Storm Tracking: The Future of the Carolina Hurricanes

[tigerslionspistonshabs]

Be a shame...I always looked at them as sort of an exception to the sunbelt franchise failure. I'm sure making the finals within 5 years and winning the Cup within 10, all while remaining competitive had something to do with it, but adequate support seems to be there.

 

Other than this season and last, they've averaged over 15,000 fans every year since the lockout. 

 

The support seems to be enough for a team that hasn't been good in 10 years. They're going through a rough patch. 

[The_Admiral]

19 minutes ago, tigerslionspistonshabs said:

Be a shame...I always looked at them as sort of an exception to the sunbelt franchise failure. I'm sure making the finals within 5 years and winning the Cup within 10, all while remaining competitive had something to do with it, but adequate support seems to be there.

 

Other than this season and last, they've averaged over 15,000 fans every year since the lockout. 

 

The support seems to be enough for a team that hasn't been good in 10 years. They're going through a rough patch. 

 

A) This reminds me a little of the "you never gave up on the Blackhawks and Bruins" argument, which fallaciously argues that all teams with low floors have the same high ceilings, which they don't. What is "adequate support" for a market that is small to begin with and faces numerous, better-entrenched competitors in the marketplace (Duke, UNC, their co-tenant NC State)? We hear from Count Bettman himself that Winnipeg has to redline it at all times in order to keep the Jets, which I understand, but never do I see any remotely similar demand upon Raleigh. They struggle to sell suites even with NC State presumably part of the package, they suffer from tons and tons of no-shows as befits a team that's about to miss the playoffs for the seventh year in a row, and their television ratings are almost certainly crap on a stick, yet all of this seems to be fine. I would argue that they too would need to max out their support to compensate for their market size and be "adequate" by league standards, but no one else seems to hold these standards. Let's call this what it is: Atlanta, for all its many faults, was a good-faith effort to plant a flag in the regional capital of the Southeastern United States, but Raleigh is nothing but a Peter Karmanos vanity project through and through. He couldn't get Hartford to give him corporate welfare, he found a place that would, and now he just sits here in his marginal New South hidey-hole hoarding Michigan kids and flaky Europeans like the poor man's Mike Ilitch. Who among us would ever say "God, I gotta get in on this Raleigh thing!"?

 

Unintentional Sunglasses Emoticon) tickets distributed ahoy!

 

C) They're doing what they've almost always done under Karmanos: being kind of bad and missing the playoffs. This is just what they do. 

[HedleyLamarr]

I have the luxury of getting to see the unlimited Hurricanes feed (pre-game, post-game, the entire commercial breaks, and of course, the game).  Not only do they have so many ticket deals for both weeknights and weekends....their building is empty.

 

If they're able to move to Charlotte, they would benefit a lot more.  Folks aren't driving 2.5-3 hours from Charlotte to Raleigh during the week or on Fridays.  I would doubt that many from Chapel Hill and Durham are driving 30-40 minutes very often to see games.

[The_Admiral]

TWC Arena is a basketball-first bowl. It'd be another Barclays without the preposterous gift lease, and probably many of the same market problems Raleigh presents. The only upside I see is that Charlotte has a more robust corporate sector than Raleigh does. 

[Kramerica Industries]

2 hours ago, HedleyLamarr said:

I have the luxury of getting to see the unlimited Hurricanes feed (pre-game, post-game, the entire commercial breaks, and of course, the game).  Not only do they have so many ticket deals for both weeknights and weekends....their building is empty.

 

If they're able to move to Charlotte, they would benefit a lot more.  Folks aren't driving 2.5-3 hours from Charlotte to Raleigh during the week or on Fridays.  I would doubt that many from Chapel Hill and Durham are driving 30-40 minutes very often to see games.

 

I also noticed on at least a couple of occasions this season that the 'Canes had Sunday 1:00 ET start times*, you know, during the NFL overlap portion of the season.

