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FuzzySkinner posted:I kind of feel that attempting to promote hockey below the mason-dixon line is idiotic. Which again, is half of the US. Like, in my perfect NHL? There would be exactly two "southern" teams, one being in LA, and the other being in Tampa Bay. The Nashville Predators own and we'll keep them, Thanks
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Jul 29, 2013 08:58
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LARGE THE HEAD posted:ne: The hilarious thing about soccer is that it's the one pro sport that people in Florida might actually turn out to see.  ElwoodCuse posted:This is never happening as long as the best players in the world are all in Europe. NBC pays more money to show the EPL on TV than MLS. And their NHL TV deal is for even more money.
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Jul 29, 2013 12:14
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Don't MLS stadiums have larger capacity stadiums and play far fewer games than the NBA?
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Jul 29, 2013 12:48
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Kibner posted:Don't MLS stadiums have larger capacity stadiums and play far fewer games than the NBA? They play like 34 games and Wiki has the average capacity at around 40k. That was a very half-truth statement, the NBA is clearly getting more people per season.
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Jul 29, 2013 12:59
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ElwoodCuse posted:The most important thing geographic expansion of the NHL accomplished was a massive increase in people playing the sport. The US Junior program is better than it's ever been and every year more Americans are drafted who grew up playing hockey in California, Texas, Florida, etc. IIRC, two most successful youth hockey programs in the United States over the last 20 years in terms of sheer growth and exposure have been San Jose and Dallas.
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Jul 29, 2013 13:03
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Soccer will never become a true "Big 4" sport because the MLS is terrible. Who the hell wants to watch a quality of play similar to a D-league or minor league team? Unfortunately the actually good clubs are all in UK, Spain, Brazil etc and I can't imagine the sport getting truly "popular" in America when the average American cannot even attend a game of where the true competition lies. No one cares who wins whatever MLS's championship is even called, no one on the street could tell you who won it last year. Slightly more people could tell you who last won the Champions or Premier league, and slightly more could tell you who has won the last World Cup. All that leaves for soccer is team USA, which does seem to get a lot of attention when they are playing legitimate competition (not random island nations for qualification reasons), but of course the international teams play on a rather limited basis.
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Jul 29, 2013 13:52
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MourningView posted:There are substantially more hockey games than NASCAR races so I'm not sure why you think this is weird or something nefarious. There's the narrative of NASCAR being the "fastest growing spectator sport" along with super high attendance numbers. I don't have numbers so I could be misremembering that. Furthermore, NASCAR is way more popular than hockey will ever be (sadly) so I would assume ESPN would reflect that. And the "ESPN hates hockey" has been A Thing for a while now so NASCAR should pass hockey by default just because hockey can't get any time. MourningView posted:Yeah hockey's a niche thing here. That doesn't make it a bad sport or anything (I don't passionately follow it because I'm usually tied up in basketball that time of year, but I started following the Ducks a bit after moving here and enjoyed it; please don't tell hockey fans), but I don't think it's ever going to get a huge audience. Which is fine. The people who love it really really love it, and that's cool.  that's cool MV. Kibner posted:Don't MLS stadiums have larger capacity stadiums and play far fewer games than the NBA? Depends. Most stadiums are around the 20K mark, same as NBA but you have a few teams piggyback NFL stadia which skews things. And yeah, MLS teams play slightly less than half the games NBA does
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Jul 29, 2013 15:37
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As we've talked about before, I think it's fair to say that soccer is transitioning to a major sport in the US, but MLS won't get above the NHL tier of popularity even if the sport as a whole surpasses hockey, due to the fact that the league just doesn't have the talent level. That will probably improve over time, but it's never going to be a situation where MLS attracts a high percentage of the best talent because of how entrenched the European leagues' positions are.
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Jul 29, 2013 15:41
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NASCAR was rising fast in the late 90's/early 00's, but has tapered off a bit lately. Hardcore fans could probably give you a more in-depth explanation, but NASCAR has made a lot of bad decisions in the past 5-6 years, to the point where even the biggest supporters have begun to lose patience.
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Jul 29, 2013 16:16
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AceFace905 posted:Equally hilarious when you figure that the only teams MLS have ever contracted were both from Florida San Jose did temporarily lose their team though via relocation. But then within a few years they got their team back.
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Jul 29, 2013 18:02
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Craptacular! posted:Part of the reason America isn't interested in hockey is that ESPN fails to inform them of anything exciting about it. This is the longest-running debate in mass-media academic theory and it is really above you to pretend like you know the answer to it.
