december-2009

DECEMBER 2009 | UNITED.COM
56 sports
move toward an all-broadband future.
It’s not that the NHL is a small or
insignifi cant league. Attendance for
hockey games, in fact, is about the same
as it is for NBA games, and hockey’s
fans are famously loyal. As an old saw
in Boston goes, “There may be only
17,000 Bruins fans, but they come to
every single game.”
Of course, there are more than 17,000
Bruins fans, but you get the point. With
competition from more dominant sports
like baseball, NASCAR, football and
basketball (and the college versions of
the latter two), there just isn’t room for
an extra sport on the major airwaves—
though most markets with pro hockey
teams have a local cable channel willing
to air games.
Such adversity has forced pro hockey
teams and the league down some
unfamiliar paths. Take Los Angeles,
a city whose fi nancially strapped
newspapers stopped sending beat
writers to L.A. Kings road games
around the same time the NHL lost
CLIMATE CHANGE?
By next season, tough times may drive three teams
back to their Canadian roots.
PHOENIX,
WINNIPEG, MANTOBA
TAMPA BAY, FLORIDA
The NHL will be well positioned to compete on
whatever new, more level playing fi eld emerges
over the next few seasons.
its ESPN contract. This fall, the team
solved the problem by hiring Los Angeles
Daily News writer Rich Hammond to
be its full-time blogger. He now does
just about the same thing he did at
the LADN but gets his checks from
the team instead of a publisher. The
result: Though whatever wall may have
existed between writer and subject
has basically been dismantled, Kings
fans now get coverage by the same
writer they’ve been reading for almost
a decade.
The Washington Capitals have long
been at the forefront of the NHL’s
digital experiment, having been
among the fi rst teams to off er bloggers
permanent seats at games. This actually
isn’t too surprising, given that the
team is owned by Ted Leonsis, who
spent the better (and certainly most
QUEBEC CITY, QUEBEC
HAMILTON, ONTARIO
LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK
profi table) part of his career in various
positions at AOL during the internet
giant’s salad days.
As Leonsis candidly told the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation’s program
Hockey Night in Canada, the wood stove
around which the Canadian hockey
world gathers, “Hockey’s not going to
make it big on television. We’ve tried for
twenty years. We have to be the most
new-media savvy league and go where
the puck is going to be. I don’t think
it’s anything to fear. I think it’s a
business and social imperative that we
have to embrace.”
The Islanders, also suff ering in a
world of reduced print space, have gone
a step further. Next to the free seats
off ered to salaried mainstream media
in the press box, the team installed a
“Blog Box,” where independent bloggers
have covered the games with the same
level of access as their traditional-media
brethren since 2007. As many as 175
bloggers applied for spots in the box
last year, and the team chose 13. Now,
instead of the usual coterie of frustrated
novelists and ink-stained eggheads, the
people covering the Islanders include
such everymen as an air conditioning
service tech and an electrician. On
opening day, at least one of the bloggers
showed up for work in regular fan
attire: an Islanders jersey.
Like other leagues, the NHL
has embraced every kind of social
networking site, from MySpace to
Facebook, and keeps a full-time
social media staff er at its New York
headquarters. This August, the Tampa
Bay Lightning made history in fewer
than 140 characters by becoming the
fi rst professional team in any major
sport to announce a trade by means of
a tweet.
The NHL streams games, too, and for
$20 a month, or $159 a year, a fan can
purchase games and have them fed to a
computer via the league’s GameCenter
Live. Some games, however, are blacked