It seems to me that falling down in the grass is an important part of modern professional soccer.
I had modest interest in hockey until moving to a city with a pro team. Now I actually watch games (well, parts of games anyway) featuring teams in which I have no rooting interest, and read hockey stories in the paper and online.
And the big bands are definitely making a comeback. :dubious:
Soccer has inevitably been the next big thing in the U.S. for decades.
I’m not saying Soccer is the next big thing. I’m saying it’s growing and is taking over hockey as the #4 sport. Still far below NFL, NBA, and MLB.
That is clear to any hockey fan. Fighting is going away. Goons aren’t being recruited. Small fast players are the norm. The league is very aware of CTE and other health issues. Old time hockey is dead.
New York is first a baseball town. Then football. Far behind that is everything else. If there ever was another decade when the Knicks didn’t suck interest will rise. That probably won’t happen until Dolan no longer owns the team.
I agree that hockey can be a rough game to get into on TV. There is nothing better live.
This is a common refrain but is in defiance of the facts and common sense:
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Fighting in hockey is WAY down. There is far, far less fighting in hockey than there used to be; it’s now a fairly unusual event, and it basically never happens in the playoffs, and yet hockey hasn’t become substantially more popular.
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The idea that Americans won’t love sports with fighting and violence is bizarrely at odds with the plain facts. People love sports where fighting is the literal entire sport, like MMA and boxing. They even love professional wrestling where people just PRETEND to fight.
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There just is not any real evidence fighting inhibits the sports’ popularity. No one has been able to find a cohort of sports fans who would like hockey if not for the fighting.
The reason hockey isn’t more popular is because it just isn’t as big a part of American culture. I mean, obviously it is popular; the 24 American NHL franchises are hauling in fans and money in vast amounts. Why it’s not AS popular as football, baseball or basketball is a complex answer - it has to do with history, inertia, culture, business decisions, and a million other things, but look, every country has sports it likes more than others for little other reason than that’s just where we are in history right now.
Just in the last century, the complexion of American sports fandom has changed in a lot of ways. One hundred years ago baseball was an American obsession, and the other two major pro sports were boxing and horse racing. In the 1960s and 1970s baseball fell behind football, which itself had gone through a major shift where college football, while still very popular, had fallen behind pro football in overall attention. Basketball 100 years ago was basically about as popular as volleyball is today; it didn’t become a pro sport until after WWII but grew in a hurry, and furthermore has become a sport dominated by African Americans, both physically and culturally, which wasn’t at all the case 100 years ago. Horse racing has declined significantly. Boxing is a much less popular sport; there was once a time when the world heavyweight champion was essentially always the most famous athlete in America, and now I doubt most Americans know who that person is. MMA has eaten some of boxing’s market, but that’s a much more recent even than boxing’s decline. Tennis and golf became much bigger sports, though the peaks of their popularity have also passed, both in fandom and participation. Bowling, which was once the biggest participation sport in America - a virtual obsession - and was getting sports coverage, has faded into novelty as swiftly as it arose.
It’d take me a whole book to explain that paragraph - to explain WHY those things happened. But it just does, and it’s not at all predictable why.
I don’t think it needs to be excised from the sport, but it doesn’t require a “goon” like Probert whose job is basically to beat people up. Maybe I’m mis-remembering, but these days I see a lot more flagrant cheap shots (i.e. checks to the head) than I recall in the past, and those have become the big problem causing concussions. there needs (IMO) to be one or two on the team who have that “you f*** with my teammate, you answer to me” presence. People used to be wary of trying anything funny on Stevie when they knew doing so would have Probert and/or Kocur coming after them.
just like last night in Detroit. Ryan Ellis shoulder checks Dylan Larkin in the head, Larkin takes exception and they drop the gloves. Larkin gets the extra 2 for roughing while the hit to his head goes uncalled. last thing the team needs is one of their high scorers risking injury defending themselves like Mantha did last season. have a guy like Luke Witkowski or Givani Smith on the bench to send the message instead.
If the hockey overlords are making moves to minimize fighting, that speaks to their recognition that it’s a problem. If your average man on the street who avoids hockey isn’t aware of that, then the old notion of fighting goons will still be there. I’m not judging the fighting as good or bad, I’m stating a fundamental flaw with hockey’s appeal to the masses.
