31 luglio 2008

Archivi di categoria: Pro valutazione del biglietto del Hockey

una notte di sabato in aprile e stiamo giocando il Hockey seriamente espressivo

Dai pucksandbooks
Sabato 5 aprile 2008

Su Stubhub questa mattina, il biglietto pi poco costoso al gioco stasera era $206 per un posto unico nel livello del randello. Le sedi pi basse della ciotola l erano $353 ciascuno. L'eccedenza su Craigslist, ricercatori disperati del biglietto ha inviato gli annunci che esigono la loro compiacenza pagare “$250 per il biglietto.„ Sul luogo del ticketexchange del Ticketmaster, su due sedi nel del were della parte 401 che prende $313.50, mentre una sede nel di fila L della parte 111 ha richiesto $1.098.90 e due nella parte 100 - gulp - offerte richieste di $1,500.

Ci aveva luogo per un gioco normale del hockey di stagione dei capitali de Washington, in Washington, DC e sulla notte (ho dovuto essere ricordato a) del finale di NCAA Four.à

Il duca ha il Cameron Crazies ed a 6:35 questa sera sono ricordato a di quella scena che guarda gi un mare diritto di colore rosso l'estremit a che le protezioni stanno riscaldando. Non c'era nessun'esagerazione, l 5.000 nel colore rosso in questa costruzione a 6:15 - quasi tutti che circondano le protezioni per preriscaldamento, tutti, come Crazies del Cameron, levantesi in piedi. Il della cabina di telefono Phanatics.à

I mezzi rotolano la richiesta per stasera per voi:

DI à

Tarik, di WaPostà Dave Feldman, Fox-5 TV Fay del Dave, tempi de Washington
Mike saggio, WaPost Circuito integrato Baysten, Fox-5 TV Nate Ewell, capitali de Washington
Corey Masisak, tempi della lavata Comcast Personale dei capitali
Dan Daly, tempi della lavata Comcast Personale dei capitali
Thom Loverro, tempi della lavata Comcast Personale dei capitali
Ryan O' Halloran, tempi della lavata Comcast Personale dei capitali
Howard Fendrich, pressa associata Comcast Personale dei capitali
Joseph bianco, pressa collegata Comcast di me, OFB
Brian McNally, l'ispettore Pescatore del Jiri, Voiceof America Peter Bondra di
Ian Herbert, l'espresso Mike Richman, radio di ESPN DI à
Krista Vogt, l'espresso Chris Simpson, Rogers Sportsnet DI à
Brian Riggane, di Post della spiaggia della palma Thomas Hass, Rogers Sportsnet DI à
George Richards, Herald de Miami Ben Eisenberg, Hockey interno DI à
Steve Gorton, Sole-Sentinella (Fla.) Justin Creech, CC MetroSports DI à
Dmitry Chesnokov, SovetskySport Julie Robenhymer, Hockeybuzz.com DI à
Slava Mallamud, sport espresso Tim Hipps, Sportsticker DI à
Jonathon Warner, WTOP Carla Peay, informatore de Washington DI à
Alex Caudana, WTOP Mike Vogel, capitali de Washington DI à
Dan Hellie, WRC-TV 4 Punto Parker, capitali de Washington DI à
Greg Toland, WJLA-TV 7 Kurt Kehl, capitali de Washington DI à

DI à

Archiviato dentro Mezzi, Lega nazionale del Hockey, Pro valutazione del biglietto del Hockey, Spareggi della tazza dello Stanley, Capitali de Washington| Permalink| Comments (0)

The Branding of a Winner in Washington, the “Good Hockey Market”

By pucksandbooks
Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Little commented upon during this Capitals’ Renaissance is how many people around town are taking notice:

Lots.

Suddenly, the downtown rink is packed. The team’s new look is a red-hot hit with the home crowd. The sports section fronts of the city’s newspapers are each week ablaze in full-color hockey victory imagery. Even the TV numbers are up. There is buzz about hockey in Washington.

“This is a good hockey market,” Jim Van Stone, Capitals’ Vice President of Ticket Sales and Service, told me during the Caps’ 3-2 win over the Rangers on Sunday. “There’s a huge amount of hockey fans in the region, and what we’re trying to do is convert them into Caps’ fans.”

It’s a big tent revival taking place in Chinatown, and the numbers of the converts are growing.

