Disparities in the NHL schedule
I’m currently writing a paper for my argumentative writing class on why the NHL schedule should be changed. Anyways, I discovered the following…
- The Detroit Red Wings will play 78% of their away games in a different time zone than Detroit.
- Since an Eastern Conference team will play 10 games in the Western Conference, at most 12% of their away games will be in a different time zone if these games don’t include Columbus and Detroit.
- The Buffalo Sabres, who aren’t even centrally located, are within 90 minutes from 10 of the 14 other teams in the Eastern Conference.
- New Jersey can travel to away games by bus 39% of the time.
- In October 2006, Crosby and Ovechkin had the number one and number three top selling jerseys in the NHL. It’s a shame for fans when ten Western Conference teams won’t play Crosby’s team or Ovechkin’s team every year with the current schedule.
And yes, I realize it’s not the most original topic but there’s plenty of opinions. And I got an A on my paper talking about partial visors in the NHL, which was also a widely discussed issue.
Related Posts
3 Responses to “Disparities in the NHL schedule”
Leave a Reply
November 13th, 2006 at 1:16 pm
This is actually a very good topic and one that fans will continue to debate. The Wings have always been at a disadvantage from a travel standpoint. The rest of the Western Conference teams have benefited from the Wings popularity through a boost in attendance when the Wings are in town and many of the teams need that boost. Another part of your post is, in my humble (and usually doomed) opinion, very revealing of the NHL under the leadership of Bettman. Obviously the league has an interest in increasing TV viewership and thereby increasing revenues, in particular for those franchises that are in non-traditional hockey markets. The most important way the league can do this is by increasing fan awareness of individual players. I believe, in a very subtle way, the league has moved away from promoting traditional rivalries (the Original 6 teams in particular) and are now promoting individual players. Advertisers look for those players that the fans identify with, and that have very high Q scores. Individuals, not teams, are what the advertisers look for. This has been successful in the NBA and we all know where Bettman came from. It is Shaq vs Kobe, not Miami vs LA. Free agency in all sports has reduced team loyalty and increased the level in which fans identify with individual players. I believe it is revealing that your post mentions neither the Penquins nor the Capitals, but rather Crosby’s team and Ovechkin’s team (and that is not a criticism, just an observation). If the league promotes those two players as individuals, and those players move to another team, the league has lost nothing in terms of it’s identity with the fans, and I believe that is the direction the NHL is going. What does all this have to do with the scheduling? The scheduling, in the new NHL, will have everything to do with divorcing the NHL from it’s past, increasing advertising revenues, and promoting individual stars around the league. Unfortunately, it will have little to do with traditional rivalries, the Original 6 teams, or the inconvenience created by having a team in the Eastern time zone suffer through numerous road trips through multiple time zones. It will have even less to do with hardcore hockey fans and everything to do with the incessant desire to bring in new “fans” (at the expense of those hardcore, loyal fans). A home and home series on back to back nights between the Wings and the Leafs does nothing for the league because those teams sell out anyway and have good TV ratings no matter who they are playing (not to mention there might be bloodshed the second night and the league does not want any of that!). The league would prefer we play Nashville and Columbus extra times to help fill their arena and promote the sport in their area. Compare our old rivalry with Toronto, which stood the test of time over decades, with the rivalry we had with Colorado that lasted a mere 8 years or so. The Wings/Avs rivalry started to fizzle as soon as certain individual players left and has now been reduced to basically another Western Conference game. In my opinion, the league will eventually regret destroying the traditional rivalries and ignoring the history and lore of the sport of the hockey while pursuing efforts to prop up franchises that are the creation of overexpansion, greed and ego. The fact that they feel the need to “sell” the game in those markets tells you all you need to know.
Good luck on the paper!!
November 13th, 2006 at 9:38 pm
Doomsberry- Do you mind if I make your comment a separate post here on BtJ giving you total credit of course?
November 13th, 2006 at 11:22 pm
[…] Doomsberry left a comment today to this post in regards to the disparities of the NHL schedule. I asked him if he’d mind if his comment became a post and so here you go, in his own words… […]