If a hockey league dies in the U.S., does anyone notice?
Toolbox
By Michelle Kaufman The Miami Herald - Published: September 24, 2004
The NHL lockout is now a week old, and still no national outcry. In fact, barely a whimper south of the Canadian border. There are more Americans outraged that Bradford was fired instead of Ivana on "The Apprentice" last week.
If the geniuses who run and play hockey didn't realize their sport was an afterthought to most Americans before last week, they surely must hear that silence now and wonder if closing shop will spell suicide for a league that was hemorrhaging money and losing popularity with every passing day.
When Major League Baseball goes on strike, people scream. When the NFL and NBA threaten to strike, people scream.
The NHL closes its doors indefinitely, and Americans shrug. Some folks in Nashville and Raleigh, N.C., probably didn't even realize they had a team. If, as the experts claim, this is The Big One, the strike that lasts all season, we could find ourselves without a Stanley Cup for the first time since 1919, when a flu epidemic canceled the championship.
And you know what? Outside of the seafood shops in Detroit that will lose octopus sales, and the diehard fans who skated on the frozen ponds in Minnesota and Massachusetts, most Americans will barely notice. They will turn their attention to NASCAR and golf and Paris Hilton.
Don Cherry and "Hockey Night in Canada" remain institutions north of our border, and fans there are already in mourning at the thought of a winter with no NHL. Not here. The league that Sports Illustrated called "Hot" on its June 1994 cover has become irrelevant. The sport that led millions to buy in-line skates a decade ago has become irrelevant.
Ratings bottom out
How irrelevant? The World Series of Poker outdrew the World Cup of Hockey two weeks ago. We kid you not. On thenight 318,000 homes tuned in to ESPN2 for the U.S.-Russia hockey quarterfinal, 1.5 million homes were tuned in to see a patent attorney named Greg Raymer stare at a hand of cards. There are infomercials drawing better than regular-season NHL games these days.
How irrelevant? The only player most Americans can identify by face is Wayne Gretzky, and he retired five years ago.
How irrelevant? The NHL network television contract was just slashed in half, from $120 million a season to $60 million after ratings dwindled over the past five years. The new deal includes no guaranteed money from NBC. The league will be paid only after the network's production costs have been met.
Hockey's television numbers have always trailed those of other leagues, but the gap grew. Last year, the NHL drew an average rating of 1.1 on ABC. The NBA draws 2.2 on average, Major League Baseball 2.7 and the NFL 10.2.
What happened? How did a sport on the rise a decade ago lose $479 million the past two seasons?
What's to blame
There are numerous theories.
There is the Inflated Salaries Theory. The average NHL player made $572,161 in 1993-94. Last season, the average NHL player made $1.8 million, and Peter Forsberg made a ridiculous $11 million. Seventy-five percent of the league's revenue goes to the players, which is too much. Consider that NFL players receive 64 percent of the revenue, Major League Baseball players receive 63 percent and NBA players receive 55 percent. To cover those salaries, NHL owners raised ticket prices, pricing out most families.
There is the Inflated League theory. Thirty teams is too many. The Sun Belt experiment is not working. There are no frozen ponds in Raleigh or Nashville—or South Florida, for that matter—and it is hard to change the sports culture of an entire region. Not impossible. But very difficult.
Even the reigning champions over in Tampa had trouble selling tickets during the playoffs. Fans in Dade and Broward fell in love with the Panthers—and even threw plastic rats—when they battled for a Stanley Cup in 1996. But that passion is not there in nonchampionship years.
There is the Game Has Gotten Boring Theory. In 1981-82, Gretzky led the league with 92 goals. Last season, Ilya Kovalchuk, Jarome Iginla and Rick Nash led the NHL with 41 goals. The stifling neutral-zone trap and huge goalie pads have been blamed. The beauty of hockey is the skating and the creativity, and both could be enhanced with rules changes.
There is the Americans Are Xenophobic Theory. So long as hockey is considered a foreign sport, there are some Americans who will not tune in. Just ask Major League Soccer.
All of these theories are valid, and it is a combination of all of them that led the NHL to the mess it finds itself in. "We are out of gas," commissioner Gary Bettman declared.
If they don't do something in a hurry, they will be out of business. Out of sight, out of mind, the saying goes. And right now, the NHL is nowhere in sight.
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