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This Has Nothing To Do With Nashville As A Hockey Market


Guest radoran

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The TV ratings for the Flyers are pretty solid in Philly.

Sure. And here in Boston too. And probably in a number of other places. But not everywhere (as is the case with the NFL) and even where they are good, they probably don't come anywhere near the NFL.

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Not that many people play it either (in the US). You can drive around almost any town in this country and see basketball rims in driveways and kids play basketball, soccer, football or softball in playgrounds. How often do you see kids playing street hockey? I live in the Boston area, a hockey hotbed in this country, but in the year that I've been here I have yet to see a street hockey game (I do know kids who play in organized ice hockey leagues, but that's expensive and time consuming for parents).

Bottom line (to me anyway)... hockey is a niche sport in this country, and will be for the foreseeable future. And I'm fine with that. If it means that some places can't have NHL teams, that's just the way it goes.

Yup I have heard that arguement before and I totally agree with. It was a big mistake the day Bettman tried to force hockey into markets that do not deserve it or for the matter of fact care for it. aka Atlanta.

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Like it or not, most of us don't just "root for the laundry." We become attached to specific players & think of them as "our guys."

If the Flyers just turned over the whole roster every 4 or 5 years, fans interest would suffer. (And so would winning.)

Again totally agree with you here. And that is why there are franchises that always suffer. There is no consistency in rosters. The Blackhawks were a prime example. for years throught he late 90' into the early 2000's, there was always constant turn around, now they have had the same core together now for a few years, they have been more successful.

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Maybe if they didn't force that donkey-lipped jerk-off down our throats in America people would watch hockey more. He is not a hero outside of Pittsburgh. People want to see a competitive fair sporting event with consistent rules and consistent enforcement. They want to choose who to root for. The NHL has missed the boat on this as well.

The casual fan (the ones the league needs to attract) doesn't care about league's marketing of Sidney Crosby. They wouldn't know a dive if the player landed in their lap. This is not the problem.

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screw equality in revenue sharing

The profitable franchises are already sending $$ for corporate NHL welfare to the bottom feeders

Pro sports franchises should not exist if they cannot survive on their fan base and shared COMMON income from national sources

Why should Flyers ticket revenue, parking, or other direct income from Flyers fans go to prop up franchises who are on life support or dogging it to get draft picks and get preferential treatment from the commissioner.

The game is in markets that cannot survive strictly on their own merit and we have had this discussion for years

Expansion was only agreed upon in the 1990s as Bettman promised a huge tv deal

No TV deal

FA salaries went through the roof

LOCKOUT AND CAP

see where that got us?

The NHL has loaned $$ to how many teams the last season to survive and owns a franchise that has lost more than $150 million

Lets get real,. if I cant afford something I dont buy it and screw billionaires or corporate entities who own teams and collect $$ from other teams to support their teams who wont be supported regionally.

I really dont care if Phoenix, Miami, Tampa and Nashville move or consolidate and the cities end up with minor league teams

The one thing none of you speak about is the NHLPA members acceptance of expansion into loser markets so they have more jobs. Neither the NHL or NHLPA is really are being really transparent about this.Its all about Bettmans fantasies and the NHLPA wanting more voting millionaires and jobs in their organizations even if the teams not financially viable due to demographics and ownership

s

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Sure. And here in Boston too. And probably in a number of other places. But not everywhere (as is the case with the NFL) and even where they are good, they probably don't come anywhere near the NFL.

The NFL, IMO, is in a league all its own. They have great marketing stradegy and the game is easily watched by even the most novice of fans. Also, since the season is only 16 gmes long, each game plays an important role fore each team. The playoffs are easy..1 and done..win and move on. AS much as I love playoff hockey, seing it go for 2 months is long. I can easily see why people don't watch it. The stanly cup finals are in June for god;s sake, most people want to be in the warm weather outside. People do not equate hockey with spring / early summer.

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Why should Flyers ticket revenue, parking, or other direct income from Flyers fans go to prop up franchises who are on life support or dogging it to get draft picks and get preferential treatment from the commissioner.

