Azaroth

Yesterday, the NHL held an outdoor game in Buffalo, NY infront of $75,000 fans at Ralph Wilson Stadium. Oh did I put a dollar sign there.

I fully intended to go to this game, actually. By the time I got around to looking at tickets, uh, 24 hours after the game was announced, they were sold out. So I was forced to watch on TV. I’m glad I did, but I was thinking the entire time that I should have just shown up and looked for scalpers. It’s a crowd of 75,000. Even if I didn’t find any tickets, I’m fairly certain I could have ended up with a bunch of drugs and a hooker or two to watch the game with in a Motel 6.

Despite the snow, rain, and various other problems related to playing outdoors (ice cracking leaving holes that needed to be repeatedly patched, etc), it really seemed like it worked out better than expected. The atmosphere is a little different at a 75,000 person outdoor football stadium than it is in an 18k seater NHL rink, too. I’ve long thought that being an event is what makes things a big deal, anyway. If the Stones played at your house every night, it’d get fucking annoying. When they swing through your town for the first time in twenty odd years, people take a little more notice. Yeah, you’ll have those die hards that show up to the all night/every night shows to hear the same songs again and again. But that’s what you get, and it’s all you get. Except, the Major League Baseball is a little like every night basement Stones shows. The NHL is a little more like every night basement Bjork shows. Yeah, everyone in Iceland goes crazy over Bjork. But you can’t pull that shit in the US and expect people to come just because. There’s a fundamental flaw in logic there.

When you play so much that the games only seem to mean something to the most die hard of diehards, you’ve got a problem. So why in the hell would you play to 18,000 four times a week when you can play to 75k once a week, anyway? It keeps the players fresher since the sport is just as rough as any NFL game, it gives fans something to obsess about, playing less games makes each game far more important in the standings, and you dont’ have to seem like you’re trying to give tickets away all the time.

So you want to fix the NHL? Demolish every single arena in the league, build rinks with 50k+ capacity and international size ice surfaces, and play once a week. I’m serious.

Baseball survives playing six thousand and eighty-two fucking games a year because there are a hundred god damn years of hardcore fans built up in America that pop a hardon at the smell of a baseball glove and grew up chewing bubblegum, trading cards and watching movies. The games are totally meaningless until the last month, but people go just to go. It’s in their blood. Don’t count on that for hockey in America. It might be in the blood of Canadians, but not Americans. And dont’ expect it to be any time soon. Bjork.

It’s a lesson from MMOs. Be Epic. If you want to compete on the biggest stage, Be Epic.

The NFL is Epic. It’s played once a week so fans can obsess and read and watch analysis on TV all week. Then once the game is on, enough fans to populate a small city gather around a 100 yard field and go nuts (as is what happens to people in general when you put them together in numbers that significant, regardless of what they happen to be gathering for).

Major League Baseball is Epic. Every kid in America grew up swinging a bat and trading baseball cards while watching Kevin Costner movies. Big Stadiums. Easy to understand, too. Etc.

Jesus, even Nascar has an niche that’s epic. Take every mouthbreathing, nosedrooling, crosseyed asshole in the red states and give them circling advertisements to watch for five hours and you’ve got a winner. EVERYONE is in for that. It keeps the rate of incestual copulation in America down and Tide is selling more detergent than ever to dirty pigfarmers who don’t use the shit anyway, but just happen to instinctively pick up a box in a haze of pseudo-consciousness every time they visit the grocery store because they watch the fucking logo go in circles all day on their idiot box while eating corn grits.

So what do you have, Hockey? New teams and new uniforms that cheapen your history? Which is the one thing you DO have going for you? Or do you honestly think that the Boston Bruins playing the Orange County Earthquakes in roller hockey jerseys is a draw? And that’s aside from the dead puck era and trapping style that the Orange County Earthquakes CAUSED, anyway.

But whatever. Nothing will change any time soon. So aside from all of that, I’d like to publicly mention that the outdoor game was a great success, and kudos to the NHL on that one. Although even though I’m a Penguins fan, I did think we sort of ruined it by winning the game in front of 70,000 Sabres fans. Hah. Owned.

Oh, and by the way, the zambonies and ice cleaning wasn’t the epic failure you television analyst retards are making it out to be. Did you really see anyone giving a fuck? These people were beating drums and dancing naked and streaking and fucking goats while hanging 20 feet from cords attached precariously to their seat on the edge of the fifth balcony. Not caring about 3 minute delays.

Dude, these guys go to FOOTBALL games. They stand around for 15 minutes between each 15 second play. They don’t care about miniscule delays to the point where you don’t clean the ice before the shootout and have players dragging the puck through a fucking snowbank on their way to the net.

But you can’t do everything right. All in all, good job. Good game. Do it again. But don’t try it in Orange County.