The Lockout

[Don Wassall]

My impression of the NHL's lockout is that the media has welcomed it. Hockey has the two elements of what a "black" sport is supposed to have -- speed and excitement. In addition it has tremendous toughness. Hockey is a very exciting sport that takes a combination of athleticism and grit to play well.


In the cities that share NBA and NHL teams, the NHL team generally draws just as well and is just as popular. But the NHL gets only a fraction of the media coverage nationally that the NBA does. In fact, the NHL might get less coverage than the WNBA, a totally artificial construct of the media that still has almost no following and is kept alive purely by media coverage that no one is interested in.


Every time a hockey player is seen in a commercial, there are probably 20 or more basketball players doing one. There is no reason whatsoever that guys like Lemieux, Yzerman, Francis and a slew of other hockey players who have accomplished great things and who almost allconduct themselves in exemplary fashion off the ice, aren't as well known as Kobe, Shaq, Iverson and others, except by media policy. Theonly hockey player the media is interested in building up is Jerome Iginla.


The relegating of hockey as a "minor" sport compared to basketball is essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy by the system. Hockey hasn't "caught on" because it is mostly ignored by the media, while basketballand its media-created superstars are"in our face" 24/7.


The media articles I've seen concerning the hockey lockout can be summed up as follows: "who cares"? And the media has now basically forgotten about hockey, whereas strikes/lockouts in basketball, baseball and football are always given non-stop prominent coverage.


I think the media wants hockey to shut down for a long time, because they despise that it remains, and always will be, a white sport.

 

[jaxvid]

Good observation Don. Living in a hockey town you wopuld think that the lock-out would be covered heavily by the press, it's not. You are right, there is not enough "diversity" for the media. Tough! People who watch hockey love it. It is the only game I want my kids involved with. Your comments on Yzerman, Lemeiux, etc. are right on too. Those guys are the type of role models you want to present to kids so what does the media do? Ignores them. It's pathetic.

 

[white lightning]

I agree with both of you.It's one of the last true sports
that won't be taken over by the Hip Hop Society these
days.I really hope that they can resolve this soon because they could really lose alot of fans.They do not
need this at this point in time with all of the other
sports grabbing kids interests.

 

[jaxvid]

I'm not too worried about the hockey lock-out. Their season is too long anyway. Hockey is a winter sport so they should play in the winter. Let the other sports get their seasons out of the way. They are trying to generate football/baseball/basketball money by playing so many games and it has diluted the regular season. Hockey is a niche sport. Northern or southern trasplanted whites are the fan base and that is fine with me.

 

[Realgeorge]

Nuts to the Nattering Nabobs of the NHL

The National Hockey League is entering its third month of "Lockout" at the behest of both ownership and Players Union. It's a most obscene situation of Millionaires vs. Millionaires. There is alsothe factor thatthe NHL is Politically Incorrect, it's WAY too white, too disciplined and too revered to be tolerated well by the sports arm of the New World Order.The NWOis quite pleased that the NHL is going through a catharsis. But pro hockey will survive both its lockout and its disapproved place in the world of International Banking. A brief explanation:



The Canada-inspired, spread-to-the-USA fan base of the NHL is passionate for the league, and each major franchise has a cult-like following. I say "major" because that's important. Major includes the "Original Six" teams from way back in the Twenties (Montreal, Toronto, New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Boston), who were the only teams until the first expansion in (dates approximate, I'm not a professional sportswriter) 1972. At that time about six new teams were added in cities like Los Angeles (Kings), New York (Islanders), Philadelphia (Flyers) and Pittsburgh (Penguins). A further expansion occurred about 1979 when the World Hockey Association folded and delivered four franchises to the NHL. Trivia Question -- they were? Edmonton Oilers, Winnipeg Jets, Hartford Whalers, and Quebec Nordiques.


In recent times, over-expansion have plagued the NHL, swelling the ranks to thirty teams, with lots of failing franchises. In nasty little bergs like Nashville, Columbus, Anaheim (!), Miami (!) and Atlanta. None of these franchises even approaches the "major" status that I apply to groups like the Boston Bruins, Philly Flyers, New York Rangers, and Toronto Maple Leafs. The Ottawa Senators were officially bankrupt last year, and the Buffalo Sabres were owned by the now imprisoned weasels who owned the Adelphia Communications empire, the Rigas boys. A fellow named McNall, at one time the owner of the LA Kings, was criminally inclined and spent time in prison.