 

NHL teams have some form of control over the start times to their home games (at least, regarding non-national games, and when is Carolina ever on the NBC networks?). The Hurricanes are never going to be successful competing directly with the Panthers and the NFL even when the Panthers are terrible. When the Panthers end up going 15-1? Lol.

 

*and at least another game at 5:00 on a Sunday too that I can recall since Tampa was their opponent. In fact, for a team that specifically requests to not have Wednesday night home games due to local Bible studies and such in Raleigh, I guess, they sure seem to play an awful lot at home on the Sabbath, huh?

[The_Admiral]

They have to play those day games because of NC State, I think. NC State has scheduling priority.

[Kramerica Industries]

You're right; that's an oversight on my part, and a reminder of a professional team being #2 in priority to a university in their home building. That can't be the case with any other NHL team, can it? Come to think of it, the 'Canes really don't play many Saturday home games, do they? Guess that makes sense now.

[dfwabel]

17 minutes ago, the admiral said:

They have to play those day games because of NC State, I think. NC State has scheduling priority.

Correct. The rush to open the building really didn't address some key issues, including scheduling. Its location next to Carter-Finlay Stadium takes out some Saturday nights too.

 

http://www.newsobserver.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/luke-decock/article16916558.html

 

"The Hurricanes manage the arena and the Wolfpack is a preferred tenant, which puts the relationship somewhere between an arranged engagement and two stepsiblings from different marriages living under one roof. It’s a recipe for conflict – particularly with a third party, the Centennial Authority that governs the arena, involved as well – yet there has been relatively little of it during the past decade and a half.

The recent dispute over who has the rights to which dates is entirely understandable. Unlike most college teams that share arenas with professional teams as tenants, N.C. State is guaranteed a certain number of priority dates. There has always been an inherent tension there."

 

http://www.fieldofschemes.com/2013/06/11/5278/hurricanes-nc-state-in-throwdown-over-arena-dates/

[The_Admiral]

5 minutes ago, Kramerica Industries said:

You're right; that's an oversight on my part, and a reminder of a professional team being #2 in priority to a university in their home building. That can't be the case with any other NHL team, can it? Come to think of it, the 'Canes really don't play many Saturday home games, do they? Guess that makes sense now.

 

Ironically, the Whalers in a new Hartford arena would probably face the same issues with UConn.

[2001mark]

I think the end game looks something like this...

- expand to Las Vegas; 16-15 conference split

- relocate Hurricanes to Quebec City; 16-15 split

- relocate Coyotes to Seattle; 16-15 split

- expand to Toronto area; 16-16 split.

 

I'll give myself a 20yr window for that to enact.  I'll check back later.  Those simply seem to be the priorities in order for the NHL- be the first into Vegas, move a couple struggling southern teams northward into hungry Canadian & Pacific Northwestern markets, & finally add a 2nd team in the Toronto area.

 

Bored, I posted it (as much for my own ref) in the realignment thread.  Toronto expansion would join the western conference... to both appease the Leafs, & to help carve their own unique identity & culture.

 

[cmm]

4 hours ago, Kramerica Industries said:

In fact, for a team that specifically requests to not have Wednesday night home games due to local Bible studies and such in Raleigh, I guess, they sure seem to play an awful lot at home on the Sabbath, huh?

Why am I just hearing about this now? That's incredible.

[The_Admiral]

Incidentally, Hurricanes fans are the most exhausting people on HFBoards, and that's really saying something. Remember, it's not Canadian fans who are overly impressed with themselves, kids! I'd be very pleased to see something meaningful taken away from them.

[Sport]

They won the 2006 Stanley Cup in a pretty entertaining 7 game series over the Edmonton Oilers. I had just graduated from high school. The games aired on a channel called VS.

 

Feels like yesterday. Feels like a thousand years ago. 

[The_Admiral]

It was still the Outdoor Life Network that year.

 

I maintain that the first two seasons out of the lockout were a weird little period in NHL history. Crosby and Ovechkin hadn't hit their stride, sweaters still had normal hemlines, everything was a penalty, the Outdoor Life Network existed...

