On Frozen Blog

It’s supposed to be about a million degrees today in D.C., so necessarily I’m insulating myself with frigid thoughts. Specifically, I have Sunday, September 16 on my mind. It’ll still be mild-to-warm then, especially in Raleigh, North Carolina, but Hurricanes’ management is doing something wonderfully frosty for the Research Triangle community that day: it’s authorizing the free admission of every single fan into HBC Arena for the exhibition matinee between the Canes and the Washington Capitals. Approximately 29 other NHL franchises should follow suit this and every September.

In the days immediately following the resolution of the NHL’s lockout a couple of years back, and before OFB, I wrote an opinion for a Caps’ ‘Net newsgroup premised on the idea that that fall the entirety of the league’s exhibition slate should have been wide open and free of charge to the American sports consumer. It wasn’t just an act of good faith/good will I was advocating as olive branch; having been in scores of rinks large and small over the years in September, I was acutely aware of how modest the NHL’s draw was during football’s kickoff month. Let’s put it this way: the Caps aren’t the only NHL team slightly inflating the announced attendance (of 8,500) for those hear-the-crickets-chirping affairs.

In a fitting show of their we’re-in-tune-with-the-state-of-hockey in the States that autumn, a grand total of zero NHL clubs thought like I did.

Let’s face facts: September is football month. Approximately 200 million Americans today hyperventilate over pigskins’ arrival on Saturdays and Sundays then. (I’m a Saturday-in-South Bend guy.) And their appetite is virtually just as acute in October. Now if the NHL were an uber hot commodity come November, through the cold weather months, we might well dismiss September’s seriously sorry gate returns. And to be fair, the NHL is no gut-’em-like-dead-deer-on-admission-rates league in general . . . like say a certain NFL owner in town, who insists that his season ticket holders purchase, at a cost of hundreds of dollars, the entirety of the league’s preseason tilt (parking (also hundreds of dollars) not included). And in the Panthers and the pigskin versions of Tar Heels and Blue Devils, the Carolina ‘Canes don’t face quite the sports dollar challenge that Mr. Leonsis does here.

All the more reason, isn’t it, for the Caps to think outside the box a bit with respect to the handful of Verizon Center dates the club hosts every September? There’s precedent for this kind of marketing/altruism in town: our Shakespeare Theater takes one of its world-class productions to Carter Baron Amphitheater every June for a week to introduce classical theater, free of charge, to Washingtonians who aren’t regular theater patrons. This is not to suggest that orating Henry’s Agincourt challenge to his beleaguered British troops is a serious rival to thwarting the Rangers’ power play. (Still, we might christen the first Caps’ free-for-all at Verizon “Susan O’Malley Savings Night,” as challenge to that marketing guru’s religious belief that there weren’t hockey fans enough in 5-million-resident greater D.C. to fill a hockey rink during the Stanley Cup Finals.)

Seriously, open those gates wide on the night of some pigskin showdown in September and see if Washingtonians react with heretofore characteristic indifference. There was a non-contact, non-starters sweating scrimmage between the Redskins and Ravens last Saturday in Baltimore. There was an admission charge (I presume $1,000 per person for the lower deck.) There was as well a parking charge (I presume $1,000 per car). If I’m the Caps, looking to make headlines in the weeks before the start of the first high-profile season the team has had since the Jagr years, I suck up the Verizon Center’s leasing fee a few times and pitch my remade product to the heart of sports-consuming D.C., in as friendly a fashion as possible. What, after all, would the club truly be losing in gate receipts anyway? 

The reality for the Caps is that they’re the red-headed stepchild in this sorta sports town . . . especially in the view of the MSM. As such, they have to concoct fan-friendly marketing strategies that no other pro sports teams (including DC United) have to. Of course, I’m not one to join the chorus of D.C.-is-a-Dead-End-for-hockey mindset. When the Caps skated outdoors at the Chevy Chase Country Club last winter their communications team took pains to keep the scheme under wraps. (Why, if natives are so puck indifferent?) And that was before we all knew that there was more than one amazingly talented Alexander on the club. 

Here’s another thought: the NHL these days in immersed in the throes of a modest (or more) turmoil over blogger access to its games. Why not use the exhibition slate as an orientation for committed and capable bloggers to get acquainted with the big-league game, from press box to post-game protocols? It’s not like press row will be stuffed with USA Today reporters then.  

Anyway, my guess is the ‘Canes will see a couple of thousand fannies in HBC on September 16 they otherwise wouldn’t have. Some families will be attending their first-ever hockey game. Of those, some youths likely will ask their parents to return to the rink. And some might even get hooked on the game for life. From the ‘Canes’ perspective, seem like a smart business plan to you?     

September in our culture is very much an orientation month. America re-orients itself with its true national sporting pastime (pigskin). College students tabbed freshmen are oriented to life away from home for the very first time. Hockey should orient sporting America to the greatest game on the planet that the media will not, and that outreach, it’s abundantly clear, isn’t achieved with $65-plus admission rates any Americans in any appreciable numbers have ever obliged.