The NHL Lockout
The NHL cancelled it's season this week and no one even really noticed. There are plenty of articles floating around cyberspace that talk about how
hockey sucks and no one watches and no one cares that they are having labor problems and so forth. These are all true statements, except for the one
about hockey sucking. I grew up in St. Louis and my Grandfather had season tickets to the St. Louis Blues throughout my childhood. I got to go to quite
a few games and grew to love the sport. The frenetic pace, the spectacular scoring plays, and the brutally violent hitting make hockey one of the most
exciting sports to watch. Unfortunately, learning to watch hockey on television is difficult. The truth is that the game is much easier to follow in person, and
the energy of the game is palpable in the air in the arenas. Sometimes that doesn't quite make it through the television. Said better, if your only exposure to
hockey is through television, it is unlikely that you will find the enjoyment in the sport.
Another problem facing hockey is that it is extremely expensive to play. You can play baseball, football, or soccer in any park, and most parks have
basketball goals. It is much more difficult to get ice time to play hockey. In fact, hockey's most recent time of prosperity (the mid to late 80's and early
90's) coincided with the popularity of inline skates, which allowed hockey to be played in any relatively flat parking lot or street.
Also, in this same time period that hockey was becoming accessible to a wider group of players, the NHL was featuring some of its greatest players ever.
Wayne Gretzky, widely considered to be the best hockey player ever to don skates, dominated the game in the 1980's and brought hockey star power to
Hollywood when he was traded to the LA Kings. The league also featured Mario Lemeiux, Steve Yzerman, Brett Hull, and Mark Messier during this
same period.
But the league failed to capitalize on this momentum for the long term and instead settled for the short term money. The owners chose to expand the league
into new markets, reaping the benefits of the millions of dollars paid for these new franchises, while not looking to the future of the sport. Certain teams
(read: The Detroit Red Wings and my own favorite St. Louis Blues) spent freely in order to obtain big name talent, which drove the salaries of the players
into the stratosphere. But the owners didn't care because they were fat with the capital infusions of the new expansion franchises. Suddenly, Columbus,
Ohio had a team.
Teams started to lose money once the market was completely saturated with teams. In turn, ticket prices had to be raised. My Grandfather, who started
getting season tickets when the Blues came to St. Louis in 1967 cancelled his season tickets when his tickets went from $16 a seat to $35 a seat in a five
year period. Seeing the game in person quickly became less accessible to fans, which, as pointed out earlier, makes the game more difficult to fall in love
with.
So the generation of players that the NHL had built upon started retiring, the ticket prices kept going up, and the NHL did very little to market itself to the
public. There was an infusion of European talent into the game, which was desperately needed because the over-expansion of the league spread the talent
a little thin, but the players were more difficult to market to the target audience for the NHL. Wayne Gretzky had an aw-shucks charm that appealed to the
American masses, but many of the foreign born stars were difficult to relate to, either because of language or cultural differences. The NHL failed
miserably at finding ways to market their new stars to the American public.
So now we find ourselves with a league that has very few stars that the fans can relate to, very high ticket prices, and financial insolvency. So what can
they do about it? They are attempting to get the players to accept a salary cap so they will have "cost certainty" for the future, which is certainly a step
towards resolving one of the problems with the league. They also need to reduce ticket prices in an effort to make the league more accessible to the
general public and find a way to market their stars to make the public able to relate to them. The real problem is that once the players and owners have had
their taste of the good life, and big money, it is unlikely that they will be able to go back. So what we will probably end up with, in the long run, is a hockey
league the equivalent of the professional lacrosse league.
And For No Apparent Reason
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