Across North America, hockey fans are waiting for, and even gloating about, Colorado’s possible test as an NHL market under a new collective bargaining agreement that at least in theory will increase parity in the league and perhaps break up the Avalanche.
That could mean the 2005-06 Avalanche would not have Peter Forsberg and Joe Sakic. It could mean the salary cap-forced departure of unrestricted free agent Adam Foote or restricted free agents Alex Tanguay and Milan Hejduk, who most likely will have to receive qualifying offers by the end of the month for the Avalanche to retain their rights. It even could mean general manager Pierre Lacroix deciding he must buy out one or two veterans in the brief time window later this month before all buyouts must count against the cap.
As the shakeout process begins, the widespread perception is that the Avalanche’s 10-year streak of sellouts, the longest in the league, and the NHL’s high profile in this market are more about a bandwagon than a Zamboni.
The Avalanche arrived from Quebec as an up-and-coming force and won the Stanley Cup in its first season in Colorado, and the image persists of the area’s hockey fandom as a spoiled and undeserving constituency that never had to pay its dues or suffer lean seasons.
That hockey’s-a-bandwagon attitude also remains entrenched among the many Coloradans who are territorial about their sporting interests and have viewed the Avalanche’s box-office success and high profile as a boorish invasion of a sports scene that should be dominated by football, basketball and baseball.
They’re the ones who insisted that the Nuggets still were a more notable act in this market when there were 2,500 customers at the Pepsi Center for basketball and the Avalanche packed the building the next night. It apparently never crossed their minds that the deterioration in attendance for an awful NBA franchise meant that this was a “bad basketball town”; it was considered a given that consumers weren’t patronizing a terrible on-floor product and were holding their passion in abeyance. Never mind that season tickets for Broncos games now are available for the asking, and that the Rockies have driven away their fans in droves. Is anyone saying this is a bad football town or a bad baseball town?
Yet if the Avalanche ever slips, if that season-ticket base deteriorates and unsold seats become common at the Pepsi Center, know what we’ll hear?
“See! Told you so. Denver isn’t a hockey town!”
Of course, I’ve been covering the NHL off and on for the past 28 years. And in this era of specialization, that probably stamps me as a “hockey guy.” It’s not something I dodge or feel embarrassed about. Well, at least not most of the time. It’s also a bit funny sometimes, given my background writing about football, baseball and basketball at other junctures of my career, and also my long-held belief that the NHL would be better if it jettisoned some of its old-school traditions.
But if anyone wants to interpret this as coming from a hockey propagandist, fine.
This is a hockey town, and it has become more of one every year.
Definitions and proof of that are in the eye of the beholder, and especially beholders north of the U.S.-Canadian border who still can’t get over the idea that there’s something less than legitimate about “new” fans to the sport swallowing hard and paying $99 a game for so-so seats – because they want to. That kind of attitude is part of the NHL’s problem: So many of the sport’s chroniclers and followers act as if it’s “their” sport and that anyone with eclectic sporting interests shouldn’t even be allowed to set foot in the arena. That said, in Colorado, the sport has gained a far stronger hold in the past decade.
Rinks have gone up, hockey participation has expanded exponentially, a national championship collegiate hockey program is starting to be able to recruit talent locally, and grandmothers are aghast that Tony Granato didn’t use John-Michael Liles more on the point last season, which seems to have been about five years ago.
Everybody moves here. Nobody leaves (except Woody). Or maybe it just seems that way. But even among the roughly 87 percent of the metro-area population that has moved here since 1996, the fans who were passionate in their formative years about the Rangers or the Bruins or the Flyers have been given reason to adopt this franchise as adults.
There’s nothing wrong with that, either, or with the reality that when the Blackhawks and Bruins and Canucks have been rotten, for example, attendance in Chicago, Boston and Vancouver has drastically slipped. They’re hockey towns, and I say that without a trace of sarcasm.
Even if the unprecedented happens, and the Avalanche becomes mediocre under the new system, leading to a serious slide at the box office, this still will be a hockey town.
Staff writer Terry Frei can be reached at 303-820-1895 or tfrei@denverpost.com.
Frei is the author of “Horns, Hogs and Nixon Coming” (hardback 2002, trade paperback August 2004) and “Third Down and a War to Go” (hardback September 2004).
