Here’s my latest from nhl.com. Click below to get to the text, or click here to get to nhl.com.
Remember when the NHL was hot (and the NBA was not?)
It’s been 14 years since the New York Rangers beat the Vancouver Canucks in a seven game series to win the Stanley Cup, and put the 54-year-old Curse to bed. That was the year when Tikkanen and Matteau rose to the occasion, when Mark Messier guaranteed a win in the semifinal series against the New Jersey Devils, and most importantly, when hockey was sizzling hot and on a major upswing.
What a great year 1993-94 was for the NHL.
In June 1994, hockey was on the cover of the Sports Illustrated. And not just that. The cover showed Mike Richter robbing Pavel Bure, “The Russian Rocket,” on the upper half of the cover, and the Houston Rockets and the New York Knicks battling it out under the hoop on the lower half, with a title: “Why the NHL’s Hot and the NBA’s Not.”
A friend of mine gave me a copy of that cover. I framed it and hung it on the wall above my desk. Hockey was hot, and by association, so was I.
The NBA was not hot, the baseball players were about to go on a strike, and things were looking really good for hockey.
It was the beginning of the Gary Bettman era, the Commissioner handing out the Cup for only the second time.
It was the year of the Fox TV deal, which brought hockey to the mainstream, and to ESPN, but at the same time, as a sign of the way things were headed, also gave us the FoxTrax laser puck.
The NHL had expanded to Florida and got more California teams, riding Disney’s Mighty Duck wave all the way to Anaheim. The San Jose Sharks colors were considered the coolest, and bravest, in any sport, ever.
The NHL was influencing the building of rinks around the U.S., it rolled out inline hockey tournaments, connected with the fans, and it was also starting to look to Europe. In 1994, the Winnipeg Jets came to Finland for a HockeyFest in the first International Challenge, showing off the Stanley Cup, and the Calder Trophy Teemu Selanne had won a couple months earlier.
There was even a collectible card frenzy going on.
But final proof of how cool hockey had become came when Nike acquired Bauer, and entered the market in December 1994. Nike. Get it? Nike! The coolest brand in the world, at the time, anyway. Nike brought its advertising and branding savvy to hockey, and gave us the out-of-work goalies, and Sergei Fedorov playing one-on-25, scoring a nice goal wearing his shiny, white skates, before getting hit by a Zamboni that had “Just do it” painted on it.
Good times, good times.
Seemed like such an empty-netter at the time.
Only, there was no-one to put the puck in. The 1994-95 season didn’t start, and finally turned into a miniature 48-game season.
Fast forward to today. There’s been another lockout. One that cost us an entire season. Pro sports history in the making.
Hockey has been the subject of Sports Illustrated’s cover photo eleven times since the “Hot” issue. Eleven times out of almost 700 issues. This is what we’ve seen:
July 2, 2007: The Hansons (from Slapshot)
July 14, 2006: Steve Yzerman retires
October 14, 2002: NHL Preview
April 1, 2002: Espen Knutsen’s shot killed a fan
June 18, 2001: Ray Bourque wins the Cup
March 12, 2001: Mario’s comeback
June 19, 2000: Devils win the Cup
April 26, 1999: Gretzky retires
June 2, 1997: Detroit Red Wings
October 7, 1996: Messier and Gretzky
March 11, 1996: Gretzky goes to St. Louis
That’s eight without Gretzky, seven without Gretzky or fictional hockey players, and five without retirements, deaths, fictional players, or Gretzky. The NHL only made the cover once in the 2002-03 season, and not at all in the 2003-04 season. The 2004-05 was lost so there wasn’t much to write about anyway.
The Rangers haven’t won since 1994 and the NHL is no longer on ESPN. Last year’s Final had record-low ratings. The three games aired on NBC averaged a 1.6 rating and a 3 share, down 20 percent from the year before, the previous record. In other words, three percent of the people watching TV at the time of the game had it tuned on to the NHL.
But that’s something the NHL has got used to by now. When the League returned from the lockout-lost season in 2005, it did so on OLN, now known as Versus. How small were the hockey audiences then? Well, according to reports, a rained-out baseball game that never started on ESPN beat Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Final in 2006.
But the real sign of the times came recently when Nike announced it was getting out of hockey. The company is trying to find a buyer for its hockey operations, and, according to an article in the New York Times, it can consider itself lucky if it gets half of the 395 million it paid for Bauer in December 1994. In the same article, Denis Drolet, president of Groupe Drolet, which owns Sher-Wood, a hockey stick maker in Sherbrooke, Quebec nails it: “Bauer is a great name, they have a great line of skates. But the hockey market is not growing.”
When the equipment market is not growing, it’s shrinking, and less people playing a sport creates a downward, non-sustainable spiral in the long-term.
It’s 2008 and the League hasn’t been hot for a while, the NHL store in New York is now supported “by Reebok,” and Disney has been replaced by Sidney.
In its new ads, the NHL is asking if this is the year.
I’m afraid the year was 1994, but maybe the NHL has an old DeLorean in the garage. And maybe, hopefully, that flux capacitor still works.
See, I’ve got this empty space on the wall above my desk.