NEW YORK — The National Hockey League today announced the cancellation of the 2013 Bridgestone NHL Winter Classic. The game was scheduled for Jan. 1 between the Detroit Red Wings and Toronto Maple Leafs at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, Mich. In addition, the League announced all SiriusXM Hockeytown Winter Festival events scheduled for Dec. 16-31 at Comerica Park in Detroit are cancelled.
You could see this one coming for a while.
My reaction is a shrug and wondering what movie to watch on Netflix tonight. With baseball over and hockey hiding, Laurie and I are finally catching up on our Netflix queue. By the time spring training hits, we might make a noticeable dent in it — following two six months (and more!) sports tends to fill the spaces in the evenings. Now we have our evenings back.
Do I miss hockey? Yes. I love the sport. So far, however, I’ve found no motivation to go chasing it; I haven’t gone looking for some random minor league or CHL game stuck on some cable channel yet. Watching replays of two years-ago Stanley Cup games? (laughs).
I got asked last night by a neighbor if seeing the lockout coming was part of the reason we gave up out season tickets a couple of years ago. Honesty? No. It was simple — 20 years in the arena and committing in so many nights and weekends was enough. We’d started to feel we were spending too much time on hockey and there were other things we weren’t doing enough of. Moving hockey to the couch gave us the ability to make decisions about not needing to be on the couch more often. And the $8-9,000 a year the tickets were costing us definitely helps pay for those options. We’re still fans of the game and of the sport, just not of having to fight to be in our seats for a saturday night game that means we can’t go anywhere further than a day trip the rest of the weekend… or that after having games on tuesday and thursday nights, the thought of a weekend jaunt down to Morro Bay just wasn’t that interesting for some reason.
That said, we thought even 2-3 years ago that a stoppage was not just possible but probable, and Laurie especially felt it was going to be long and nasty. I, hopeless optimist that I am, saw this as a problem that mature adults could sit down and hash through and that the stoppage was probably inevitable but I didn’t think it’d be significant.
Silly me.
There are always loud threats of fans leaving and never coming back, and you can always find individual cases of it, but the reality is I can’t think of a major sport where the fans stayed away once the games started. Maybe a week, maybe a few weeks, but it doesn’t take long before the crowds are back and the turnstiles are spinning. There’s a reason why the fans have no voice in these fights, and I don’t expect that to change.
On a personal level? When hockey’s back, so will I, although I wonder whether it’ll be with the same enthusiasm and for as many games (in arena or on couch).
I do wish Bill Daly and the league would stop issuing pre-written memos about how sorry they are to have to do this and how bad they feel for the fans that things have to be cancelled, because I don’t buy it. This stoppage isn’t even about all (or most) of the owners any more, but about a small group of the power-broker owners controlling the league and negotiations. The rest of us are coming along for the ride.
I’d love to express outrage, or disgust, or contempt, or something. Instead, I find my reaction is disappointment. Disappointment and ennu.
I’m disappointed that I’m not seeing the owners not in that leadership group fighting to get this solved; too many of them are sitting on the fence and letting this play out. If they’re doing anything in private, it’s not showing and leaking. Maybe it should, even if Bettman fines them. It might cause things to shift around a bit.
I’m disappointed in a lot of the media because they’re pandering to the fans and not educating them. There’s a lot of bad (or simply made up) stuff floating out, and a lot of coverage is pretty crappy. It makes the media folks out there trying to get through the noise and make sense of this much more valued (thanks to you folks…)
I’m disappointed in the fans, but then, they’re doing what they do every time. Hint: talk is easy. And the owners know that. Problem is, not enough of us will ever band together to cause something the owners have to pay attention to. (what that might be is an discussion for some other time, some other maybe. But a start might be convincing league sponsors to start pulling sponsorships if things aren’t settled, which fans could only force through some sort or real or threatened boycott. Good luck with that).
And I’m disappointed in myself, because part of me feels I should be more involved and more angry. Mostly what I feel is tired. So I’m going back on the couch until this is over. By the way, Ken Burns’ documentary on WW II rocks. Just sayin’
At this point I only want two things: one is for this to end and everyone to get back to hockey, and right now, I can’t see them solving this before christmas. Too much entrenched on both sides as far as I can tell (although the player’s position of “we aren’t interested in unconditional surrender, but we can talk” is a lot more palatable than the owners position.
The other is some way to believe that once this is solved, this is it and it won’t happen again. I have no confidence about this, because of the contempt key players have to everyone and everything other than what they want. Without regime change, that’s not going to change.
And by regime change, I’m not talking about Bettman. he’s not the problem. He may be the facilitator, but he’s not the problem. Replacing him with someone else likely makes this worse, not better, next time. The regime change is among some key players in the ownership group, in places like Boston and Philly and Detroit. The only way that’ll change is through time and — attrition — and only then if their replacements come in with fresh sensibilities the way we saw things change in Chicago.
Or when the rest of the league ownership group stages a coup and tells the old-line, old school owners to shut up and get out of the way. Unfortunately, I don’t see anyone in the ownership around the league willing to build the coalition to make that happen.
So on we go, with no hockey.
And a comfortable couch…
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