This, this, and this again. I'd hate to have to be the guy who tells the Leafs fan who is paying $120 for a ticket that say, 5% of that is going to go to the Nashville Predators so that they can pay Shea Weber's signing bonus, while Preds fans are paying $45 for their tickets.

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The NFL, IMO, is in a league all its own. They have great marketing stradegy and the game is easily watched by even the most novice of fans. Also, since the season is only 16 gmes long, each game plays an important role fore each team. The playoffs are easy..1 and done..win and move on. AS much as I love playoff hockey, seing it go for 2 months is long. I can easily see why people don't watch it. The stanly cup finals are in June for god;s sake, most people want to be in the warm weather outside. People do not equate hockey with spring / early summer.

Completely agree. You can't use the NFL as the role model for the NHL. They play in different universes.

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The casual fan (the ones the league needs to attract) doesn't care about league's marketing of Sidney Crosby. They wouldn't know a dive if the player landed in their lap. This is not the problem.

I believe they do recognize that they can't identify with him. Therefore he becomes less marketable to Americans that want to enjoy the sport. All you have to do is watch the kid and pay attention a little and you realize.

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There is a significant divide between the haves, consistently successful, wealthy teams and the have nots, inconsistently successful, mostly smaller market teams. Bettman's power base is formed mostly by the later group. There are more of the later category teams and in the NHL owners group, yet each individual owner has an equal stake in the NHL, even though their teams widely vary in worth. Therefore, Bettman's policies tend to favor the less successful teams to the expense of the more successful teams, as blatantly exhibited by the NHL's very recent contract proposal to the player's association. The problem is that the NY's, Philadelphia'sand Torontos run on a very different economic scale than the smaller market teams. The pressures and rewards are exponentially greater for the more successful teams. They produce far greater revenue but also have to produce a better team year in and year out. It takes good management, strong fan support and more money to do so consistently.

Although we hear about the resentment around the NHL towards the large market teams the truth is that the lare market teams support the smaller market teams. Revenue sharing takes from the wealthy and gives to the poor. This artificially limits the larger market teams ability to produce a good product. at some level this has to bread resentment. Mr Snider gives other teams money, so they can take his players. Just look at Carle. Do the Flyers share their money with Tampa Bay? Yes. Does Tampa Bay then outbid the Flyers, with the Flyers money, for a good but not stellar player? Yes.

I think that the pressures to produce a superior product and the limitations which are inherent in the present system leads to "circumvention" or whatever you want to call it, as represented by this recent offer to Weber at such an inauspicious time as during the collective bargaining meetings.

For the franchise "NHL" there has to be a better model than to have owners of each team, in essence, equal partners, when Toronto is worth a billion dollars and New Jersey and Phoenix are basically bankrupt. Their circumstances are just to different. This system just won't work for the long term.

I do not know what the answer is, but the system is broken, and if there is another lockout this yea,r the NHL won't recover in it's present form.

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i would be happy as a pig in XXXX if the league folded as it exists now and contracted with only viable markets and no little sisters of the poor. The quality of the teams goes up, fewer jobs and boo hoo less millionaires paid for by teams/fans in other cities

Eliminating all the mistakes and changing league leadership -including the commish, his idiot minions and campbell, shanny and the morality less competition committee may mean hockey decisions and rules based on the wishes of the players and the good of the game, not for poor franchises or attention deficit disorder casual (at best) fans

These lousy franchises drag down the profitability of the entity as a whole

Its like going out to dinner every day with people who can never pay their share of the bill but have plenty of money at home

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I can't rad, i don't know what motivates him. I can surmise but i won't * know * .

i do not know how they tried to deal with suter, maybe he didn't like Nashville and was going to leave regardless of the payday.

i can point to the things i have written in other threads and a previous post in this one, Nsh, had a great chance this year to represent the west in the finals, they needed some scoring at the deadline and couldn't or wouldn't make the moves to get it, their system is full of good players that could have been used to bring in a guy to fill it up, but what they got was gaustad and gil, like i said gaustad i get but he's not a fill it up type guy, he's the character guy. they blew it there.

they had super bad luck with their russian players choding it up and not performing .

they took weber to arbitration instead of offering a serious deal to their captain and best player.