The Capitals’ players are doing their part out on the ice, and the team’s marketing professionals have devised some creative sales packages that have fueled an impressive surge in group and partial plan sales. But “the buzz” about hockey in town — the one driving thousands more into the stands, toward the souvenir stands and stores, and before their television sets at home — seems to have its origins in a remarkable and broad confluence of positive events for the organization.

Go back to last June and the launching of the revamped look of the team. Caps’ fans long hungered for a return to the team’s original red, white, and blue colors, and the team not only listened but carried out the makeover in an appealingly clean and restrained contemporary design that, judging by its red wave prevalence within Verizon Center, appears to be popular across gender and age.

There’s an understated, classic look to the new look that seems synchronous with its founding predecessor — perhaps best illustrated among the array of fashionable baseball caps seemingly on every hockey head in Verizon Center. January home games most especially seemed to showcase that Santa Claus trafficked thick in these parts in Capitals’ red, white, and blue. This new look is largely responsible for the team’s merchandise sales being up 40 percent this season over last, according to Tim McDermott, Capitals’ Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer.

It’s great to look marvelous, but now the Caps’ are a good looking winner. Washington loves nothing so much as a front- runner, and a Caps’ ticket sales staff that for years had to pitch an at times far-off seeming future can now point to a present that includes things like sweeping the Ottawa Senators and vying for first in the Southeast division. Paid admissions this season, McDermott told me, will be up 15-20 percent over last season.

And if winning weren’t enough, the team’s sales staff gets to market a set of young stars catching the notice of the entire hockey world.

“We are fortunate to have what we call our four young guns,” McDermott told me, alluding to Alexanders Ovechkin and Semin, Nicklas Backstrom and Mike Green. “You can honestly and very objectively sit back and say that for the next 10 years this is a team that’s going to compete for the playoffs, this is a team we hope that will compete for the Stanley Cup,” he added.

So the Caps are not only winning but doing so with young star power. It’s a fantastically appealing headlining quartet — a Rat Pack on skates — and a core of the team positioned to play together many years. Who wouldn’t be lured in by that? Hence, Gang Green, Ovie’s Crazy 8s.

And to this already potent marketing mix management has added the immensely quotable and feel-good story of hockey perseverance in Bruce Boudreau. He dresses a bit oddly, he’s chock full of fabulous tales, he never fails to deliver a money quote after games, and from his gaudy stint of winning in Hershey he’s vested in most of the Capitals’ young core. He just seems the right guy for the part.

Home crowds here typically start out discouragingly small in October and November, no matter the team’s forecast or its early season success. Then, come January, after the Redskins’ season is completed, there’s long been a healthy improvement in puck patronage. But there’s something different about this season’s mid-winter attendance improvement: its vastness.

Ovechkin in Caps shirt - photo by Sovietsky SportThe Caps’ three most recent home games have all seen attendance solidly above 17,000 — and for two of those dates, the opposition came from the Southeast division, long a yawning bane to HockeyWashington’s Old Guard who feasted on the high nutrition fare of Patrick Division foes for years. Last Friday night, fully 45 minutes before the Caps squared off against Carolina, the number of tickets available to F St. walk-ups for seats in the 100 and 400 levels was zero.

Nada.

As if Hanna Montana was in the house.

Perhaps even more interesting was a new demographic among them: college students. No fewer than 2,300 area collegians took part in the Capitals’ Student Rush program last Friday night, by which they can access tickets at admission rates even college kids can afford: $25 for seats in the lower bowl, $10 upstairs. How did the Caps lure thousands away from campus keggers on a Friday night? With winning, but also with aggressive and well-placed branding, particularly in social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

“Our street teams have actually been on the campuses,” Van Stone told me, alluding to Caps’ staffers who this season have regularly been out promoting the team at Metro stations, area businesses, and now college campuses, distributing t-shirts, pocket schedules, and even hot dogs to promote $1 Dog Night.

Verizon Center as the world’s largest frat house? You have to admit, the Friday night atmosphere in there has changed — and for the better — of late. And while college-budget-friendly admission rates to see Alex Ovechkin are inducement indeed, the hordes of collegians may also be responding to the team’s youth: in their ages, the likes of Ovechkin, Backstrom, and Mike Green, among others, are their peers.

The swell in popularity isn’t restricted to game attendance, either. According to McDermott, Comcast viewership for Caps’ broadcasts is up 37 percent this season over last. That viewership is virtually certain to increase during the stretch run, too, particularly if the team remains in contention for the Southeast title.

