2010 Stanley Cup Playoffs

[The_Admiral]

I didn't harbor any real dislike for the Blues till they fired their coach and turned into the Charlestown Chiefs.

[STL FANATIC]

Sucks. Niemi was finally Niemi and they still won. I hate them.

Do you actually hate them because you see them as fierce rivals in the Cubs-Cards mold, or is this just part of St. Louis' massive inferiority complex when it comes to Chicago?

I hate them as rivals. To me they're the Blues biggest.

It's unfortunate that in the last 15 years there have only been a couple of seasons in which both teams were good, but what the rivalry once was when both teams were competitive in the 80s and early 90s has been passed down to me.

It's accentuated by living around large numbers of Chicago natives who only recently decided they're interested in hockey. I know bandwagons happen to everyone, but it's rough being stuck right in the middle of one, especially when it's already your least favorite team.

[MDC]

Sucks. Niemi was finally Niemi and they still won. I hate them.

Do you actually hate them because you see them as fierce rivals in the Cubs-Cards mold, or is this just part of St. Louis' massive inferiority complex when it comes to Chicago?

I hate them as rivals. To me they're the Blues biggest.

It's unfortunate that in the last 15 years there have only been a couple of seasons in which both teams were good, but what the rivalry once was when both teams were competitive in the 80s and early 90s has been passed down to me.

It's accentuated by living around large numbers of Chicago natives who only recently decided they're interested in hockey. I know bandwagons happen to everyone, but it's rough being stuck right in the middle of one, especially when it's already your least favorite team.

There is a huge difference between a bandwagon following from a normal championship run and what is happening with the Blackhawks. There was no such thing as NHL hockey in Chicago until Dollar Bill Wirtz died. Anyone who could pay attention to the Blackhawks and call themselves a fan was a social outcast (no offense to our die hards) They werent on TV! It was impossible to be a Blackhawks fan

[OMMF]

[ They werent on TV! It was impossible to be a Blackhawks fan

What a lame excuse. How often are small colleges or junior teams or teams that play non-Olympic sports on tv? Whether they are on tv should not be a determination in your appreciation of them. Furthermore, if your fandom is dependent on whether the rest of society deems it appropriate, you aren't really a fan.

[rams80]

[ They werent on TV! It was impossible to be a Blackhawks fan

What a lame excuse. How often are small colleges or junior teams or teams that play non-Olympic sports on tv? Whether they are on tv should not be a determination in your appreciation of them. Furthermore, if your fandom is dependent on whether the rest of society deems it appropriate, you aren't really a fan.

And if you look closely, you'll note that their fanbases are highly localized/non-existent. It may be a chicken and egg issue here, but the relationship exists.

The abject refusal of a modern "Big 4" franchise to get with the late 20th Century as long as the Blackhawks did is rather embarrassing and indefensible in a market as big as Chicago. I don't blame the fanbase for bailing on the team/refusing to support it financially or otherwise until Wirtz died. This was arguably the biggest and most prolonged fan revolt in modern major league sports history, and honestly, those who stayed fans would have been considered objects of scorn.

------------------------

As an aside, STLFanatic, I seem to recall some rather impassioned defenses out of you of the St. Louis fanbase during the fan revolt that developed in the last year or so of the Laurie fire sale of the Blues.

[STL FANATIC]

The Blues attendance was down for a year and a half. Since then they've had regular sellouts. Have the Blues been Cup contenders or a mediocre team with mere hope? (Hint: It's the latter).

But that wasn't even close to the point I was trying to make. Don't get me wrong, it's a point I sometimes do go after, but what I said up there wasn't a call-out of the entire fanbase, it was just stating that I'm stuck amongst a particularly bandwagony crowd here in Champaign. The type that's never paid attention to the Blackhawks their entire life and now claim to be the biggest fans in the world. And it's impossible not to automatically revolt against it, especially when you were kinda against it in the first place.

That's all.

[The_Admiral]

I think you and I are about the same age +/- a year or two. I'm guessing that the people you're dealing with, if they're white kids from middle-class Chicago burbs, probably had at least a passing interest in the Blackhawks up through about 1996 or so, which is about when things started to go off the rails for the Hawks and when aging and technological advances meant Following Sports would require more than just playing video games or yelling "I'm Chris Chelios!" in the driveway or whatever. Also, high school hockey is pretty big in the North Shore towns (this would seem to puncture the canard that hockey is a sport for blue-collar racists, wouldn't it?), so it's not like there's a total unfamiliarity with the sport and the team. The Blackhawks are pretty well ingrained as a civic institution; even people who don't always know when icing is waved off are well-acquainted with entry-level Blackhawks lore and minutiae. I remember I was pretty bummed in 1993 when I asked my parents if we could drive to Aurora to go to Stan Mikita's Donuts only to find out there was no such place.

Of course there are still bandwagon fans, and there always will be whenever there's a team on the brink of a championship. People want to be in position to celebrate these things with their peers, even if they weren't there through every moment of the bad times. Everyone can't be us. Still, be careful about dismissing people as having never cared about hockey, because it was very much there until the ten-year Dark Age.

[BBTV]

[ They werent on TV! It was impossible to be a Blackhawks fan

What a lame excuse. How often are small colleges or junior teams or teams that play non-Olympic sports on tv? Whether they are on tv should not be a determination in your appreciation of them. Furthermore, if your fandom is dependent on whether the rest of society deems it appropriate, you aren't really a fan.

