One of the biggest lessons that we learned as fans during last year’s NFL and NBA lockouts, as well as this year’s NFL referee lockout and now the NHL lockout, is that we don’t matter worth a squat. Sure, we’re the people who provide the money, but the owners, players, agents, players’ reps, and everyone else involved in labor negotiations know that we’re never going to realize the power that we have and just walk away from sports to prove a point. After all, if we gave up on sports, we’d have to deal with reality and not one of us wants to do that.
Take the Seattle Seahawks-Green Bay Packers “Fail Mary” game, for instance. It wasn’t just Packers fans, as NFL fans in general were calling for boycotts of the following week’s games if Roger Goodell and the owners didn’t get their sh*t together and reach a deal with the regular refs. If the NFL hadn’t come to terms on a new 8-year deal with the refs’ union that same week, would people have tuned out? Absolutely not. It wouldn’t have made a difference, because we’re moths drawn to the bright light.
The NHL is such a better example, though, because the stink of the last hockey lockout (hockout!) is still ripe in our figurative nostrils. You’d think that would stop commissioner Gary Bettman and the NHLPA’s Donald Fehr from allowing another work stoppage, but we obviously know that’s not the case. Instead, both the league and the players have walked away from yesterday’s meeting with no hope. Why? Because the owners want more revenue sharing at the expense of the players (among other things, obviously).
I feel bad for NHL fans. Really bad. Before the lockout, the NHL couldn’t even get ESPN to pay it 10 seconds of coverage on SportsCenter. Now? The network is rubbing salt in Bettman’s wounds by inking a deal with the Kontinental Hockey League for this year. Bettman doesn’t care, though. He thinks he’s David Stern. Too bad the fans that he’s enraging know that he’s anything but Stern. They know he’s simply a man who has lost his grip on reality and is destroying an entire professional sports league in the process.
But Bettman doesn’t lose. Neither does Fehr. Hell, the players won’t even really lose. Only the fans lose, and that’s the worst part about this.
Oh and the NHL’s Ice Girls lose, too, so let’s forget all that other stuff and spend some time honoring them, because they're awesome and we're going to miss them more than the players.
(Banner via, images via NHL Ice Girls, Boards N' Broads, Sports Illustrated, and other various places.)
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pic #12: I thought Pronger was forced into retirement?
I’ve had this point bumbling around the back of my brain for a while. Let’s see if I can give it a chance to get out and spread its wings in the most tortured analogy of all time.
The fans don’t matter. Not really. And I don’t mean in the adolescent “no one cares about me and my epic problems” way. I mean we actually and factually don’t matter. I’ll try and see if this makes any sense.
The leagues don’t answer to us. Gate revenue is a tiny portion of their overall take. Yes, it’s true that concessions and parking are pure profit and an empty stadium would hurt the bottom line. But how much? My team’s fan base, Packer fans, have a legendary waiting list for season tickets. And while it is the stuff of absurd pride and stupid jokes that the list is 100,000+ people long at this point, what it does illustrate is that the Packers have their season ticket revenue locked up for a while. If 40k+ people up and cancelled their season tickets, another 40k+ would step in. And other teams, certainly not every team but many, have similar circumstances. I remember reading a couple years ago how the pint sized tyrant Dannyboy Snider was bragging about waiting lists for his stadium as well.
But that’s not even my main point. Imagine if the teams all lost out on substantial revenue from concessions and parking because people have had enough. There’s still merchandising. Ok, what if that goes away?
They just signed a multi-year multi-billion dollar deal with the four networks. That’s enough guaranteed revenue that the league will still be profitable irrespective of fan inclusion.
And the networks don’t care about you. They care about ad dollars.
And the advertisers don’t care about you. They care about the insanely outdated Nielsen boxes.
And the Nielsen corporation doesn’t care about you. They care about the 25,000 (!) homes that have their boxes. In a nation of 300 million people there are 25… thousand boxes. Your viewing habits can’t begin to matter in a system like that.
Personally, I don’t care about hockey or basketball. Milwaukee doesn’t have and will never have, the NHL. And even if it did, I couldn’t afford it. And with the structure of the NBA, the Bucks have no chance to be good, even if they weren’t incompetently mismanaged for the last 15 years. Which I grant they have been. Which leaves me with baseball and football. As a lifelong Brewers and Packers fan, it saddens me to know that my love of those uniforms will never be reciprocated. But the simple fact of the matter is, it won’t. I don’t matter to them. And neither do you.
Someone please prove me wrong. I get that the points are both that if we all rose up en masse our voices would be heard, and that we won’t. But still. I’d love reasons outside of my points to be optimistic of the fact that we matter. I just don’t see it.
Tight logic, well said. My Mom still cares about me though.
Pic #30: Those titties have been crowned.
Speaking from a very personal place, my dad is off the boat European and my mom is from Thunder Bay, Ontario, so the presence of most sports wasn’t that prevalent in my household. When I grew up my dad’s standpoint was that I should play soccer, and my mom’s was that I should play any sport I wanted but if I chose hockey that sure would be peachy. Without doing you all the disservice that is the recanting of the fracture of my family I will say that in recent years Hockey has been the one thing that allows my mom and I to have a bond that doesn’t feel like a forced familial thing. While I live in NYC, where I was born, retirement has seen my parents move upstate a bit. As we tried to rebuild our relationship, my mom would still take the 1 hr 45 min ride on the Metro-North in to the city about 8-10 times a year for Rangers games. It’s the only time our relationship feels natural. If this season doesn’t happen it’s gonna be a fairly sad few months.
Pretend there was a joke or two in there somewhere.
I hate the team, but, wow, the Hawks have some fantastic ice girls. Girl in pic #32=Amazing.
RIP: Atlanta Thrashers ice girls.
LOL at ESPN airing KHL games. That league is worse entertainment wise than the NHL!
Shhh. Burnsy doesn’t know Atlanta doesn’t have a team anymore.