So NHL owners can be a strange lot. Their commissioner, Gary Bettman, is legendary for having never seen a hockey game before taking over as commish. Clarence Campbell turns over in his grave! Often revered as a "genius" by main-stream news sources, Bettman instead is a slick, fast-talk business type who runs the NHL like a department store chain. Open 'em up, Close 'em down. Expand expand expand!! and when we're overexpanded, chop off the unprofitable franchises and start over. Not a great "business model" for hockey players or fans .... or for responsible owners, of which there are many.


The current strike / lockout is classic post-Reagan psychosis. The players and owners believe that the Gravy Train will last forever. Now that permanent recession has arrived, each side is deluded toward the current impasse. The owners truly ARE bankrupt due to their following the poor advice of Bettman & Co., namely to expand to the hilt in the 1990s. The moronic players have fallen for -- really, knuckled under to --the strong-arm tactics of their union leader, the gangster-like Bob Goodenow, who operates strikingly (pun!) like Donald Fehr did during the past two Baseball strikes. Goodenow & Co. operate with an iron fist. We Will Obtain multi-million-dollar salaries for all players, at all costs!! because our Agents and My Office need the dough! A dirty little NHL secret that rarely makes the papers is that many older players attempt to "Low-ball" their salaries to prevent themselves from being priced out of the market. Very intelligent idea, but they run afoul of the Union, and hissing and fighting results.


The poor, poor NHL players, making on average $1.5 million per year (actually it might be a tad higher, like $1800000 per year)! Brett Hull, son of Hall-of-Famer Bobby, lamented some years ago that many mediocre NHL players make 2 or 3 million bucks per year. He is right. But Brett and the rest of his linemates are no match for the Big Business (read: organized crime figures) who run this beast called the NHL and NHLPA. We will have a strike, and a lockout. And players, watch out, the cat's out of the bag: Replacement Players! Count on it.


Last three paragraphs, bear with me: The NHL suffers from the stifling effect of bigger, better, stronger players. Over the past twenty years, NHL hockey players have approached football-like dimensions with amazing team speed. The ownership brigade and League Office types failed to grasp this situation. What resulted was a gradual constriction of the flow of hockey games. The 1970s and 1980s provided what (happy) fans called "Firewagon Hockey," where back and forth flow zipped across the ice, providing lots of action and lots of scoring. Late in the 1980s and through the 1990s, coaching staffs of bottom-dwelling teams figured out that the only chance they had to win was to resort to "clutch-and-grab" hockey, to slow down the pace of the game, frustrate the fast skater, reducing the "size of the rink." It worked. The entire NHL ground down to the plodding slugfest that it is now. Albeit it is a slugfest of amazingly fast skaters, it's still a slugfest. In short, there's not enough room in the rink. Rink dimensions are the same as they always have been, but now players are dramatically larger and faster.


The result has been, predictably, stalemate. By gosh, we can't expand the rink! It will take away seats! Humbug! The always ineffective owner-commissioner clique has gnashed their teeth about the drop in scoring and boringness of their games. The obvious solution is to enlarge the rink. Other tweakings like eliminating the Red Line, moving the goals back, stretching the Blue Lines, outlawing "clutching and grabbing" would all help ... but they won't be tried because the ossified NHL leadership is completely incapable of making reasonable innovations. So the lockout goes on. The Players indeed are gruesomely overpaid. The market will adjust to this anomaly, real quick. The NHL leadership is greedy and stupid ... but not terminally stupid. They at least have been able to stop the train to avoid total destruction. All parties have themselves to blame.


The NHL ultimately will survive, probably with fewer teams, replacement players, bitter veterans returning to teams to compete with cheaper new guys, pissed off fans, and reduced revenues. All of this is just fine with NWO. He truly would like to see the almost-all-whiteNHL disappear. But it won't happen. Eventually professional hockey in the USA and Canada will deliver a product amenable to its market and that market's ability to sustain the product. I ga-ron-tee there will be a pro hockey league in action by January 2006.


