[Greg_Wyshynski]

Originally Posted by Ishkur

May I bring to your attention: The Olympics Triplecast.

Ever since that debacle, NBC found out that the average American just can not be bothered with watching sports about other countries in other countries live, so learning from the experience they have vowed never to do anything like that ever again.

Now, the Olympics features only Americans winning things (or, if the human interest story is really good, a foreigner winning or at least participating in something where they had to overcome adversity just to be there, fleeing from a tyrannical country where their family was sent to the gulag years ago, training in the USian land of freedom along the way), taped, edited and given that smarmy Bob Costas recap narration for your pre-packaged primetime mass consumption.

And it still doesn't get very good ratings. Not compared to March Madness or the Superbowl, at any rate.

1. The Olympics TripleCast was a titanic failure of marketing and misjudging what fans would pay for the Olympics. It's failure had nothing -- not a damn thing -- to do with showing foreign athletes or foreign sports. Any other interpretation is complete revisionist history.

2. The Olympics do not only feature Americans winning things. They feature the best competition of the night, and usually involve an American athlete. Are you saying NBC wouldn't show an all-Russian figure skating final? Because you bet your ass they would.

3. The Olympics don't get Super Bowl ratings...which means other than the finales of M*A*S*H and Seinfeld, it's just like every single other program in television history.

It's funny, because John McEnroe was talking about this just last year: Tennis in America has been declining in interest ever since Agassi and Sampras ceased to be threats to go head-to-head in any given Grand Slam. Sure, there's Roddick (and if you want to be million-to-one-long-shot about it, James Blake or Taylor Dent), but he's too inconsistent to really capture America's heart the way a Jimmy Connors could.

There's the women's tour, of course, and Americans represent that well, but for some reason the press still wants to be talking about Kournikova. For some reason.

Golf: same thing. America pays attention when America wins. Or when it involves America. It's like the presence of other countries is too anti-climactic or something, the best matchups really pit Americans against each other. Davis Cup is crazy-ass popular overseas. Here......it's a rolling tumbleweed compared to Duke vs. UK.

Your contention is that American fans don't care about "foreign" sports. You've proven yourself wrong when you talk about a player like McEnroe or Connors or Tiger Woods. These are sports as alien to the United States as hockey, and in tennis's case have nearly the same kind of ethnic mix. Yet they can be, and still are, popular with fans, and are covered intensely by the media.

I grew up watching grainy black&white Hockey Night in Canada on my lil 15" TV in my room back in the 80s. I never had a problem figuring out what was going on.

And bully for you. The point is that HDTV makes hockey easier to watch.

The great secret (and irony) about rivalries is they don't actually involve the teams. They involve the passionate devotion to the teams by their respective cities.

Would this be a Canadian view of an American problem?

As cities, Denver and Detroit don't really have a gripe. Neither do Philly and Toronto. Yet put these teams on the ice, and you have intense and wonderful hockey. It has little to do with the fans and everything to do with what happens on the ice. Your example applies to georgraphic rivals, but it's a generality.

You haven't seen serious fan support unless you've witnessed the legendary "White Noise" movement of early 90s Jets arena, when they were in the Playoffs. Winnipeg and Quebec were moved so the league could find bigger markets with potential television broadcast dollars, not because of dwindling fan support. It was painful. There were 560,000 signatures on a petition, which is crazy because Winnipeg was only a city of 500,000 people! It was like all of Manitoba--and probably Saskatchewan too--came out to see them. And yet none of that mattered. The NHL didn't care, the owners didn't care, Bettman certainly didn't care. He was determined to sink this franchise into mediocrity for the cheap and easy buck, and the problems we have today largely result from bonehead decisions like that one.

Check the attendance figures for the Jets. It's not as if they sold out every night.

As for being a boneheaded move -- you can argue that Phoenix was the wrong place to relocate the team, but are you saying that having teams in Winnipeg, Quebec, Ottawa, Edmonton and Calgary would have made this league financially stronger than it is today?

Funny you should mention that. When Pavel Bure was traded to Florida there was a popular picture of him with his shirt off stepping out of the Canucks weight room with Gino Odjick. The guy was seriously ripped. Florida papers got hold of the photo and printed it. Marketing dept. of the Panthers grabbed it and used it in a campaign about this new player they just acquired aimed at--yes, the gay community. Pavel, with his boyish, fetching good looks and stocky, beefy frame, was a natural heartthrob for neo-Pathers fans, most of whom were female, gay, and/or cared little for hockey. The crowd of Panthers games after that moment was a little.........how should we say.....odd.

And its easy for Dallas and Colorado to acquire fan support: they inherited good teams. The jury's still out on whether they will continue to support them when they inevitably decline, however. We shall see.

I'm not sure where you're going with that strange homophobic rant. I was just saying there were a lot of transplanted New Yorkers in Florida.

As for Dallas, you said that hockey can't thrive in the American south. The Stars are in Texas. If you're saying they'll go in the tank if and when they stink, that's pure speculation.

The dump and chase is NEVER boring, and is in fact one of the better strategies in hockey

.

We'll just agree to disagree on this one. And I say that as a Devils fan