It was predictable that the team’s winning ways would garner some level of interest from sports Washington, but not to be overlooked in the equation is the perhaps redefining, landscape-altering, sublime performance of Hart Trophy candidate Alexander Ovechkin. The Caps and this city simply have never seen his likes in the team’s sweater before. Nor for that matter has the rest of the league.

Sunday afternoon a camera broadcasting a feed to Verizon Center’s state-of-the-art, high definition center-ice scoreboard honed in on Ovechkin on the Caps’ bench. Ovie being Ovie, as soon as he realized he was on camera, he beamed that gap-toothed grin of his and the arena erupted. Of course soon thereafter he scored a goal, and the team came back from a 2-1 deficit and prevailed in overtime against the Rangers. Ovechkin’s hold on HockeyWashington — which is expanding — is irrefutable. And thanks to Caps’ management early in 2008, that courtship will endure past next decade. Van Stone and McDermott confirmed for me that fans are purchasing ticket plans for this season — as well as putting down deposits for next — while citing the new deal for Ovie as a reason.

So with the arena virtually full, revenues up all around, and the team in first place these days, the branding work must largely be finished for the Caps, right? Wrong, claims McDermott.

“What I’ve learned is that we have to be prepared for success, to capitalize on it,” he told me. “That means that we can’t ‘go dark’ once the season is over. We have to find a way to connect with hockey fans here even in the offseason. That’s what we’re thinking about now, ideas for doing that.”

“The rebuild is over,” the team’s owner conspicuously claimed at the onset of training camp last fall. Now it appears that Ted’s team — the one on the ice as well as the one off it — is buiding an infrastructure to make Washington a durably built hockey town. Tickets, if you can believe it, are already becoming scarce.

Filed in Alexander Ovechkin, Alexander Semin, Bruce Boudreau, Comcast SportsNet, Front Office, Kettler Capitals Iceplex, Mike Green, Nicklas Backstrom, Pro Hockey Ticket Pricing, TV, Washington Capitals| Permalink| Comments (12)

Death by Late-Night TV

By pucksandbooks
Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Cup'pa JoeIn Monday’s New York Times, in her “Sports of the Times” column, Selena Roberts posits that baseball itself is largely culpable for its death as a participation sport in the U.S. She noted that by the time MLB got around to sanctioning the first pitch of an American League playoff game last Saturday night, the American sporting landscape was already abuzz from another Saturday afternoon of upset specials in college football. Worse, Saturday night’s Red Sox-Indians’ tilt ended some time near Sunday morning church-going for millions of Americans.

In catering more to Jay Leno’s demographic, baseball is divorcing itself from the very constituency it needs to perpetuate itself: young athletes. And in so doing, and here’s where Roberts’ argument gets really fun, baseball necessarily has exported many of this nation’s best athletes to another sport — football.

“Only insomniacs, Stephen King and barflies would have seen the Red Sox lose at that hour [Saturday night],” she wrote.

“Only baseball could test the sleep-deprivation limits of its fans in a postseason where every inning feels like the seventh-inning stretch. Only baseball could seem more invisible, more numbing, during the playoffs than it did during the slow-drip cadence of a 162-game season.”

It’s not a terribly terrific idea I don’t think to take a non-contact sport, which derives much its enduring hold on its supporters for its “cerebral” and games-without-clocks appeal, and by virtue of starting games past the bedtimes of millions of American youths, help ensure they can’t form important attachments to it. We’re talking about the sport’s postseason, after all, when heroes and icons typically are birthed.

“This is why college football is reveling in the sweet glory of parity,” Roberts claims. “The decline of baseball as America’s pastime — or past time, as the clock may indicate — has inadvertently seeded football programs across the country with talent.”

“Where are all the skilled athletes going? To the sport they can watch, to the sport that engages their short attention spans and markets to their starry-eyed sensibilities. To football.”

There’s data backing up Roberts’ point. The conspicuous decline in participation by American blacks in baseball is increasingly being documented — the sport’s been obliterated from urban America. (Where are the fields in cities?) But now American blacks are beginning to be joined on the sidelines by another important group: whites.

“In the past 15 years, according to a recent study by the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, the percentage of African-American major league baseball players has plunged to 8.4 percent from 18 percent; the percentage of white players has slipped to 59.5 percent from 68 percent.

Now look at Division I football statistics compiled by the N.C.A.A. In the past five years, the percentage of football scholarships offered to African-American players has risen to 45.4 percent in 2005-6 from 39.5 percent in 1999-2000.”