-- Yuri Dmitryevitch Andropov Edited by: Don Wassall

 

[Colonel Callan]

This situation was a foregone conclusion once Bettman was put in the driver's seat, so to speak. He and his ilk seek to destroy white success in any endeavor, and that includes sports. One wonders what behind the scenes wheeling, dealing, and blackmail were used to put this troll, this piece of dreck who had never even seen a hockey game before, in the top spot. These aliens are now the "commish" in all the major sports. It's due to working together as a group with an agenda amongst atomized, independent whites. However, on the bright side, it is having the effect of slowly making whites aware of themselves as an ethnic group.

Sorry about the rant, but I saw this a mile off when Stern's "boy" was dropped into the catbird seat.

 

[Don Wassall]

Curious how the All-Star game has already been cancelled, in early November -- more than two months before it was scheduled to be played. When the '94 lockout ended, regular season games were being played in about two weeks.


Bettman is even saying that the entire regular season is close to being cancelled when only a relative handful of games have been lost thus far. Either Bettman and the owners are playing some serious hardball, or there is more to this lockout than meets the eye. . .

 

[jaxvid]

Nice post realgeorge! Welcome to the board.

My two cents.

I'm a lifelong Red Wings fan and hockey follower. The NHL has always been different then other sports. Probably because the players come from a completely different demographic then in other sports. Rural, suburban, or foreign white kids. Hockey franchises have always been a bit shabbily run. For a long time it was a family affair with several families running franchises. The addition of so many clubs is merely to make money for the cash starved teams, since they collect from every team that joins. There is some genuine interest in the "New South" in hockey. Firstly because so many norhterners have retired to the South and secondly because it is all white and features some fighting which like it or not is exciting. However the interest in hockey is thinning in many places and the salaries are out of control. That said there are a lot of rank and file players that are not happy with the lockout. They make decent salaries, not outrageous ones and want to go back to work. The salary cap is a good idea. The "freemarket" concept does not apply to professional athletes because their occupations, by their very nature, are part of a closed system (limited teams). I personally do not see the influence of outside forces at work. This is a standard labor dispute that happens all the time and has the usual suspects involved.

 

[bigunreal]

I think the NHL Players union has to face reality; the league,
especially with so many teams, simply cannot continue to pay out the
kinds of salaries it it paying out now. That said, this situation is
very sad. I still think hockey is the best sport to watch in person
(well, tied with baseball), but the NHL has never done much to expand
its fan base. They need to quit catering to their present fan base, the
majority of which loves the pro wrestling-like fights and celebrated
goon behavior from players on each team. Non-hockey fans don't
understand the fighting, and you aren't going to attract many by
continuing to allow it. Also, the "clutch and grab" stuff has to go.
You can't adequately market a sport if its biggest offensive stars are
stymied by this kind of defensive style, which could easily be stopped
by a few rule changes. I agree with others that the media seems to
welcome this strike, with a collective "who cares?" attitude. If the
NFL, NBA or Major League Baseball was on strike, they would all be
concerned about the players and owners "doing something" to "save the
sport."

 

[Realgeorge]

The world awaits the reply from the NHL to the NHLPA's proposal over the weekend of 9 December. It's Gary Bettman vs. Bob Goodenow, mano a mano! The union offer is intriguing. It preposterouslycuts player salaries, one time, by 24% (why not 25, too much?) as a "significant bargaining" act. Along with the cut comes the owner-unacceptable "luxury tax" that makes sense only in a beast of a money-maker like Major League Baseball. Unless Bettman and the owners arrive at work tomorrow sky-high on controlled substances mixed with adult beverages, they will reject the offer and cancel the season. The only question (the intriguing part) is how hard the players and Goodenow laughed after "cutting" their salaries by a fourth, and expecting the NHL and the sporting world not to see the ruse. This morning several "angry, indignant" players fumed and seethed bitterly that their union boss was giving too much away. Why, Jaromir Jagr would have to make 2.4 millions less next year than his current 11 millions. The horror of it. I wish someone would fire me from a $10 million-per-year job.


Anybody out there take the NHLPA's offer seriously? Looks like fake indignation to me. Bring on the replacement players.