[FGM13]

11 minutes ago, McCarthy said:

They won the 2006 Stanley Cup in a pretty entertaining 7 game series over the Edmonton Oilers. I had just graduated from high school. The games aired on a channel called VS.

 

Feels like yesterday. Feels like a thousand years ago. 

I was six when that happened and I'm still sad about that.

[Sport]

16 minutes ago, the admiral said:

It was still the Outdoor Life Network that year.

 

I maintain that the first two seasons out of the lockout were a weird little period in NHL history. Crosby and Ovechkin hadn't hit their stride, sweaters still had normal hemlines, everything was a penalty, the Outdoor Life Network existed...

oh that's right. I think I remember they hurriedly threw together some "sportsy" on-air graphics and logos to get away from the OLN leaf logo. 

 

2005-2007 was like that episode of Futurama when everyone on the planet keeps blacking out and waking up at a later time and nobody knows what's happened during the black outs. A legitimately bad team went to game 7 of the finals, May be the least remarkable Stanley Cup winner ever won the Stanley Cup, the Buffalo Sabres were really good but started wearing the ultra weird Buffaslug uniforms, Ovechkin was doing awesome things but seemed like a crazy person, I thought Nikolai Zherdev was going to work. 

[Kramerica Industries]

That Oilers team was actually really good with respect to puck possession relative to the rest of the league. If they had Roloson from the start of the season, they wouldn't have finished with only 41 wins. I'm not going to say that justifies the shock of them beating Detroit in the first round, but to say that Edmonton probably wasn't only the #8 team in the West that season in terms of talent, either. That was the season they had Chris Pronger, I know that much.

 

2005-'06 and the first half of the 2006-'07 season (so, I guess just 2006) is certainly my dead zone when it comes to how much hockey I watched. When you're still in your adolescent-teen years, losing an entire season of a sport you thoroughly enjoy is a crippling blow. I may have watched/listened to 3-4 Lightning games that entire 2005-'06 season. I can remember they snuck in as an 8 seed and got absolutely keel-hauled by the Senators in the first round, but not because I was watching anything other than the final ten minutes from the one game they actually won in that series. For me, it wasn't until I randomly came across the Lightning radio feed on the dial from January 2007 when they were playing some game in Minnesota, a game where they were leading in the 3rd period and went on to win and I listened the rest of the way, that I ever got back into the swing of it. Just in time for Johan Holmqvist to have the 1/2 season of competence he would have at the NHL level, too; that game was at the start of a second half surge in the dying embers of the Lecavalier/St. Louis/Richards years (which the lockout, in part, thoroughly destroyed anyone from seeing the ultimate potential of that team, though given how awful a GM Jay Feaster was/is, that 2003-'04 season might've truly been one freakish fluke).

 

It's a shame, too, since the 2005-'06 season was that one season where they actually called penalties, and goal scoring shot up around the league. Crosby and Ovie both posted 100+ points as teenage rookies, no? It would've been fun. Alas. It was ten years ago, so it's long past the point of getting worked up about this now.

[2001mark]

It almost seems that the Hurricanes are reliving the slow demise of their Whaler days? 

[Still MIGHTY]

I thought the 2006-07 season was all right...

 

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

But yeah, for me, the Carolina Hurricanes are generally a dead zone of my hockey knowledge. I think I know less about that franchise and its fanbase than any other in the league. There's Rod Brind'Amour, Eric Staal, Cam Ward, that 2006 Cup Run... and... um... Ray Whitney? Brett Hedican? EDIT: Oh, hell! They got swept by the Red Wings in that other Cup Final, right? Huh...

 

And as someone that kind of chronicles their life in relation to hockey seasons, I honestly can't remember what I did during the 2004-05 lockout. It was my freshman year of high school, but the rest is a blank spot.

[FiddySicks]

Whenever I play those timed "name all the teams in the big 4" games, I always end up missing two or three teams before the clock runs out, and I ALWAYS miss the Hurricanes. They're almost noteworthy for how unnoteworthy they are.