This has been bugging me for quite some time, but I finally decided to get around to writing about it because I'm tired of the media comparing the Tampa Bay Lightning's situation with the hockey lockout to the Montreal Expos and the baseball strike in '94. It's like comparing apples and oranges, and is based on a misunderstanding of the market.
I just realized that some of you probably have no clue what I'm talking about, so here's the short version. When MLB went on strike in '94, the Expos had one of the best records in baseball, were generating some excitement, and people thought that they had a genuine chance at making a World Series run. The strike killed that and the Expos were never able to get back to that level. In hindsight, the strike is attributed as the reason that the Expos left, because they were never able to regain their fans. The line of reasoning goes that the Lightning are in a similar situation because they created excitement with their Stanley Cup season, and that with the lockout the fans won't come back.
Reason number 1 that Lightning!=Expos: The Lightning actually won their championship, there's no telling whether the Expos would have kept up the momentum or collapsed late in the season.
Reason number 2 that Lightning!=Expos: Hockey is not baseball. How often do you hear somebody say "I hadn't followed baseball but I went to one game and I got hooked"? Never, at least that I can think of. Hockey, well that's a different story. People are upset that just when they discovered what a great sport hockey is, it got yanked out from under them and they want it back.
Reason number 3 that Lightning!=Expos: Hockey fans are different than baseball fans. The fan base for hockey is smaller than baseball, but of those fans, hockey has many more diehard fans as a percentage of the whole than baseball does. Comparing the '94 hockey lockout to the '94 baseball strike, when the sports came back, the diehard fans came back in both, but hockey recovered a lot faster because there isn't really such a thing as a casual hockey fan. Baseball didn't recover fully until the McGuire Sosa homerun race.
Reason number 4 that Lightning!=Expos: People actually care that there's no hockey. Yes, even in Florida, they care, and surveys have shown that the Lightning market is up there with the major hockey markets in their level of caring that there isn't a season.
Reason number 5 that Lightning!=Expos: We survived Art Williams, the worst. owner. ever. And we survived clueless Japanese ownership before that, and when you have a fan base who hung on through the kangaroo circus that was the Lightning and saw them through to victory, a little thing like a lockout isn't going to keep them away. If the Lightning folds, it will because the moron little elf that is Gary Bettman will have run the league into the ground and there will be no such thing as the NHL.
Posted by kathryn at Febrero 27, 2005 03:37 AM | TrackBack