When I walked through the Pepsi Center portal Sunday and saw a microphone-wearing Joel Quenneville running the Avalanche workout in front of several thousand season ticket-holders, I couldn’t help but laugh.
On a Broncos game day, there were more fans watching an Avalanche practice than sometimes showed up at McNichols Sports Arena to watch the NHL Colorado Rockies – the team Quenneville played for, and I covered.
Tonight, the Avalanche will celebrate the long-delayed beginning of its 10th season in Denver. There will be so much pregame fanfare before the home opener against Calgary, the team is asking fans to be in their seats by 6:50 p.m. to avoid being halfway down the stairs, beer in hand, when the lights go out.
Yes, some of it involves self-congratulation, and the Avs – who enter the season with a league-high 439 straight home sellouts – don’t need to be sheepish about it. For all the grief they get when they stumble, it all comes with the underlying “given” that the franchise has generated those high expectations and had a praiseworthy run under general manager Pierre Lacroix. And this represents an amazing turnaround for those of us who have been around long enough to remember when Denver was considered the Siberia of the NHL, and then a failure as a major-league hockey market in the early 1980s. I could spend the next 20 paragraphs explaining why those images were unfair, given the Rockies’ problems. Yet the unfairness of it all didn’t prevent the Rockies from slinking off to New Jersey.
The base of hockey interest always has been here, dating to various minor-league pro franchises and when the University of Denver Pioneers played in a relocated war-surplus building on a campus that seemed halfway between downtown and Colorado Springs. When the Avalanche immediately drew, it was because a) that faithful Colorado hockey constituency came right back to the NHL; b) transplants raised on the Blackhawks and the Bruins – or the Rochester Americans and Portland Buckaroos – jumped aboard in sufficient numbers; and c) “new” fans were drawn to the sport and a franchise on the verge of winning the Stanley Cup.
Unfortunately, there still are a lot of blinkered folks in the game’s power structure, in the media and even in the seats, who dismiss those new fans as being beneath contempt. And that’s one reason the sport got into the fine mess that led to the dark season.
Here in Denver, the biggest advances have been in the increasingly across-the-board knowledge of the fan base, plus an amazing growth in youth hockey that almost entirely can be attributed to interest generated by the Avs. DU, the two-time defending NCAA champions, actually can recruit locally, and Coloradans on major-college and NHL rosters will become more common. Plus, the 20-something fan in the seats increasingly will have the sport in his background.
“You see the growth of minor (youth) hockey throughout the area, all the way up to Aspen,” said Quenneville, an Avalanche assistant in that groundbreaking 1995-96 season before becoming head coach at St. Louis. “With DU playing the last couple of years, and then they put a (minor-league) team in Loveland and they fill the building, so it’s pretty remarkable the progression has made. I don’t want to say it’s the No. 1 sport, but it’s really taken off to a whole different level.”
As he watched the Avalanche practice, Lacroix said, “I think now the people have a better knowledge of the game. Before they were hoping, now they want it. And the growth, helping us build the game, is unbelievable, with more rinks and more kids playing.”
If the New NHL, with its salary cap and allegedly “level” ice, leads to a serious slippage at the box office for the Avalanche, the cry of the ignorant will be that it proves this isn’t truly a hockey market, but a bandwagon. That will be ridiculous, because markets such as Boston, Chicago, Edmonton, Vancouver and Calgary rightly got away with attributing thousands of unsold seats in recent years to “discerning consumerism.” And when the Nuggets had 3,000 fans in the building, how many were saying, “See, Denver’s just not a basketball town!” That’s right, nobody.
As a hockey town, Denver has earned the same benefit of the doubt.
If it ever comes to that.
Staff writer Terry Frei can be reached at 303-820-1895 or tfrei@denverpost.com.