 

[jaxvid]

I didn't like the idea of a salary concession. For every Jagr making millions there are dozens of guys making $200,000. Take 24% off of that and it's $152,000, after taxes around $100,000 a lot less in Canada. That's peanuts for one of the 400 best hockey players in the world and they only make the money for a few years. I think the offer was engineered by the big money guys, who like Realgeorge says can stand to take a mil off the top. League rejected the offer anyway.

 

[right winger]

Both sides are on the brink now. Gotta hope the players see how the NFL has prospered with a salary cap and be realistic about the situation. If the season is cancelled, it's a victory for the caste system and all anti-white forces and a defeat for a great sport.

 

[sunshine]

This lockout is a terrible thing--I personally blame the owners. A real shame considering there are more great athletes in hockey today than ever before. For instance just to single out one name, IIya Kovalchuk of the Atlanta Thrashers is arguably the most electrifying athlete in all of pro sports.


Hopefully they will settle this thing soon. Good grief.

 

[Realgeorge]

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[This is the first anti-players position I have noted anywhere in the mainstream press.]


MICHAEL ROSENBERG: Boys, it's time to give up and play hockey</TD></TR>
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<TD>BY MICHAEL ROSENBERG, FREE PRESS COLUMNIST



How bad is this hockey situation?





It's late in the third period, they've pulled the goalie, they're facing an odd-man rush, and most of America doesn't understand this sentence.



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The United States has never fully embraced hockey. The sport survives on pockets of fanaticism, which is fine, but if this season is canceled, those pockets will get a lot smaller.





That's why this is one of the most important months in NHL history. And everybody involved is blowing it. It's January, and nobody is playing hockey. What's worse is that nobody is even negotiating to play hockey.





The league locked out its players in September with hopes of getting a better collective bargaining agreement. Four months later, the league and players association make loud proposals in public and ignore each other in private.





That's not negotiating. It's posturing.





The league just canceled its Jan. 14 board of governors meeting because talks are at such a standstill that a meeting would be pointless. The 2004-05 season is almost kaput. Everybody in the league knows it. The league has barely even discussed how to schedule games for a short season.





Unless there is a drastic change in the next two or three weeks, the season is dead. And if that happens, everybody loses, but the players lose most of all. The players made $1.5 billion in salaries last season. The owners say they have about $2 billion in revenues. But if this season is canceled, that revenue figure goes out the window.





The season-ticket base will drop. A lot of corporate sponsors will bail because most of them have one-year contracts, and they won't be so happy with a league that held onto their money under the guise of waiting for the season to start. The league's revenues could easily drop to $1.5 billion next season. After the 1994 World Series was canceled, baseball attendance dropped by 20 percent -- and hockey relies far more on ticket-sale revenue than baseball does.





And since owners don't want to pay the players much more than 54 percent of their revenues, the owners would want to pay players less than $900 million per season. That is a collective pay cut of at least 33 percent. Last month, the players association submitted a proposal that would cut salaries across the board by 24 percent. Some players were stunned their union did that, but the owners quickly dismissed the offer. Owners saw it as a short-term fix to a long-term problem.





While players and owners squabble over how to split the pot, the pot is in danger of shrinking. If this season is somehow saved, the effect of the lockout will be limited. If the season is lost, the league won't recover for years. If the players don't like what they could get now, they need to understand it will only get worse next year. And they will each have lost at least a year's worth of salary they will never get back. There is only one way to salvage this season: The players will have to fold like a newspaper.





The owners aren't going to fold. Commissioner Gary Bettman needs only eight votes among 30 owners to nix a deal. With at least half the teams losing money, by almost any calculation, Bettman can get those eight votes in less time than it takes him to twitch uncomfortably.





Bettman is adamant that he wants "cost certainty" -- a salary cap or its equivalent. The owners say they lost more money last season than they will if there is no hockey this season.





In the last few months, many players have lashed out at Bettman. They point out that Bettman was the one who approved franchises in non-traditional markets; that Bettman is barely budging on his demands; that Bettman has been in office for 12 years and must take responsibility for the state of the game. In many respects, they are correct. For much of the last decade, hockey owners cashed in on big expansion fees with little thought about how it would affect the game in the long term. That's a big reason hockey is where it is.





