Quote:
Originally Posted by esquire
(Post 9753537)
Junior hockey, much like NCAA hockey, does best when it is the biggest game in town. Sure there is the odd place that can attract a good crowd even with a pro team in town, but by and large it's the smaller markets that embrace them the most. It makes sense for the junior teams to have a foothold in the large pro markets, but I don't think anyone seriously expects the junior team to take on a dominant role and start drawing 15,000 fans a night or what have you.
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Just merely having that presence would do a world of difference for the sport and those participating and being exposed to it. I don't think anyone is expecting the Steelheads to move to the ACC and draw 10K+ a night, but I think it says a lot that MLSE has shown no interest in owning any sort of junior team and seem happy enough with just the Marlies at the Coliseum. In fact, any NHL effort to buy-in to the CHL seems exclusively just as an exercise to fill dates at arenas. Which, again, is fine, but I wonder how those teams would fair with independent ownership.
Quote:
Originally Posted by esquire
(Post 9753537)
Anyway, if hockey isn't relevant (or is of diminishing relevancy) in Canada, between all the major pro teams, all the minor pro teams, all the junior teams, all the amateur players and leagues... then what sport would you actually consider to be relevant?
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I guess I need to restate what i've suggested. The CHL has no relevancy in Canada's major centres and has been relegated to its suburbs and smaller centres exclusively. This is partly due to HC's negligence and partly down to the sport just naturally becoming more appealing to suburbanites in general as the inner-city lower classes are priced out of both playing hockey and attending games.
NHL teams still do well but i'm not convinced that that support is as directly supportive of hockey as much as it is supportive of the brands of those teams or league. There's no real way to really gauge this and others are free to question this as much as they like, but I think you'll find more actual 'hockey fans' at CHL games than at NHL games, particularly those in the larger centres like Toronto. It's more
NHL the Product rather than
Hockey the Sport, if that makes sense. This is mostly conjecture on my behalf but it explains the wide gap between Canadians coming out for NHL hockey but not for CHL, women's, or any other various kinds at different levels. This works out fine for the NHL (money is money) but does a lot of damage to the sport at the grassroots level.
When I talk about the relevancy of a sport in a market i'm mostly referring to sports as they pertain to themselves. That is to say, are the Leafs more or less relevant today in Toronto than they were in 1992? How about in specific areas like Downtown? Oshawa? Markham? If a market is a pie chart calculated to 100 what would the Leafs have taken up thirty years ago as opposed to today? (This sort of conversation is especially relevant to the Argos, whose popularity diminished with the introduce of more and more professional sports teams to Toronto over the decades). For the CHL, they're less relevant in these markets today than ever before simply by virtue of not having any presence in these markets (an argument over whether or not Langley qualifies as Vancouver or Mississauga as Toronto), offset in part by continued relevance in growing mid-sized markets.
I'm not saying that hockey is no longer relevant in Canada - far from the truth as evidenced by just about anything - but if we're trying to trend these sorts of things out and gauge interest in various bodies then I think it's obvious that hockey is losing ground to sports that are quickly catching up to it in the general cachet of Canadian sports interest. Hockey in Canada is losing ground to hockey in the US and with other sports in Canada, so it remains to be seen how much it can, or will, be squeezed in the coming years.
I think the best indicator of the difference in mindset between the NCAA and the CHL is in their national championships - where the NCAA has been holding its Frozen Four events at NHL arenas since the mid-1990s, whereas the CHL has stuck with smaller arenas in smaller markets. If the CHL were perhaps a little daring and willing to take a risk then they could expand their tournament and move it into an NHL arena for a week or so, contained to whatever league is hosting it on that cycle. An eight-team knockout Memorial Cup at the Bell Centre sounds more appealing than their round-robin and knockout formula in Blainville, IMO. It's a change like that that can get the CHL back into major cities and back into more relevancy in the mainstream outside of their mid-sized and small markets. As the Frozen Four travels to Tampa Bay and Las Vegas in the coming years the Memorial Cup will surely be off to Kamloops, Sudbury, and Rimouski...