Sure, people who enjoy boxing like to watch fighting. Sure people who enjoy MMA like to watch fighting. But compare those to, say, baseball. Have 160 or so boxing matches in a huge stadium every year. See what kind of attendance they draw.
it’s just conjecture that this is the case, though. I haven’t seen anything that indicates fighting is limiting ice hockey’s broader acceptance. The league may think so, but they weren’t really cracking down on it in earnest in the early '90s when the NHL got a boost in popularity. A lot of that had to do with the film The Mighty Ducks which did well and prompted Disney to found an NHL team of the same name. If anything I’d bet it was Disney who wanted the league to sanitize the game for their benefit.
But that’s doesn’t at all prove it’s a problem with attendance or interest. Again, you just haven’t shown a connection. No one has.
Saying fighting is down because they’re driving it down to fix attendance is like saying baseball has fewer stolen bases than it used to in an effort to fix attendance, or that basketball has more 3-pointers than it did ten years ago in response to attendance issues. The reduction in fighting is largely just a strategic thing; the assumption used to be that you needed players to fight because
- It “protected” skill players,
- It was good for morale in some way, and
- Because you didn’t have enough skill players to fill an entire team anyway so you might as well have fourth line guys who could do something else (note that goons were almost never defencemen, a rarer skill commodity.)
Assumptions 1 and 2 were simply wrong, or at least not right enough to offset the advantages of replacing goons with skill players, and Assumption 3, if it ever were true, isn’t anymore, because there is a much bigger pool of skilled players to draw from now relative to the size of the league.
I think part of it just comes down to weather. Ice-skating at all is not an option for a significant portion of the country–we don’t get much in the way of suitable ice during the winter, so you have to go looking for an ice rink to even learn the basics, and they’re not all that common. There seem to be only 2 in my home state, and only 6 or 7 in DFW (which is home to an NHL team) meaning less than 1 rink per million people.
Consequently, most of us in the warmer parts of the country never even consider learning to skate, let alone to play games on skates. What are we qualified to discuss about hockey? We’re impressed with them just staying upright.
Part of it might just be limited attention that has to be rationed or budgeted out. With 4 major professional sports leagues, it’s hard for fans to be equally rabid or enthusiastic about all four of them. The top three - NBA, MLB and NFL - already draw considerable attention. There is bound to be some drop-off in interest or enthusiasm with the 4th.
Hockey is huge in San Jose, where I spent 20 years beginning just after the founding of the Sharks. They routinely sell out a 17k seat arena. As far as discussion, I had plenty of coworkers to talk about games with. It didn’t get much airtime on sports talk radio because the stations are based in S.F. and the the hockey fandom is limited to Silicon Valley. (Plus nothing but football and baseball gets on the anyway. )
I’m excited about getting a new team in Seattle.
yep, I remember when that expansion phase happened, there were Sharks and Mighty Ducks jerseys all over the place. IIRC it even influenced some NBA teams to change their logos and color schemes; in '96 the Pistons changed their logo and colors from the red, white, and blue they’d used forever to a teal, red, and orange scheme which fans hated.
This is the answer. Yeah, maybe in certain regions of America hockey is widely discussed (Pittsburgh, Detroit) but for the most part it was just not an available sport for most of us. Even now in the Columbus, Ohio area, where the sport has grown immensely thanks to having an NHL team, there are only a couple venues available to play hockey. If kids don’t play it, they probably don’t watch it and definitely don’t discuss it.
The difference now is that the USA gets exposed to the top European leagues now. And, the time zones work out as the matches are played in the morning in the USA.
On Monday mornings at my office, people will talk almost as much about the Premier league as they do about the Redskins’ latest debacle.
There was a minor blip in interest in hockey when the Caps won the Cup in 2017, but it remains a niche interest.
The Nashville Predators are venerated, locally.
Why should it be?
But you have to admit, even here its a secondary subject and more around certain circles of people. Your General Issue person may not be able to name any player except maybe Sid. And most people have no idea Mario isn’t still playing.
In other words I agree with the OP mostly and I always wrote it off to the wide range of climate here in the US and hockey only catching in with youth leagues and schools nationwide (note that world before hitting reply and frying my ass) lately. For those of us say over 30 we can talk baseball or football or basketball with anyone from anywhere because we grew up not just watching but playing as well. Hockey? Around us high school teams didn’t show up until the 70s and even then they were rare. 1974 when I played the entire WPIAL roster was like 6 schools? PeeWee and such was maybe the 90s? Give it another 20 years and then grab a ouija board and let me know how it worked out.
I wonder if that influenced the SuperSonics changing their colors the same year (1996). They went from the green, yellow, and white they had since 76 to an ugly green orange and red. Basically identical but replace teal with green.
They wisely changed the colors back in 2002.
Then in 2008 they went away forever. 