Open Ice, Open Minds
By Bob Grove

The people who market the National Hockey League had better hope fans across North America don’t react to the resumption of play, whether that’s next October, next Christmas or about the time we put a man on Pluto, with the urgency owners and players displayed over the first four months of this lockout.

With the exception of two December meetings and two informal three-on-three discussions coaxed by NHL Players Association president Trevor Linden in January, fans mostly have been up to their trendy third jerseys in silence. The national media reacted to the Sept. 15 lockout by questioning the sanity of both sides, and subsequent coverage was virtually non-existent, much like the effort put forth by both sides to find a solution.

Days turned into weeks, weeks into months and fall into winter as the 2004-05 season slipped away amid tired rhetoric and seeming indifference to the stark reality that the attachment of fans to the game was atrophying by the hour.

Nearly half the NHL’s players found jobs in Europe, carrying their own equipment, playing in small rinks before small crowds for paychecks that were sized accordingly. Canadians had their local junior teams to cheer and, this season, a world junior championship team. Americans had college and professional football and basketball, not to mention, God help us, televised poker.

Yeah, I know, it probably had better ratings than the Stanley Cup Finals.

While these guys plod toward a time when the economics of the NHL are more closely aligned with common sense, the challenge of marketing the post-lockout game gets incrementally more difficult every day. The NHL was threatening to become the first major sport to lose an entire season to labor differences, and that means marketers will be in uncharted territory whenever they start to work.

“Certainly there’s something symbolic about being the first professional league to have a whole season lost. To have a full cycle missing. . . does have some lasting impact, even for core fans,” said Paul Swangard, director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon. “The best-case scenario now is to have a sprint version of a season, say 30 games, and a compelling playoff run. It’s always a challenge for any sports property to disenfranchise fans through labor strife.”Swangard doesn’t just talk in broad generalities, either. He cites the statistics from the NHL lockout of 1994-1995, which wasn’t resolved until January and resulted in a 48-game schedule, and reminds us that “the NHL didn’t see a dramatic drop (in attendance) when they came back. In fact,” he says, “their numbers were slightly higher because, one, the core fans in five of the six original cities came back very strongly and, two, there were a number of new buildings.

“For the most part, the NHL benefits from the fact they don’t have many casual fans. They have a core base of fans, and they’ve been trying to figure out for years how to get the casual fans to come across. The challenge is how do you do that in places like Atlanta, Phoenix and Nashville, where there’s a little less history and more casual fans?”

The casual fans will be the first to shun hockey when it does return, and that’s a problem because revenues are more closely tied to ticket sales in the NHL than in any other major sport. Struggling teams aren’t going to go under during the lockout, but several of them could when they finally drop the puck again.

The first volley should be fairly meaningful reductions in ticket prices across the board. “That is the most tangible example of how to reach out to fans and make them feel they’re getting some benefit from two brats who have been fighting in the sandbox for months,” says Swangard.

The NHL will also need to retain strong corporate partners, but Swangard doesn’t think that will be as difficult as one might imagine.

“What they (corporations) are telling us is that they’re as adamant as anybody about wanting the economic system to get fixed,” he says. “They’re saying, ‘Why should I link my brand with a sport that is synonymous with things fans don’t want: excessive salaries, bickering between players and owners and high ticket prices?’”

Nothing, however, will make more of a marketing impact than fixing a moribund NHL game that today favors grinders and limits the magic that its best players can display.

“While I was in Europe in November to give a speech, I went to Sweden to see an Elite League game,” Swangard said. “They played in a building that would make the Igloo look like the Pepsi Center, and there were only about 5,000 fans. But they were close to the game, the game was open on the big rink, and the players were energized. It was over in two hours and 15 minutes, including overtime, and I walked out thinking that I paid less but it was so much better than what I’ve been seeing in the NHL the last 10 years.”

PSR Senior Writer Bob Grove has been covering the Penguins since 1981 and currently serves as a regular co-host on the Penguins Radio Network.