I read Roberts’ remarkable findings and claims and thought back to Labor Day weekend, when Appalachian State stunned much of planet Earth with its compelling slaying of top-5-ranked, powerhouse Michigan. It wasn’t with smoke and mirrors that A State pulled off the feat, it was with quality athletes — all over the field, and especially at the skill positions. Does that kind of upset happen 20 years ago? Of course not; had it, the reaction to this game wouldn’t have been as powerful as it was. And now, virtually every Saturday sends fresh jolts throughout the top 25 rankings. College athletic directors who 5 or 10 years thought they’d scheduled “gimmes” out of conference in 2007 are learning something else.

The vast majority of college football games each Saturday are completed just as baseball’s playoff clubs are leaving their hotels. And so baseball’s wound in the competitive sports marketplace is self-inflicted. Why can’t a postseason first pitch be delivered at 1:05 on a Saturday? Because of baseball’s bloodlust for prime — and past prime — time big bucks.

There’s a cautionary tale here for hockey. The good news is that when a hockey broadcast, regular season or playoff, commences at 7:00 on the East Coast the action starts at 7:05 and pretty much proceeds unabated until 9:30. It’s a kiddie-family friendly schedule. For some mysterious reason baseball broadcasts arrive and viewers are greeted by nearly a half hour of non-action analysis. Then, in its modern iteration, baseball imposes something on the order of 21 pitching changes over the course of nine innings. Really, could it do anything more to drive away viewers — young ones most particularly?

The economics of baseball for families aren’t all that bad — wide swaths of stadiums’ upper decks and bleacher seats remain within wallets’ reach. Less so, though, I think with big-league hockey. The American League and CHL games I attend are constantly crammed with kiddies. That’s not because they find the NHL boring.

There are great athletes today in hockey, at all levels. This is true to some extent because they have been able to make a connection with the game on television. But could even more great athletes form an attachment with hockey, particularly, say, in urban settings? I think so.

One of the more endearing traditions in the American Hockey League is the relative prevalence of afternoon games. Some are scheduled during September’s preseason slate, others on holidays like Columbus Day. School kids by the busload fill the stands at affordable rates. Hockey wants to be a hit, but first you must hook the kids.

“As viewing habits go,” Roberts concludes, “a sport can’t be a hit if it’s not seen. Football gets that. And with it, all the talent.”   

Filed in American Hockey League, Baseball, MLB, Media, Morning cup-a-joe, National Hockey League, Other Sports, Print, Pro Hockey Ticket Pricing| Permalink| Comments (7)

The Hurricanes Open Their Doors, Wide

By pucksandbooks
Tuesday, August 7, 2007

Cup'pa JoeIt’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.)

Continue reading ›

Filed in Blogs, Carolina Hurricanes, Eastern Conference, Hockey, Morning cup-a-joe, National Hockey League, Pro Hockey Ticket Pricing, The NHL Lockout, Washington Capitals| Permalink| Comments (6)

More Foul Winds Under Wirtz

By The OFB Team
Saturday, March 31, 2007

Chicago Logo - image from TSN.caToday’s Chicago Tribune details what is perhaps the nadir of the Chicago Blackhawks under Bill Wirtz: free tickets there can’t even be given away:

“One of the National Hockey League’s charter franchises, the Blackhawks have been so desperate to attract fans to a half-empty United Center that the organization has been offering free seats through numerous promotions, including an e-mail campaign that put top-notch freebies the length of a hockey stick from the ice.

“It’s called papering the house,” said Barry Melrose, a former NHL player and now a hockey analyst for ESPN. “I’m not surprised they are doing it. It’s been a terrible period for the Blackhawks. People are frustrated and angry, and the fans are showing it the only way they can, by staying away.”

Some relevant facts: owner Wirtz has held hard on his refusal to televise Blackhawk home games — all of them. That’s a policy that runs counter not only to the rest of the NHL but modern common sense. Even Abe Pollin recognized the imperative of getting the Caps’ home games on TV decades ago, when his building was half full. And one of Ted Leonsis’ first accomplishments as owner was to get all 82 Caps’ games on TV.

Chicago is and long has been one of America’s great sports towns. It still has great fans, and those fans have proven that they will lavishly support competently run professional sports teams (think Cubs, White Sox, Bears). But with the the recent feats of the White Sox and Bears in mind, who can much blame the city’s hockey fans for staying away from the United Center’s hockey nights in droves?

