With the NHL’s latest Winter Classic, set for New Year’s Day at Wrigley Field, approaching, the question again will come up about whether Denver could be the site of an outdoor game in the near future.
Avalanche owner Stan Kroenke and his umbrella sports organization expressed tentative interest in a game following the success of last January’s Penguins-Sabres game in Orchard Park, N.Y.
But even if the Red Wings-Blackhawks matchup is a spectacular success Thursday, it seems a longshot for Denver to be next on the list.
For openers, the most attractive opponent for such a game in Denver, and for NBC, would be the Red Wings, and they would be out of the mix. Also, if New Year’s Day remains the target, it’s hard to imagine the Broncos and owner Pat Bowlen going along with scheduling a Friday, Jan. 1, 2010 game at Invesco Field at Mile High. The possible expansion of the NFL regular-season schedule could come into play. The Sabres-Penguins game two days after the completion of the 2007 NFL regular season worked at Buffalo’s Ralph Wilson Stadium, but if the Bills had been in line to play host to a Jan. 5 or 6 playoff game, it could have gotten interesting.
Also, the Wrigley game might show that relatively intimate confines and a non-NFL stadium are the way to go for an outdoor game. But that should or would immediately move Boston’s Fenway Park and the Bruins to the front of the line in the U.S., rather than bring the relatively antiseptic Coors Field into the mix.
And here’s the good news: The Jan. 1 weather in Denver is so “unreliable,” it would take away some of the charm if we have a high of 52 degrees, which as of Friday was the prediction for Monday. The icemakers swear that decent outdoor ice is possible under those conditions, but it’s about atmosphere.
The Avalanche isn’t the NHL marquee team it was, and the television czars are paying attention. A Washington-Colorado game would showcase Alex Ovechkin, the NHL’s best player, but the schedule would have to be juggled to get the Capitals into Denver more than once every 27 years. (Just kidding. Mostly.)
Rough sledding in Phoenix.
With Wayne Gretzky behind the bench and Don Maloney as general manager, the young Coyotes are in the running for a Western Conference playoff spot — and perhaps just as important, in position to be next season’s Blackhawks.
But as probably will become apparent again Wednesday when the Avalanche visits Glendale, Ariz., the Coyotes are continuing to have problems at the gate and are hemorrhaging money for owner Jerry Moyes. The official attendance figures heading into the weekend had the Coyotes at 26th in the league, averaging 14,716, ahead of only Atlanta, Nashville, Columbus and the New York Islanders.
So it wasn’t shocking when Canada’s national daily — the Toronto-based Globe and Mail — last week reported the Coyotes are getting advances on their share of league revenues, presumably to stay afloat, and trying to renegotiate their lease at Arena.The arena is part of an impressive shopping and restaurant development, also adjacent to the Cardinals’ University of Phoenix Stadium, but it’s both far and usually a difficult drive from the downtown Phoenix area.
I’ve long been a defender of “nontraditional” NHL markets in the sense that it’s amazing how short the memories are of many of their critics, those who want to pretend all those empty seats didn’t exist in Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton in the 1990s — or simply sniff and say that Canadian consumers were too savvy to support bad products.
Even granting that there can be a lag time between on-ice and box-office improvement, if support doesn’t pick up in Phoenix for an entertaining young team, and in Nashville for a well-run franchise that does far better on the ice than it probably has a right to, then it might come time to simply say: It just isn’t working.
There will be many ways to rationalize it — the economy, high ticket prices and all the other usual suspects — and it won’t be necessary to get into the blinkered mentality of making hockey support some kind of moral litmus test.
Chicago was a sleeping giant that awakened when the Blackhawks’ management moved into the 21st century. Despite their amazing start, the Bruins aren’t yet a hot ticket in Boston and are only 19th in NHL attendance, but are showing signs that a gate recovery is inevitable if the B’s continue to play well.
And the NHL has other trouble spots.
Before you even get to the markets struggling to draw for bad products, the bottom line is that if markets won’t draw for good teams and products, then it isn’t going to work.
SPOTLIGHT ON
USA winger Drayson Bowman and defenseman Kevin Shattenkirk
The World Junior (under-20) Championships began Friday in Ottawa, and the USA team features a couple of high-profile players with Colorado connections.
Bowman’s family lives in the Denver area and he played most of his youth hockey in Colorado before his family temporarily uprooted to the Vancouver area so he could play bantam there. Bowman was a teammate of Jonathan Roy, Patrick Roy’s son, and the Avalanche goal-tender told the Bowman family that Drayson would stand a better chance of advancing if he went to Canada to hone his game.
After playing bantam and junior B in Vancouver, Bowman is with the Spokane Chiefs of major junior’s Western Hockey League.
Last spring, he scored the winning goal for the Chiefs in the Memorial Cup, the three- league championship tournament of the umbrella Canadian Hockey League, and he had 42 goals in 66 games for the Chiefs last season.
A third-round pick of Carolina in 2007, Bowman signed a three-year entry-level deal with the Hurricanes during the summer and again attended their training camp, but was sent back to Spokane for additional seasoning. So far in 2008-09, in what would be his fifth full season with the Chiefs, he has 15 goals and 33 points in 30 games.
Shattenkirk, 19, is in his sophomore season at Boston University, and he and Terriers forward Colin Wilson are the alternate captains (the term USA Hockey uses) for the Americans at the World Juniors. Defenseman Jonathon Blum, a Californian who plays for the Vancouver Giants of the WHL, is the captain.
Colorado took Shattenkirk, from New Rochelle, N.Y., with the 14th overall choice of the 2007 draft, before he headed for BU. At 5-feet-11 and 200 pounds, he’s a little bigger than Avalanche defenseman John-Michael Liles, but he also is known as an offensive defenseman. He has three goals and 12 points for BU this season, and one of the ironies is that BU — minus Shattenkirk — will be in Denver for the Wells Fargo Denver Cup on Friday and Saturday at Magness Arena. That would have been a chance for Denver fans to see the Avs’ prospect, and there is hope he could turn out to be as good as another Avs draft pick who passed through BU — Chris Drury.
Increasingly under the post-lockout collective bargaining agreement, NHL teams are more aggressive about signing draft choices attending college, and it’s logical to assume the Avalanche will make a run at signing Shattenkirk after his sophomore season.
Bowman had two goals and Shattenkirk had an assist as the Americans opened WJC play with an 8-2 victory over Germany on Friday. They face the Czech Republic today. The tournament concludes with the bronze- and gold-medal games Jan. 5.
