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Icing the Buck

The National Hockey League has a perennial marketing dilemma, one it faced twice in 2010. Tournament hockey, be it the Stanley Cup playoffs or Winter Olympics, is tremendously exciting and has the capability to engage the casual sports fan (a group best defined as "people who watch games on TV"). Regular season hockey, while not always dull, does not.

Unfortunately, regular season games comprise the bulk of the league's inventory. It's most of what it sells. Therefore, the NHL spends most of its time pushing its least attractive product. Then it wonders why it can't get a big U.S. national TV contract.

Hockey isn't known as a sports business full of forward thinkers, or even thinkers (Florida, hotbed of the winter game?). But it occurs to me that another sport, equally as hidebound, has a possible solution for the NHL's annual "February and March, who cares?" problem. That would be European soccer.

European soccer leagues have a regular season and tournaments that go on at the same time. A top club can play in three forms of competition simultaneously, its league, the Champions League (a tournament for teams that did well last season) and, usually, its national tournament, in which major and minor league teams play a tournament that goes on all season parallel to the league schedule. A team that is doing poorly in its league may still do well in tournament competition. Portsmouth, the bottom team in the English Premier League, will play for the FA Cup (national tournament) championship. That has allowed the club, which is bankrupt, to sell more tickets and cut a slice of more TV revenue.

Soccer, in short, has a higher percentage of tournament inventory compared to regular season inventory. Why couldn't hockey do the same. Why not a reduced regular season and an extra parallel tournament besides the Stanley Cup? A world club championship, say. If the best team in Russia came to the Garden of a Saturday in January, it might attract more interest than a visit from the Columbus Blue Jackets, and it'd make just as money for the Bruins. Or a combined AHL-NHL tournament? The Red Wings come to Lowell. I'd watch that instead of another goddamn Big East basketball game.

This proposal will never be considered, let alone adopted. I am convinced the NHL doesn't WANT to expand its popularity. It is content to exist as the fourth/fifth (depends on strength of NASCAR in franchise market) U.S. professional sport. Which is too bad for them, and for us. There's so much more to do in April and May than in January and February. That's when we need winter sports at their best, not at their most drab routine.

posted by Michael Gee @ 6:53 AM