But this is no longer a question of right and wrong. It's a question of hockey or no hockey, and the sand is piling up at the bottom of the hourglass. </TD></TR></T></T></TABLE>Edited by: Realgeorge

 

[Realgeorge]

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<SPACER height="1" width="1" ="block">Several NHL teams are just plain flat broke. The NHL need merely to hang on for a few more months and some teams will start folding. The strike wil naturally end as the league implodes and the collection of 30 employers of NHL players will shrink to 28, then 24. Only then will the spoiled pampered babies of the NHLPA get back to work. Musical chairs will have reduced the number of roster spots by ten to thirty percent. I have not a scintilla of sympathy for the moronic players for whom $500K per year is an "insulting" figure of insufficiency


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Phoenix Coyotes owner disputes newspaper report that team is in significant debt</TD></TR>
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<TD>By MEL REISNER, AP Sports Writer
January 13, 2005


PHOENIX (AP) -- The chairman of the Phoenix Coyotes disputed a newspaper report suggesting that the team is on shaky financial ground and has exhausted its NHL-approved credit line. A story in Thursday editions of the Globe and Mail said the club was carrying a heavy debt load and had little equity left. That characterization is wrong, said team chairman Steve Ellman, reached by phone in New York. The newspaper claimed the Coyotes had borrowed $60 million and cited an NHL source to support the statement that the amount was a high debt load for a hockey club.


``We've not utilized the full amount,'' Ellman said. ``The NHL specifies the level of debt that each franchise is entitled to borrow on their team. They approved $60 million, so we have the capability to borrow $60 million, but we have not. So we have excess borrowing capacity available.'' Ellman also said the Coyotes' debt burden should be viewed as part of Coyote Holdings' consolidated debt. He declined to give that figure but said it was relatively low in relationship to the assets of the holding company. Coyote is the holding company for the professional hockey and lacrosse teams based at the new Glendale Arena, as well as concerts, boxing matches and other special events held there. It also owns the 6.5 million square-foot Westgate city center commercial development adjacent to the building.


Last month, the team responded with a letter protesting another story by the Toronto paper that claimed co-owner Jerry Moyes, who owns about 75 percent of the Coyotes, had hired an investment bank to find a buyer for the team. Moyes denied the story then, and Ellman said he was puzzled by the successive articles. ``There is a very bright future ahead of this franchise,'' Ellman said. ``The fact is the team is not for sale, and as a combined holding company -- and that's what we need to look at in our business projections, more than hockey -- our debt levels are relatively low.''</TD></TR></T></TABLE></TD></TR></T></TABLE>

 

[Lance Alworth]

this is kind of unrelated to the lockout, but I think is somewhat worth mentioning anyway. Earlier today, I was visiting one of the hockey message boards, and I noticed a comment by a poster stating on what were possible reason for the state of the game being at an all time low right now. He mentioned something about the lack of "diversity" in the sport. I responded to his post, which went something like this "what do you mean, lack of diversity, there are people from all different countries playing, US, Canada, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Chech, etc.." I knew what he meant, but I was playing dumb about it. What he meant was, the lack of NON-WHITE participation, but it is for this reason why hockey is one of my favorite sports. I don't know about ya'll but I know that I can relate more to white Canadians, Russians, Swedes, Finns, Czechs, a lot more than I can with American blacks. Why the brainwashed sheeple in this country sees nationality before race, I'll never understand, but this egalitarian point of view is one of the main reasons why America is going to hell in a handbasket

 

[Realgeorge]

http://boards.washingtoncaps.com/fo...01b6c58c0f28&amp;act=Track&amp;f=4&amp;t=9882
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<DIV align=right>From the Washington Captials website - messageboard. Some comments from frustrated fans ... ..... .... </TD></TR>
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Junior Member

Group: Members
Posts: 42
Member No.: 787
Joined: 4-June 04

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<DIV =postcolor>IMHO, it's not the greed of either side, it's the lack of enforcement of the rules, and how the market hasn't adapted.

to wit, hockey has gone downhill since the trap, which is a result of the officials not calling a hold a hold, and an interference an interference (which the 2 ref system was supposed to fix).

so, this has resulted in the case where a $500k player can neutralize an $11m player. thus, the $11m player shouldn't be worth that much if a $500k player can neutralize him.

in the past, where hockey was more exciting, you could market the $11m player because they could do things that were amazing (gretzky, lemieux, jagr, forsberg).

if the "free market system" that the union espouses actually did happen (ie no guaranteed raises), with the rules enforced as is, salaries would probably decrease due to market forces.

on the other hand, if the rules were enforced, hockey would be more exciting, you could market the star players, and the whole pie would be increased (thus making everyone happy).

discuss amongst yourselves...

