Phoenix Coyotes making us look bad

In fact, I hear that cited as by far the number one reason, but I am loathe to repeat it because I actually live more than twice the distance from SBP as residents in Tempe live from Jobing.

Even in traffic, of which Ottawa’s Queensway is certainly not immune at 6PM (much less after the game getting out of the parking lot), every routing software and GPS device shows my trip as much longer. And I take the bus!

Hell, I walked through the snow to a WJC game when the transit system was on strike (albeit from a location only slightly further than the Tempe-to-Jobing route. Yeah it took hours, but I had already spent $202 on a pair of tickets six months before the strike, and had already decided to give one ticket to my brother for Xmas, so thankfully he was happy enough to walk with me and forego the cost of a cab that I could never have asked him to pay. We ended up splitting a cab home with a couple we met at the game, but even that required walking another mile and waiting another hour. For the game the next night, we cabbed it both ways.

So what I was getting at in my previous post was, what are the reasons behind people’s unwillingness to sit in their comfortable air conditioned car and drive the relatively short distance from Tempe to Glendale. Is it an age thing, a cultural thing, a cost thing, or a neighborhood thing.

Because if it’s not due to people’s recent financial crises like in Detroit, or people’s advanced age like in Boca Raton, or people’s preference for soccer like in Mexico, or people’s perception that Glendale is a foreign town like the lack of cross-over between Long Island and Newark, then frankly I just don’t get why the NHL BoG should continue to support a population that has already decided that hockey does not suit them.

If MLB had a team at Lynx Stadium that routinely drew only 8000 with a ceiling of 10,000 (be it due to stadium size or simply realistic projections) and the lowest ticket prices in the league, I would conclude that Ottawa cannot support baseball and accept that the team should be moved to an American city.

So I prefer to think that distance to the rink cannot possibly be the only reason, or even the main reason. If it were so, I’d have to seriously reconsider my disapproval of those who demand the team move to Winnipeg.

It would sure suck to be you, and suck even worse to be OdinMercer or zyllyx, but I am a baseball fan who still has his stub from the last Lynx game and the last Expos home game. And there are only about 4000 people who can claim the former, only 32,000 who can claim the latter, and I imagine no more than a dozen of us who can claim both. The numbers simply didn’t warrant extreme efforts to keep either team in town.

18 months ago, when the Coyotes problems first started to become apparent, happened to coincide with a Phoenix Cardinals run into February at the Super Bowl.

By the time that hype died down, and in the wake of sports fans having spent hundreds of dollars on tailgating alone, about fifteen baseball teams made their way into town. By the time the Cactus League got underway, most southwesterners were quickly becoming invested in the March Madness Regionals hosted by Glendale. The attraction to college hoops that month was more than anything of us Northerners can even fathom (I imagine it was like the WJC tournament in Ottawa X a gaijillion). By the time that was over, and focus shifted away from top-seeded UConn dominating every team that came to town, there wasn’t even a break before the DBacks held their home opener. Of course, the Yotes had already been out of contention for a couple of weeks by that point, but that wasn’t the case this past Spring, when the Regionals shifted to downtown Phoenix, further earmarking people’s mid-March sports attention in town.

Going further back, only two months before the Steelers/Steelers Super Bowl, the city of Glendale was gripped with their usual SunDevils football fever, which cuts into fan budgets every Autumn. And one year before the Cardinals made it to the big game, Glendale played host to the infamous Pat’s failed attempt to complete the perfect season in Super Bowl 42, in February 2008. And only three months before that, the DBacks hosted several October game in 2007 as the NL West champs.

So yeah, the Yotes are in tough against the Sun Devils every October/November, and often enough the DBacks, as well. Then they have to compete with Fiesta Bowl season in Glendale every January, while the rest of us are watching the Winter Classic. Then they deal with the Super Bowl that is either in town or features the Cardinals. Then the picthers and catchers of 15 teams report for duty the next day every February. Then it’s frequent Western Region hoops tourneys in March while the Cactus League is always in full swing. There simply is no slow sports day in Phoenix,and especially in Glendale, from September through April.

Millions of residents is one thing, but how much cash can people be reasonably expected to reserve for hockey?