Penguins\' Sidney Crosby skates earlier in the playoffs.
He also presided over an expansion, relocating franchises to nontraditional hockey markets like Phoenix, Nashville and South Florida. This cultivated new fans, gave the league a national footprint and brought in $420 million. But there was a downside: Several teams in the South and West and in the league\'s smaller markets started to struggle financially as salaries spiraled, and soon they couldn\'t afford the more skilled, speedy players required for success.

Their only alternative: hiring low-cost, defensive-minded players to flood the center of the ice and slow down the game, emulating the style that helped the New Jersey Devils win three Stanley Cups. Eventually, even the best players appeared to be skating through slush.

In the case of the Penguins, even after superstar Mario Lemieux and financier Ron Burkle pulled the Pittsburgh team out of bankruptcy in 1999, it had to dump expensive stars Jaromir Jagr, Alexei Kovalev and Martin Straka, replacing them with cheaper players. By the 2003-2004 season, attendance had dropped from near-capacity crowds at 17,000-seat Mellon arena to just 11,877 fans a game, and the team was able to win just 23 of its 82 games.

This season, things are better. A $50 million salary cap per team is in place that reflects 55% of the league\'s hockey-related revenue. New rules extend the offensive zones, allow longer passes that produce more breakaways and prohibit even minor clutching and grabbing, allowing young speedsters like Pittsburgh\'s Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin to shine.

"We\'ve finally got everything on track," Mr. Bettman said last week.

But Paul Kelly, executive director of the NHL Players Association, says the league can\'t be considered healthy until franchises that are struggling financially, such as Columbus and Phoenix, improve, and the league gets a better broadcast deal in the U.S.

"Used to be you could find a game on in any bar in Boston," Mr. Kelly says of his hometown. "Now you have to search for it -- or the bartender doesn\'t even know what channel it\'s on."

The responsibility of persuading sports fans that hockey is worth watching again has fallen to John Collins, a 46-year-old former National Football League executive who joined the NHL 18 months ago. He convinced Mr. Bettman to forget about growth and focus instead on getting North America\'s 53 million self-described hockey fans to start acting as though they love the sport.

Hockey is tribal. NHL research shows 50% of NHL fans won\'t watch the finals if their favorite team isn\'t playing. Television ratings for hockey grow just 41% in the playoffs, while baseball\'s grow 400%, and the NBA\'s grow 135%.

Mr. Collins has set out to cultivate the league\'s core with events like the outdoor Winter Classic game, played this year in front of 70,000 fans in the Buffalo snow. Without a presence on ESPN, the country\'s leading sports network, the NHL points fans to highlight and analysis shows on NHL.com. Its marketing message for the playoffs: "The Cup changes everything."

"The question is, how do you build incremental behavior," Mr. Collins says. "To talk about acquiring new fans at this point in our development is almost too much of a challenge."

Wall Street Journal

[kindm's]

You know maybe it would make sense to you know hire Hockey people instead of NBA throw aways and NFL marketing guys.

Bettman ruined the NHL. The expansion killed hockey. It diluted the talent and still does. The only reason they are happy is because there is parity in the league, ie. all the teams suck about the same except maybe 3 or 4 which are a but better.

There are too many teams. They had to change a bunch of rules just to get back to where they were before the trap became the go to style.

They have essentially taken hitting out of the game and fighting is a lost art. there have been a total of like 5 fighting majors in the entire playoffs this year. They need to get rid of the instigator penalty as well so all the cheap shots are under control. Any hockey person would know this / think of these things

[tyzack]

I stayed up through the 2nd overtime.

Holy shit, that was a great game to watch.

I think that the longer this series goes, the better it is for "hockey."

However, they will get trounced in ratings on Thrusday.

[FrankZappa]

I was told the wnba got a better tv rating than the stanley cup game the other night (not last night, so game 4 I guess?)
NY ratings WNBA .7 & NHL was a .4

oof.

[weekapaug19]

fell asleep in the first OT last night, but that 3rd period was great. Detroit was all over them in the 3rd, the the pens got very lucky at the end.

[tyzack]

I was told the wnba got a better tv rating than the stanley cup game the other night (not last night, so game 4 I guess?)
NY ratings WNBA .7 & NHL was a .4

oof.

WNBA advertises on ESPN/ESPN2, and was on (the ads) constantly during the NBA playoffs.

Also, WNBA is on ESPN/ESPN2, so bars will be tuned to that by default on a Monday night. People assume that NBC is drama Monday->Friday.

I got sooo mad at the networks post-strike for not signing back onto hockey. I still haven\'t forgiven them and I still have my firebombs ready.

[FrankZappa]

espn isn\'t going to go after hockey unless hockey gives them back an offer they like. In the mean time, enjoy vs. :shrug: