This is correct.
The Coyotes winning: the only thing entertaining about that would be seeing what Bissonnette does on his day with the Cup.
Dude, it’s the fucking Flyers. They have one of the worst reputations in the NHL. I so would not take it personally. They once booed a public service announcement for cancer awareness simply because it featured Sidney Crosby. They once booed Santa Claus. Come on. You’re supposed to hate the Flyers – everyone does. They’re evil.
Congrats on beating the snot out of them. Mind you, I’m rooting for NY, because I like a lot of the players there, they’re a good team this year, and I think it would make a hell of a series. (Granted, I’m not a fan of Tortorella, but I don’t hate him enough to wish evil on the team)
Trash talk about sports, and criticism is gonna happen. Hell, you’ve given ME enough shit over the Pens – you should be able to take it as well. 
This is your only warning New Jersey Devils. Shape up and take out John “Fist Magnet” Tortorella or I will have “The Devils are a trap team” carved on my tombstone.
I always find myself wandering in here after a game has been played before remembering to try and make any predictions.
I think the Kings will take their series; I think Mike Smith can steal a game or two, so it’s going to be a fairly good series. Maybe Kings in 6.
I really had no preference between NYR or NJ last night, but I found myself cheering more for the NJ chances than the other way around, so I guess part of my brain is a Devil’s fan. Or perhaps it’s just my crush on Marty. I think NYR will win, again I’ll go with 6 games but I won’t be surprised if it goes to 7.
As for how the number of fans a team has affects the Finals, let me put it this way: During the Pens-Red Wings finals, I could go out in Montreal and see quite a few people wearing those team jerseys. Same with Chicago, the Ruins, the Flyers (embarrassingly enough, hehe!). The Rangers, the Avalanche, the Kings and Canucks, and a lot of Oilers fans, oddly enough. Even in Habs-land, people are fans of other teams, and the streets, the malls, the pubs have that vibe. There are likely quite a few Devils fans around, thanks to Martin Brodeur, but offhand, it really is MB30 gear that I recall seeing, not New Jersey Devils per se. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone, let alone a crowd in a bar, wearing Coyotes stuff here. So like I said, the off-ice narrative is different. You don’t get that same buzz from teams with fewer fans…sure, people hop on bandwagons, but the emotions are different, weaker. It makes watching finals different. Many of us will still watch, most will still cheer, but many others simply give up when the games are between teams they don’t care about, and that number is larger for a Yotes-Devils final than it would be for a Kings-Rangers one. You might disagree to some extent, but does that explanation make a little bit of sense, at least?
Random story time that none of you care about:
There’s a great commercial that plays here for La Cage aux Sports, a restaurant. It’s in the form of an interview with Martin Brodeur where he’s saying that he found himself with the puck and an empty net at the other end, leading 3-1 in the playoff game, and he hears [cut to crowd in the restaurant yelling SHOOT!!! SHOOT!!!], “ben, j’l’ai schooté, direct dans le net…” (so I took the shot, straight into the net…). That commercial’s been on for years and I still crack up every time. Here it is!
There’s a similar one with Georges St-Pierre, where he hears the crowd tell him to wrap up his opponent’s legs in a UFC match, so he did, and he kept his championship belt… GSP ad.
I have seen a few people wear coyotes jerseys here in Ottawa. Maybe just to be ironic. Maybe just to piss off fans of Canadian hockey teams, I couldn’t tell you. But at least they get the cool “Robo-coyote” jersey from their first few years in Phoenix, not the sucky ones they have now. 
If I had ridiculous amounts of money, I’d get a vintage Quebec Nordiques jersey. Now *that *was a hockey jersey.
Not at all, those are indisputable facts.
I take umbrage with the hyperbolic statement that they are “Two teams with maybe one team’s share of fans”. That it was said in the way it was said at all. There was nothing constructive about the statement. There was no fighting ignorance with the statement. It was a unnecessary statement that served no purpose but to belittle two fan bases.
It wasn’t my contention that you have some antipathy for the Devils, but that your previous prediction record, specifically regarding them, suggests that you don’t really follow them and thus your opinions regarding them, their fans and their issues are probably not the most informed or trustworthy.
“Snore.”
Perhaps it’s a leap, but I’d be curious to hear how the universally recognized term for boring, when it’s generally (inaccurately) accepted that the Devils are a boring team, isn’t implying that the series would feature boring, snooze-worthy, trapping hockey.
I still fail to see how the size of a team’s fan base has any impact whatsoever on the viewing pleasure of a series they’re involved in.
I’ve never given you shit over the Penguins. I’ve only ever given you shit for your defenses of their actions.
I can take criticism and ribbing and smack-talk. There’s plenty of ammunition: Brodeur having an affair with and ultimately marrying his wife’s sister-in-law is tried and true. Lou Lamoriello’s draconian methods and unwillingness to break with his own rules that lead to things like Parise probably leaving after the season to sign with Detroit or whomever because he refused to negotiate with him during the regular season or just give the guy the blank check he deserves. Koval-gate. Playoff under-performance (the meltdown vs. Carolina in 2009 is the favorite option). Chico Resch and his awful stories and homerific homerism. That’s all fair game because it’s all true, so with all of the options I cannot stand it when people fall back on played out false narratives.
To a degree, but here’s my problem with this kind of thinking: it promotes a vicious cycle.
If people don’t want to watch a Finals series with teams who have smaller fan bases the networks see the lower ratings and use that to justify not giving those teams additional coverage (via Games of the Week, a Winter Classic appearance, media coverage, not being relegated to grainy, low-def feeds on the Channel Channel when a scheduling conflict arises [probably just a local issue, but worth mentioning], etc.) next season, thereby meaning fewer people are exposed to them and they are hamstrung in their attempts to draw in more fans.
Not wanting to watch teams with smaller fan bases specifically because they have smaller fan bases is, I don’t believe, good for hockey as a whole.
Keep in mind that RickJay and I are both in Canada - there is no difficulty finding playoff games up here because every single game of every round, East and West, is aired on either HNIC or TSN, and also on RDS. On nights with more than one game, you get them on RDS2 and TSN2 as well, all in HD. Even in the regular season, we get quite a few out of market games, particularly on RDS. Ratings don’t matter as much, because hockey is there either way… and if it’s boring teams, with a boring narrative, well, it’s boring.
True, Mike Smith is one hell of a story, and Brodeur playing at this level at 40 years old is kind of cool, but you gotta admit that NJ-PHX isn’t exactly a rivalry for the ages, which is what people want. So our perspective is definitely being skewed by the intense hockey markets we live in: we want that vibe that just isn’t there with these teams.
I honestly hadn’t thought of it the way you just described: in terms of third-tier channels and getting national exposure because it’s such a non-issue in our minds.
No one is trying to draw in more fans here… we just want fun hockey, and the off-ice experience plays a role. With those two teams in the SCF, the off-ice experience would kind of suck for us, even if the hockey is amazing. The playoffs have already been a little it dull for me since the end of the first round: going to a pub on a Friday or Saturday night…the game might be on, but no one is really watching beyond keeping an eye on the score.
I guess we’re just of two different minds about it, and I’m sure the countries we live in and the “culture” of hockey within them play a large part in that, as you say. Personally I’d rather have amazing hockey and couldn’t care less about the off-ice product, but I get what you’re saying.
I do think, however, that what everyone seems to be clamoring for, a NYR-LAK series, would be all kinds of awful.
As to rivalries in the SCF, they’re going to be pretty few and far between because of the inter-conference play. Aside from maybe Pittsburgh-Detroit playing each other two years in a row, there just isn’t a lot of drama between most EC and WC teams.
There may be a little more interest in the WCF here in Raleigh, because of two ex-Canes playing each other(Ray Whitney vs. Justin Williams)
Really, why the hate? Because of the look on his face when he watches the call on the Jumbtron? That’s ridiculous. You don’t know what he’s thinking. I’ll bet that oftentimes it’s how he’s going to chew out the player in the locker room, in the film room or at practice. The guy doesn’t go over the top. He doesn’t act like a prick to the press or anybody else.
As sports personalities go, he is one of the classy guys.
He’s got the team winning, they play like a team, as hockey goes they play clean, there’s no indication that he plays favorites and they work hard. What’s a coach suppose to do?
