SI Sees a Sleeping Giant in the Southeast
By The OFB Team -
February 13, 2007
Important findings are contained in Michael Farber's February 5 essay "The South Has Risen" for Sports Illustrated. Farber, SI's senior hockey writer, calls the Southeast "hockey's best, most raucous division." In his assessment of the Southeast's rise from late '90s laughingstock to today's five-quality-team frenzy, he does point out some long-term issues that may prove too difficult for the division to surmount:
- "Washington, which joined the NHL in 1974, still has emotional ties to old Patrick Division rivals like the Rangers [OFB note: see last Saturday night's Verizon Center attendance], Philadelphia Flyers and Pittsburgh Penguins, a team it met in the playoffs seven times between '91 and 2001.
- "When asked to identify its biggest rival, most Lightning players named Philly, which Tampa faced in its first playoff series, in '96, and again in the '04 Eastern Conference finals."
- " . . . hockey feels grafted to the Southeast cities. A game in Florida is like a passing summer squall: Ten minutes after it's over, you'd never know it happened. Fans of Southeast teams are a subset in their towns. They might as well be 15,000 chess afficiandos or members of a book club . . ."
- "The schedule, in which each team plays each divisional opponent a whopping eight times, is also less than ideal in these relatively new markets, which rely on fan bases made up heavily of transplants from the Northeast."
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