Nashville is in this situation with weber because they handled many things poorly.

the hugeness of this cannot be discounted imo

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Obviously they just plan to keep the pipeline going with their younger prospects. They are a "system" team (like moneyball, but in the NHL).

what's funny @AndyS is i was explaining this to my wife and while she is really gd smart, she doesn't have much interest in hockey except when giroux is drilling crosby or any flyer is drilling an opponent , she says oh so Nashville is like the A's in moneyball...brilliant

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If the Flyers just turned over the whole roster every 4 or 5 years, fans interest would suffer. (And so would winning.)

The Flyers do turn over the entire roster every 4-5 years. Coburn is the longest tenured Flyer, acquired in'07. We are all still here, and the team performs reasonably well.

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The NHL needs to figure out a better revenue sharing system. This up coming CBA might be a good place to start.

how about TV money;find a way to grow the brand so there is actually revenue to share. NBC has made a commitment to the NHL now it is up to the NHL to turn that into $. the advent of HD is the best thing to happen to the sport from a broadcast perspective.

the game doesn't need tinkered with much, uniform enforcement of the rules, a coherent supplemental discipline system.

i refuse to feel like my team is doing something bad or wrong by tendering an offer sheet to a this player, it is within the current cba rules. if the other gm has mishandled his players and not dealt with them in the manner others can and will, maybe someone else should be making those decisions and Dave should be head of scouting and player development.

homer's not going to take giroux to arbitration so the arbitrator can compare him to a player he has 3 x the skill and lowball the offer. that will not happen, and in weber's case it did, and suter was watching.

you're right this doesn't have everything to do with Nashville as a hockey market ,IMO it has to do with the abilities of the GM and how he's badly managed these two situations.

I think it's about both...Nashville as a hockey market and the ability of the GM to manage these situations. I think they are directly related.

I keep seeing criticisms that the Predators are at fault for "lowballing" with the $4.75 million arbitration offer but that's how arbitration works. One party comes in artificially high. The other artificially low. Remember, Weber asked for $8.5 million which is a figure as ridiculously high as the Predators' was low (and this was when the cap was $63 million). In the end, he ended up with the biggest cap hit for a defenseman. I doubt the Predators were offering $4.75 per year on a long term deal just as I doubt Weber was asking for $8.5 million per.

It's not unreasonable to think that the Predators' inability to sign him to a long term deal was impacted by the kind of hockey market Nashville is. They averaged 16,690 tickets sold per game in 2011-12...97.5%. That proves this is not just about how well a team draws. The problem is that a small market will never be able to match a large market as far as what they can charge for their product on a local level. The Flyers average ticket price last year was $66.89. Nashville was $51.04. Combine that with an arena that holds about 2,500 more people and it becomes a big number. That's just ticket revenue. Without researching, I would bet that the cost of advertising/sponsorship would be higher for a large market team than it would be for a small market team.

http://espn.go.com/blog/dallas/stars/post/_/id/13315/stars-have-cheapest-ticket-in-nhl

This is where an idiot who lives in a large market would say that if they were such good fans they would pay whatever was asked to go watch their team. Yes and no. Simple economics. The bigger the market the more 'demand' there is. Large markets can afford to price tickets higher and not worry about demand. The bigger the population of the market, the better the chance of finding enough people that will pay the price you are charging.

I/M/H/O, if Poile had the green light to spend to the cap (fairly certain they never have), Weber never even makes it to this point. @radoran is right when he notes that the Flyers being owned by a behemoth of a company is a big advantage. That's not to say they are at all in the wrong for spending every last dollar to put the best team on the ice...but it is an advantage when other teams cannot. The Predators are owned by Predators Holdings LLC.

http://predators.nhl.com/club/page.htm?id=36978

I know nothing about any of these guys...but I'd be surprised if the spending power was equal to that of Comcast Spectacor. If it is, shame on them for letting it get to this point with Weber.