Last night the refs totally blew the hand-pass non-call. I don’t know how. When they called Kreider it was a make-up call and the look on Tortorella’s face said exactly that.
It turns out Kreiders goal was not that important. You have to score at least one goal to win a game. The Devils didn’t do that.
I don’t have many feelings about the guy either way except to think he looks like the Fonz, but this:
is just patently untrue.
This is the guy who got into a water bottle squirt fight with a fan and is notorious for his terse, antagonistic relationship with the media.
Have you ever sat right down close at a professional sporting event? The attendees (I wont even say fans) can be brutal. The heckling and the mocking that goes on can be truly disgusting, profane and way over the top. I know that coaches and players shouldn’t engage the fans in those circumstances but when those incidents happen, seeing what I’ve seen, my initial reaction is to take the side of the athlete or coach. Any human can be pushed to their limit. So what if he got in a squirt gun fight?
If he is so terse and antagonistic with the media why haven’t the NY sportswriters torn him to shreds? They’ve done it to a lot of coaches and managers. I think they actually respect him. Yes, if his teams systematically lose he will get torn up but he isn’t losing. In the HBO special on the lead-up to the winter classic he didn’t appear antagonistic. Consider that he even participated in the documentary in the first place.
From my point of view and knowing what I do about coaching, having done some of it, I would use him as a model.
And yet the coaches of 29 other teams, some who’ve had more than 1 HC over the past few years have all managed to avoid such confrontations. Amazing that.
Not that I’d normally ever encourage reading anything he writes under any other circumstance, but Larry Brooks has had a few choice words about him in the recent past because some of his more memorable post-game interview explosions have been directed at him.
Perhaps, but more likely it’s become more of an “Oh, that’s just Tortorella being Tortorella” thing. Seriously, look up videos of his interactions with the press… particularly after losses. He’s short, quick-tempered and antagonistic; that is, if he doesn’t cut the interview short by storming off. He’s been doing it for years so it’s become expected and actually anticipated. Hell, some DJ made a mix out of some of his recent post-game comments.
It’s quite possible that the reason none of the NY sportswriters that cover the Rangers haven’t been too harsh on him (I’m assuming you’ve read everything written about the matter by every journalist before posting such a question) is because they have to deal with him on a daily basis and they’re (relatively speaking) professionals.
I can’t say necessarily that I blame him because if my team had just lost the last thing I’d want to do is stand around and answer the same stupid ass questions from the same stupid reporters, but that’s part of his job.
Point is, he absolutely goes over the top and acts like a prick sometimes. That’s his prerogative and I don’t give a shit either way, but say he doesn’t is incorrect.
Yeah, it’s a different thing here. In Canada it would be a cause for public outrage for a playoff game to not be available.
This just isn’t going to be a very fun final four. None of the remaining teams are dynamic offensively; New Jersey and New York aren’t bad but they’re not great, and Phoenix is bad and Los Angeles was the second-lowest-scoring team in the entire league. None seem, well, INTERESTING, and there’s no dynamic rivalry, no really interesting players or personal narratives. In the case of Phoenix you have a team on league life support that doesn’t even really have a certain permanent home; it’s a team without any sort of meaningful identity.
I don’t necessarily need Big Names <TM> or Markets <TM> in the mix - well, hell, New York and LA are huge markets so we aren’t missing that anyway. It’s just very uncompelling hockey right now.
And I’ll admit it; to me there’s something deeply unsatisfying about the possibility of a southern team like Phoenix with no fan base winning the Stanley Cup again. Did many people in Tampa Bay or Raleigh give a tin shit about winning the Cup? Part of the coolness of it is the joy and euphoria that comes with it. It seems less meaningful to hand that to the 1,175 hockey fans in Arizona, who might be deprived of even having a team in a few years if this latest bid fails.
If your location field is accurate, are you sure about this? I’m in Manhattan now, but when I was in Queens Time Warner was identical in both boroughs, and here, anyway, NBCSportsHD is channel 481 on Time Warner.
I just wanted to link to this story: Staples Center to host 6 playoff games in 4 days.
Any guesses as to how the ice is going to be?
30,000 people showed up at the RBC Center to see the Cup the day after the Canes won. Just like any other hockey city, the better the team plays, the more fans show up.
Wait – you’re talking about John Tortorella?