Make room on the Avalanche bandwagon, hockey nerd
“There’s an interesting contrast between the way the sudden popularity of the Avalanche is perceived versus the continued interest in the Colorado Rockies. Some in the media assert that the baseball team will never have incentive to improve until the fans stop paying attention. Yet fans did stop paying attention to the Avalanche and are now being punished by some for coming back.“
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What a difference a year makes. Well, a year, a few good hires, a hot goalie and a number one draft pick anyway.
As the 2012 / 2013 NHL season wound down only a handful of devoted Colorado Avalanche fans were paying any attention at all. The club under GM Pierre Lacroix and head coach Joe Sacco had gone a miserable 16-25-7 in a lockout-shortened year. Players wanted out of Colorado and often threw their former coaches and mates under the bus when they were granted extradition. It was ugly.
This abbreviated but awful season came on the heels of a five year stretch in which the Avalanche qualified for the playoffs just once and was eliminated in the quarter-finals. A dark cloud hung over an increasingly unpopulated Pepsi Center. The squad had not sniffed success since 2008 and the only people having any fun were talk show hosts who liked to quip that hockey was radio death.
Lots of folks never tuned in at all last year. Another millionaires vs. billionaires sports work stoppage was more than the average fan could take, especially from a game that ranked a distant fourth in importance to football, baseball and basketball. Heck, even soccer seemed to be gaining a foothold over hockey in the minds of many mile high sports enthusiasts. The NHL and its local franchise had nothing to offer in terms of excitement.
Then came Roy.
To be fair, the Kroenke family which owns the Avalanche, first fired Lacroix and Sacco and hired Joe Sakic. Sakic in turn hired Patrick Roy, followed by Adam Foote, then cashed in on the dismal 2012 / 2013 season by selecting Nathan MacKinnon with the first overall pick in the draft. Goodbye misery, hello excitement. The off-season went so swimmingly that people were already beginning to talk about hockey again in Colorado. Still, something about the “getting the band back together” aspect of the Avalanche’ moves seemed too packaged, too perfect to actually work. The new-look Avalanche might have been just a novelty so some fans still stayed away. Besides, the Broncos were well on their way to a Super Bowl then so Denver had its mind on other things.
Coach Patrick Roy started the new Avalanche era off with a literal bang. After the season opener, a victory over the Ducks of Anaheim, Roy smashed the glass divider between himself and Ducks’ coach Bruce Boudreau in a lustful attempt to get after him. The tempo was set for a whole new kind of hockey in Colorado. Clearly these Avs were going to be feisty and nasty and not take adversity lying down. But was Roy going to lose his mind like that all the time? Would his behavior be the story of the coming season? Whatever the case, interest was returning to the Avalanche in waves. It still wasn’t bandwagon time, though, not so long as the Broncos were still winning games.
Denver fans prefer to pretend that the Super Bowl never happened and for good reason. The drubbing the Broncos took at the hands of the Seattle Seahawks left everybody drained. After the hyperbole that surrounded the regular season and Denver’s run through the playoffs it was hard to imagine the Broncos’ season ending so horrifically.
Luckily, the Avalanche were there to help people forget their woes. After going 10-3-1 in January the Avs amassed a record of 13-6-1 in February and March and went 5-1-2 in April en route to a division title. During those months the Avalanche bandwagon slowly began to fill.
Now that the Avalanche are the second seed in the West and are prepared to begin a playoff series this week the bandwagon is about to need new shocks. Folks from all walks of like are flocking to hop on. The throng includes both casual fans and members of the media, many of whom would utter nary a sound about hockey as recently as three months ago.
Denver Post Columnist Terry Frei has been critical of some of his fellow scribes and entertainers via his Twitter account over the past week. Frei refers to the “Denver media hockey bandwagon” in Tweets like these:
Denver media hockey bandwagon update: No Avalanche player will miss a game with a tight quad … or if they did, they would feel shame.
Denver media hockey bandwagon update: Unknowledgeable scribes will take cliched way out and write about Mann…er, goalie, every game.
Denver media hockey bandwagon update: Scribes, when Patrick Roy uses your first name, he is NOT saying you’re his best friend or Red Fisher
Denver media hockey bandwagon update: Hey, late-arriving writers, just keep Googling and rewriting previous works of hockey scribes.
Denver media hockey bandwagon update: Hey, the playoff beard column is always good for a few yuks! Challenge MacKinnon!
Denver media hockey bandwagon update: if a guy wins 4 and loses 3 faceoffs, say he “dominated, winning 57 percent”
Denver media hockey bandwagon update: Then there’s always that hilarious hockey players’ superstitions column!
I was corrected earlier, so I’ll tweak this: Hockey fans are proprietary, but they also can spot the research by Google fakers by 2nd graf.
Reprise: From Anaheim, my Mon @denverpost column/commentary was on Avalanche. I didn’t have to Google, sorry.
Denver media hockey bandwagon update: There’s always the easy trash other market because “your” mercenaries are playing “our” mercenaries
Denver media bandwagon hockey update: Hey, we could do a yukker on how many mayors Mayor Hancock has to bet!
Clearly Frei is bitter about having covered a sport for so long that suddenly everyone seems interested in covering. His feelings mirror those of those few devoted Avalanche fans that were still clinging to the team in the wake of the past few disaster seasons. The mindset is “you weren’t following the team when they were bad so you have no business following it now.”
There’s an interesting contrast between the way the sudden popularity of the Avalanche is perceived versus the continued interest in the Colorado Rockies. Some in the media assert that the baseball team will never have incentive to improve until the fans stop paying attention. Yet fans did stop paying attention to the Avalanche and are now being punished by some for coming back.
James Merilatt, President and co-founder of Mile High Sports, has observed this dichotomy and noted it via his own Twitter rantings:
Hockey people. SMH. They finally get their moment in the sun and decide to act like arrogant jerks. It’s why they’ll stay at No. 4/5.
I love how hockey snobs act like it’s such a complicated game, one that the rest of us couldn’t possibly pick up quickly. Gimme a break.
We are the radio partner of the Avs. We are all in. I’m just saying to use the playoffs to welcome more people in.
Most hockey fans are in the “welcome back” pool. They don’t harbor any resentment to fans that are suddenly buying tickets again and talking hockey around the water cooler. But there is a contingent of fans – and writers – who are bitter. The Avalanche are very suddenly a hotter talk topic than the upcoming NFL draft and that hasn’t been the case for several years. For some it’s a bit of an adjustment.
I’m like a lot of casual fans. The lockout pissed me off and left me disinterested in hockey. Nothing short of a minor miracle could have pulled me back in this quickly. Alas, Colorado has witnessed just that, a minor miracle. In the wake of the Sakic hiring … and Roy … and MacKinnon … we have found ourselves captivated by the Colorado Avalanche again. Isn’t this how sports is supposed to work? Fans vote with their dollars and with their interest and an increasing number of them are voting “yes” on the Colorado Avalanche.
So make room on the bandwagon, hockey nerds. We’re piling on. I’ve grabbed a rail and so have my kids. Dmac is grabbing a rail and Peter Burns is and every other jerk off in town who usually only talks Broncos is yanking themselves up and plopping down right next to you. You can huff and puff and complain all you want to but there’s nothing that can be done to make this hockey team uninteresting to the un-bathed sports masses.
Does this thing make a stop at Coors Field?