@mojo1917 - You are right to not feel like the Flyers did anything wrong. They are playing within the rules. Unfortunately, those rules allow for a large market team to take advantage of a small market team. I don't mean making an offer to an RFA. It's the front loading of the deal to make it very difficult for a small market team to match that - for lack of a better word - feels a bit slimy to me. Don't get me wrong...I'd love it if the Pens pulled the same trick to land a player like Weber but I would feel a little less enthusiastic about it. Now, if the offer were $7.8 million per year where the player is actually getting paid $7.8 million per year...different story.

I also agree with you that serious revenue sharing may be the only way to keep the NHL from turning into the the NBA or MLB where the large market teams have a significant advantage over the smaller market teams. Someone else pointed this out but the NFL is a bad model. Someone with more knowledge can correct this but there is no 'local' TV revenue in the NFL. The league negotiates with Fox, NBC, CBS and ESPN for rights that include all games. It's not like the Steelers are dealing with Root Sports directly. The teams split the revenue from those national deals equally.

MLB, NBA and NHL...there are nationally negotiated deals but there are also deals to be agreed to between the teams and local networks. Getting back to large markets versus small markets, the Flyers will always make more than Nashvile in these local TV deals. Good luck getting the owners to share that revenue. It's why the Yankees are what they are and the Pirates are what they are. There is revenue sharing in baseball but at the end of the day it does not amount to much...not to the point where the Pirates will ever be able to compete with the Yankees when it comes to the signing of free agents.

So how to fix the problem? For starters, realizing the problem has nothing at all to do with the inconsistent discipline handed down by Shannahan or the league's marketing of it's star players as @Phillygrump would suggest (amazing even this is Crosby's fault). It's the die hard fan who takes issues with those matters and the die hard fan is not the NHL's concern.

Might be oversimplifying but putting into place some guidelines on how contracts can be structured would be a huge step. No more front loading. A player's actual annual salary cannot fluctuate by more than 10% - 15% per year from start to finish. If Nashville really only had to pay Weber $7.8 million per year right off the bat, there is a much better chance they match I think. Limiting the length could help but if you limit the salary fluxuation you may see less of these 10+ year contracts handed out..at least when the players in question will be 40+ years old when the deal is up. No signing bonuses, either. These won't completely solve the large market vs. small market problem. But it would help.

I still have no idea what Nashville will do. If they wanted to sign Weber long term I can't help but think that the biggest difference between what they were offering and the Flyers' offer is when Weber gets his money versus how much (i.e. - less front loading). The cap hit is more than reasonable. Maybe that is what Weber wanted in light of the current labor issues. If that's the case and you are the Predators, why not "suck it up" for the first half of the contract? In the 2nd half, you'll be paying Weber a lot less than what he's actually worth when he'll still be in his early 30's and, presumable, one of the top defenders in the NHL.

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Yep.

They had a chance(s) to lock up both Weber & Suter long-term prior to this & didn't do it. That was their choice.

They had a chance to have the best defensive pairing in the NHL for a long time (with THAT goalie!) and didn't do it.

Weber should have been the cornerstone of that franchise, but instead they treated him like they couldn't wait to show him the door.

Obviously they just plan to keep the pipeline going with their younger prospects. They are a "system" team (like moneyball, but in the NHL).

Suter *wouldn't sign* - blaming them for "not signing" somene who "wouldn't sign" isn't an argument.

Again, do you know what Weber's been offered? Do you know what Nashville offered Suter?

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Because this is a Hockey town.....I'm curious to see what the hockey ratings are in Nashville.......

Yes, well, Philly *wasn't* a "hockey town" in 1967. And wouldn't be a "hockey town" if New York and Montreal could have signed the Flyers best players away simply because they had more money.

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