(yeah, it's late, and this is largely a stream of consciousness)

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[jaxvid]

Hockey is a pleasure to watch because it is NOT diverse. The sight of a sweat drenched player taking time from his between period rest to interview with the announcer is great. It shows these guys are not prima donna's. Also it is great that they look like real people not the oversized ghetto thugs like in other sports. Heck you can relate to these guys. The sport will survive and be better then ever.

 

[Realgeorge]

The extremely Neo-con Washington Times has a pretty good sports beat reporter who actually can write in complete, logical sentences. Mr. Fayhas this tidbit regarding the NHL strike. Seems that a sizableminority of players would be more than happy to play under a Hard Cap .... or perhaps it's a restless minority of a large silent majority of players. Cowardly and sheepish, just like the bulk of their countrymen in ordinary occupations, they sit paralyzed, unable to resist or fight. Whatever happens, the rich NWO figures who bankroll the NHL and the Players Association will be big cash winners, while theduped white players get hind &amp;%#. PS - I removed a "WWins" ad from the middle of the article that touts "Fahrenheit THIS"

By Dave Fay
THE WASHINGTON TIMES


Ten years ago tomorrow, the NHL picked up where it left off the previous season, ending a 31/2-month lockout imposed by the owners.
There is no chance of that happening this time around, at least not tomorrow. The two sides in the current lockout  at more than four months old, the longest work stoppage in league history  have not met face-to-face since Dec.14. In fact, it's hard to say the two sides have negotiated in the strict definition of the word; they have bumped into each other in hallways to exchange and reject proposals but have yet to sit across a table and discuss the issues.


That's what today's gathering in Chicago is all about. Trevor Linden, the Vancouver Canucks (and former Washington Capitals) center and president of the players union, is playing host to a meeting between three representatives of management and three from the union to try to bring the absent heads of both groups to the bargaining table. They will be negotiating  not about the labor dispute  but about a way to get the real talks started.
Conspicuously missing will be the two prime antagonists, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman and Bob Goodenow, executive director of the players association. They pointedly have not been invited; having them present would be like starting a Girl Scout marshmallow roast with kerosene. Nonetheless, because the two key players will not be present, today's talks will be just that  talk  but far better than the deafening silence that has gripped hockey for months.
Rumors are running wild, as is usually the case in work stoppages. There are reports a sizable number of players are ready to accept just about anything proposed by the league. On the other side, a group of a dozen or so owners reportedly is ready to challenge Bettman over his ironclad policy of a salary cap or nothing. Linden apparently wants to know what the league is willing to offer if the players approve some form of a hard cap.


Meanwhile, related problems continue to mount. The NHL's puck supplier, InGlasCo of Sherbrooke, Que., has laid off half its 40 workers. The Boston Bruins have reduced the work week for front office employees to three days; Pittsburgh trimmed the work week by a day in September. And the Hockey News, the weekly publication devoted to covering the NHL, may cut back to a twice-a-month schedule.
In various leagues across Europe, nearly 350 NHL players were on rosters as of yesterday, a figure that grows by the day. Late last week Goodenow reportedly posted a notice to players on the union's secure Web site advising them to take jobs in Europe for the remainder of this season and entertain offers for next season as well.


Yuri D. Andropov

 

[bigunreal]

This situation is so sad. It is also reflective of just how pro-black
our establishment press is. Where are all the outraged reporters and
commentators? This is a major sport cancelling an entire season!
Remember the outrage when Major League Baseball cancelled the World
Series? Just imagine what would happen if the NFL ever cancelled a
Super Bowl, let alone an entire season. Why, you'd have politicians
from both "competing" parties up in arms, and the likes of Jesse
Jackson and Al Sharpton would be figured prominently on television.



The complete lack of media reaction to this unprecedented fiasco should
be a slap in the face to all of us. THIS is what they think of any
sport with little or no black presence in it.