Growing up in the '80s, all Flyers home games were on PRISM (premium cable channel (you had to pay extra for, like HBO)), most of the road games were on SportsChannel, and maybe 10 regular-season games were on UHF. We never had cable, so even though I saw kids wearing Flyers jerseys to school, I had never seen the team play. All I knew was that I really loved their logo. In fact, I got in to hockey because by accident I was turning the antenna on the house (remember those huge antennas that were on the roof, and you had a set-top box to rotate it?) and got a New York UHF channel that was playing Rangers at Flyers. I remember because Bob Frose was the Rangers goalie, and the kids in my school hated him because he used to be a Flyer. From there a 9-year-old BBTV started scouring the TV Guide magazine for any Flyers game that was on local UHF, which at the time, was a very low-powered station that we could barely get out in the burbs. I still watched every game that I could, and ended up becoming a huge fan (it helped that my second year of watching was Ron Hextall's rookie year.) But that was because I sought it out. Had I not gotten totally lucky and tuned in to that New York broadcast, I would probably never have become a hockey fan.

I'm sure it's different now, because everyone has ESPN and the internets, but back in the day, it certainly was VERY hard to be a hockey fan if your team wasn't on TV. Even now, why be a fan of a team and pay money to an owner who treats you like garbage? I wouldn't want to put money in that guy's pocket if he was as bad as everyone is making him out to be.

Oh, the irony - now that I have every channel, the internet, and you guys to keep me informed on what's going on in the NHL, I really don't care. Probably because as I get older I just don't care about sports much (I have Phillies season tickets because every game is a party down there, and nostalgic feelings from my youth) and I do legitimately love football, but I just don't have time or desire for any other sports. So as big of a fan as I once was (and I was a HUGE Flyers fan up until the year they lost to the Lightning in the ECF) I am now just a bandwagoner. But I served my time - I rooted for Hextall, Chico Resch, Peter Zezel, Tim Kerr, Kevin Dineen (!!!), Tommy Söderström, etc. Even as a bandwagoner, I probably still know more about the team's history and great players than most fans. I just couldn't name you 10 players on the ice right now. The lockout and salary cap really hurt too - hockey was the one sport that really was like "family" - guys played there forever (at least with the Flyers it seemed like that) and stayed in the area after they were done. Now, half the team is turned over every year. Meh. Go Flyers.

[CS85]

I've been getting a ton of flack from my peers about my "recent" blackhawks appreciation. I can happily say I've been a hawks fan since 2001, but thanks to living in east-central illinois, blackhawks merch (and hockey swag in general) is completely unsold in area stores. I have a rotten blackhawks "lucky" cap and a knock-off chelios jersey as my only material possessions bearing the glorious neon indian. I have worn these all the time, YET within the last 3 months as the Hawks have cleaved their way into the news, only now do people in the area pay attention to my swag and question my fandom. Even so - Chicago blackhawks fans new and old have a get out of jail free card regarding the current success because of the decades-long suffocating by the WWW ownership. It's kind of hard to connect to and support your local hockey franchise when they're not on TV, especially in this modern era.

[The_Admiral]

I wouldn't want to put money in that guy's pocket if he was as bad as everyone is making him out to be.

The most delightfully evil thing Bill Wirtz ever did was successfully lobby for legislation that made it illegal for businesses to stop buying liquor from his distributorship. Eventually this was ruled unconstitutional, but man, how does it even have to come to that?

[Sodboy13]

I can only speak for myself, so I don't know if anyone else's experience parallels this. But, for about a dozen years there, I was a Blackhawks fan by way of being an anti-Blackhawks fan. I rooted for every move that team made to be nothing short of an abject failure. (Theo Fleury ruining an entire season with one night in a Columbus strip club might be my favorite, but please feel free to refresh my memory with others.) Because it felt like, to me, any degree of success served as an endorsement of the old man's business practices, which were the equivalent of still holding Latin Mass 40 years after Vatican II.

And yet, as I spent my winters going to Wolves games and wearing my Phoenix Coyotes Starter jacket, I couldn't help but get the feeling in talking to other puckheads that there was still this great Blackhawks following in the city. It hadn't been killed off by the old man; it was just dormant, waiting for some sign of positive change. That, of course, happened when Dollar Bill died, Peter passed on the chairmanship, and Rocky went to setting about showing the world that he was very much not his father's son when it came to hockey matters. That's when I, and I suspect many others, got the signal that yes, it was okay to start rooting for this team again.

There are, of course, among the happy masses, some bitter diehards, no doubt the 3,500 who kept their season tickets through the deepest of doldrums. And there is the complaining about where all these people were during the bad years, and assorted levels of chest-beating about "real fans". Well, I was doing better things with my money during those years, pops. Don't get ticked at me because you were dumb enough to drop $65 a night to watch Boris Mironov eat his way around the ice 41 times a year.

[MDC]

Hahaha, the Flyers are putting this guy back in goal for game 2!

ESPN's Link

[charger77]

They are putting in Marty Brion?

[MDC]

They are putting in Marty Brion?

Crap! I thought that was a 49 on his sleeve, not a 43. Its still a funny picture!

[BBTV]

and a picture that's been made of a lot of goalies. I'm sure I've seen it with other players.

[MDC]

Alright, regardless, Mike Leighton is starting game 2, and I approve of this. Though I do have a feeling Boucher will be put back in net by the end of the game, or at least the series.

[Don]

Too bad for the Flyers sake the Blackhawks arent putting in this guy...

[Cujo]

Hahaha, the Flyers are putting this guy back in goal for game 2!

ESPN's Link

Philly in copper. I like it!

[NEW.ERA]

I applaud the Flyers decision to throw Leighton back in nothing better then seeing a goalie try to redeem themeselves.

I could understand if the Flyers lost 6-0 but Niemi was just as shaky. I think it's safe to say tonight will be a stalemate type of game.

[JACK IS CONSTRUCTION]

Game 2 is starting, hopefully it's half as intense as game 1.