This state of affairs on Lake Michigan is no trifling matter. Beyond being an Original Six franchise, the Hawks have given birth to hockey legends. It was Bobby Hull in his Hawks’ sweater on the cover of Life Magazine; Larmer . . . Savard . . . Chelios . . . Roenick; the Hawks drafted Dominik Hasek. Bill Wirtz more or less has full prerogative to run the club as he sees fit. Right now, he’s running it into the ground.

Filed in Chicago Blackhawks, National Hockey League, Pro Hockey Ticket Pricing, Washington Capitals| Permalink| Comments (3)

Maniacal About Their Small-Town Hockey

By pucksandbooks
Friday, March 16, 2007

Winter RoadMaine is a massive state which is massively underpopulated — blissfully so, many of its residents allege. According to 2005 Census Bureau data, the populations of Maine (1,321,505) and Fairfax County, Virginia, (1,006,529) are comparable. Maine’s northern-most county, Aroostook, is so large in sheer size that it betters the combined sizes of all of Maine’s surrounding New England states. All of them. The state religion is Black Bears hockey.

I first visited Maine in the autumn of 2004, partly to take in a Quebec Major Junior Hockey League game in Lewiston featuring the Rimouski Oceanic and a buzz-generator skating for them named Sidney Crosby. I remember first wondering, what is a small southern Maine town (pop. 35,000, approximately) doing with a Q League franchise? Turns out, the town has distinctive French Canadian roots. Your first clue arrives as you pull in to the hockey rink parking lot and notice the name Androscoggin Bank Colisee. Even way up north in New England you don’t encounter too many Colisees.

In the late 1800s, water power from the Androscoggin River spawned a flourishing textile industry in Lewiston that attracted tens of thousands of immigrant workers. The largest concentration of them — 40 percent — arrived from French Canada and resided in a section of Lewiston known as “Le Petit Canada.”

I was startled to learn that Muhammad Ali’s world-famous knockout of Sonny Liston in 1965 took place at Bank Colisee, then known as the Central Maine Civic Center.

colisee-complete_tn.jpgWhat is today known as the Lewiston Maineiacs hockey club was birthed in Trois Rivieres, Quebec, in 1969, where they resided until 1992. The franchise moved to Sherbrooke that year and played ten seasons there before settling in Lewiston in 2003.

The drive from coastal Portland to inland Lewiston requires a mere 40 minutes, but it swiftly delivers significantly deeper snows. Halfway through my commute I notice, for the first time since arriving in Maine late Friday night, groomed snowmobile trails parallel to the highway. As I learned in 2004, one really would prefer to skidoo to Le Lewiston Colisee if one could, as the lone two single-lane exits from its parking lot swiftly make one long for the late weeknight exit experiences from Landover, Md.’s, second-most famous parking lot.

Fourteen dollars puts a visitor pretty much anywhere he’d want to be in Le Colisee, and on this Sunday for its 4:00 matinee between the Maineiacs and the PEI Rocket I’m startled to see the home team warming up in one of the oddest-looking alternative sweaters I’ve ever seen. Knowing that I want to write about this experience, I’m instantly pained by the prospect of trying to describe their appearance. “Maineiacs,” I’ve ever thought since I first heard it, is a clever nickname for the club, moreso perhaps for a hockey club, and their primary logo is modern and impressionistic in a modern sports kind of way. Continue reading ›

Filed in Atlanta Thrashers, CHL, Entry Draft, Los Angeles Kings, Old Time Hockey, Pro Hockey Ticket Pricing, Sweaters| Permalink| Comments (4)

Caps Go After Niedermeyer (and Otter)

By The OFB Team
Wednesday, January 24, 2007

belushi.jpgConsistent critics of pro hockey ticket prices, we also praise well-conceived and meaningful discount schemes, and the Caps have a new one. Targeting the poorest among us (college kids), the Caps this week announced that for the remainder of the season those in possession of a valid college ID can get into the team’s remaining home games — all of them — for $21 each, and get a free large pizza to boot.

Double Secret Admission?

We’re thinking about taking some classes.

And to kick things off, for this Saturday’s home date with the ‘Canes, the Caps will allow in free the first 368 collegians who present themselves at Verizon Center, and dole out more free pizza.

Gives a whole new range of possibilities to the notion of Caps’ University.

Filed in Frat Hockey, Pro Hockey Ticket Pricing, Washington Capitals| Permalink| Comments (4)