 

[right winger]

bigunreal wrote: "This situation is so sad. It is also reflective of just how pro-black our establishment press is. Where are all the outraged reporters and commentators? This is a major sport cancelling an entire season! Remember the outrage when Major League Baseball cancelled the World Series? Just imagine what would happen if the NFL ever cancelled a Super Bowl, let alone an entire season. Why, you'd have politicians from both "competing" parties up in arms, and the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would be figured prominently on television.

"The complete lack of media reaction to this unprecedented fiasco should be a slap in the face to all of us. THIS is what they think of any sport with little or no black presence in it."


Very well said.

I wonder if any hockey fans are waking up after four months of this kind of media discrepancy and being told over and over that their sport doesn't count.

 

[speedster]

With some exceptions hockey is just not all that popular in the States.It always has been and always will be a Canadian game.There are so many sports that are head and shoulders above hockey in popularity.I wonder if anyone was even aware of the fact that the World Junior Hockey Championships were recently held in North Dakota.You would think there would be some good coverage on this tournament,but there wasn't.In Canada there was wall to wall coverage from the pre-tourny stuff untill the gold medal victory by the Canucks.You have a small amount of hardcore American fans,some casuals and a tonne of sports fans who don't give a fig about hockey.It's got nothing to do about race here.

 

[Don Wassall]

I think it has almost everything to do with race and the power of the media to shape perceptions. The reality is that the NHL routinely fills to capacity or nearly to capacity, 17,000+ seat arenas at an average ticket price of $50 and more. Sure, alot of that is corporate buying, but a lot of it isn't, and there are a lot of middle class fans who would attend more games if the ticket prices were lower.

The NHL is a poor draw as far as television ratings on nationally televised games, but on a local level many teams' televised games draw very well in the markets where the teams are based.

Even with little national television revenue and publicity, the NHL is a huge business, one with sufficient revenues to pay its players an average of almost $2 million per year. Obviously that is too much, but even if the owners get the hard salary cap they want, most NHL players will still be millionaires. This is no small potatoes league, it is a huge business entity, far more popular than all but three other pro sports leagues in North America, and probably not far behind the NBA. There may be more hard-core hockey fans just in Canada than there are hard-core NBA fans in the entire U.S. And just as many casual sports fans don't care about the NHL, many don't care about the NBA and MLB either.

The media keeps saying that no one cares, but what are hockey fans expected to do? March by the hundreds of thousands to Washington, D.C. or Ottawa? Even when baseball's much more publicized strikes took place, there was nothing more than a few sparsely attended protests where baseball cards were burned, or stillborn efforts were made to "organize" the fans.

When the other sports went on strike, the media constantly interviewed players, owners, union reps, fans, etc. There are no stories like that about the NHL, even after all this time. It's the media that doesn't care about hockey, not its many millions of fans in Canada and the U.S.

 

[Don Wassall]

And as far as national appeal, there would be a lot more if hockey players were hyped by the media and seen in commercials as basketball players are. Without the gargantuan discrepancy in media coverage and hype, every negative argument made about the NHL could just as easily be made about the NBA.

What is the one element where blacks are supposed to have a huge edge over whites? Speed. And that is what hockey has in abundance, more than any other sport, combined with the warrior aspect, which it has more than the black-dominated NFL with its running out of bounds, falling down to avoid being hit, refusing to tackle, etc. If blacks were a significant contingent of NHL players, the league and the current strike would have a much different media image.

 

[Lance Alworth]

Another great post Don. You hit the nail square on the head. The media could give a rats a$$ about hockey. why? because they see it as an entity that the powers that be will never be able to multiculturalize, therefore it must be wiped out of existance all together. I know this for a fact because networks such as ESPN are always going out of their way to deligitimize and stigmatize the sport with their little asanine comments such as "does anyone even remember the NHL?" This type of subliminal brainwashing sends the message to the average sports fan that the NHL is bush-league and that it ranks up there with WNBA and Arena Football in terms of popularity, when the reality is, is that hockey is VERY popular at the regional level in certain cities in the northern US and is EXTREMELY popular throughout Canada. Thats why I dont even bother with ESPN anymore. They are to sports what MTV is to music these days. They'd rather promote gangsta-rap NBA thugs such as Ron Artest than say.. a Brad Richards or Martin St. Louis, the same way MTV would rather promote talentless (c)rappers instead of REAL musicians