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Jul 29, 2013 21:23
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Hockey will never be as popular as other sports for a few reasons. The biggest stars still only play about 1/3rd of the game. You can't really tell who is who except for the numbers because everyone is covered up. I know everyone is covered up in football to, but you can tell a wide receiver from a running back because the play keeps resetting so you can follow them by where they line up. If you want to watch Calvin Johnson you have 45 seconds to find him before every play. You can go see a Capitals game to see Ovechkin and spend the entire game saying "is he on the ice? Which one is he?" Any other sport you know who is who. You go see LeBron, you don't spend 40% of the game watching Chalmers thinking he is LeBron while LeBron is on the other side of the court. And, as my dad who is born and raised in the south, put it: "I will pay 20 dollars for our family to go watch something I don't understand, but I will not pay 200 dollars to do it"
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Jul 29, 2013 22:46
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Ribsauce posted:You can go see a Capitals game to see Ovechkin and spend the entire game saying "is he on the ice? Which one is he?" Any other sport you know who is who. This part of it gets fixed pretty quickly in my opinion (like within a few games at the outside), mainly because the best guys tend to do or try to do things that everyone else can't or isn't doing. Plus the way a lot of guys wear equipment is a giveaway. And if you were so inclined you could watch Panthers hockey for something like 15 bucks a ticket. I don't know, I don't think there's any way the NHL can turn North American sports back into the big 4 (if it ever really was) but those reasons don't exactly ring true to me.
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Jul 29, 2013 23:07
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I'm interested in this type of hockey without faceoffs or the concept of wingers playing in-front of the net in the defensive zone.
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Jul 30, 2013 01:02
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Drunk Canuck posted:I'm interested in this type of hockey without faceoffs or the concept of wingers playing in-front of the net in the defensive zone. Yeah the shootout is pretty interesting.
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Jul 30, 2013 01:16
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Trying to divine why particular sports are popular, and especially which ones are going to gain or lose popularity, is like evolutionary psychology but somehow more made up.
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Jul 30, 2013 01:30
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Ribsauce posted:The biggest stars still only play about 1/3rd of the game. Aside from QBs, this is almost true of football too. How many plays is Star Runningback actually on the field?
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Jul 30, 2013 04:30
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If you really think the MLS will gather a major foothold in the US and get better ratings than one of the big 3 when European Leagues are leaps and bounds better than than MLS so much that American players aspire to play in those leagues... I really don't know what to tell you.
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Jul 30, 2013 06:40
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If MLS becomes more popular and is able to distribute higher salaries toward its players, then the top American players will want to stay home to play. It feeds into itself rather nicely from there.
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Jul 30, 2013 06:43
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LARGE THE HEAD posted:If MLS becomes more popular and is able to distribute higher salaries toward its players, then the top American players will want to stay home to play. It feeds into itself rather nicely from there. Barring a severe collapse of the entire UEFA infrastructure (which isn't impossible), Europe will always pour more money into its soccer players than America.
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Jul 30, 2013 08:41
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The fact that there are about 20 MLS players who make more than the league minimum salary of the NFL, NBA, NHL or MLB shows where the US spends it's sports budget.
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Jul 30, 2013 09:42
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BackInTheUSSR posted:This is the longest-running debate in mass-media academic theory and it is really above you to pretend like you know the answer to it. Come on, don't leave us hanging.
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Jul 30, 2013 09:52
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Hand Knit posted:Come on, don't leave us hanging. Presumably he's referring to whether or not the media generates popularity or whether it's simply responding to it. I would assume this is a nature vs. nurture type thing that the only people who argue the tail doesn't wag the dog at least a bit are purely being provocative. That said I'm not sure what's wrong with what Craptacular said as it was a super weekly worded statement.
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Jul 30, 2013 10:08
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Dusseldorf posted:Presumably he's referring to whether or not the media generates popularity or whether it's simply responding to it. I would assume this is a nature vs. nurture type thing that the only people who argue the tail doesn't wag the dog at least a bit are purely being provocative. That said I'm not sure what's wrong with what Craptacular said as it was a super weekly worded statement. I think I sounded way more douchey than I was trying in that reply. Sorry bout that, wasn't my intention. Agenda-setting theory is cited in nearly every academic article ever written about mass media, and there is really no consensus on whether the media dictates popular culture or if popular culture dictates media coverage in a one-to-one setting. Obviously the two are interconnected, since media and culture do not exist in bubbles separate from each other, but I think - and a lot of academics in the field will agree - that it is probably a little more slanted toward culture->coverage, rather than the inverse (and a lot of that comes from the economic failures of certain types of news coverages, which has helped disprove the media's old "Hypodermic Needle" theory). But it is really taking a lot of liberties to say that hockey isn't popular because ESPN doesn't cover the interesting parts of it. ESPN doesn't really cover the exciting parts of soccer very much and the sport has seen a huge popularity surge in the last decade.
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Jul 30, 2013 13:59
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BS goes into a bit of the Rivers/BS feud that SA seemed to love earlier this year:quote:The day after we exchanged barbs during the NBA draft, Doc and I talked for 45 minutes on the phone and agreed to disagree on how the Boston thing ended. He truly believes the Celtics didn't want him to come back or pay him all that money as they were rebuilding. I don't buy it, as I told him — I thought that they didn't want to pay him that money once they believed he didn't want to be there. Also, I told him that I thought he didn't want to rebuild for a third time, and that the thought of coaching a contender and starting fresh in Los Angeles — where he gets to pick his own players, no less — was overwhelmingly enticing for him. He actually agreed with that. He just doesn't think he quit on the Celtics — he thinks the situation ran its course. So it's a he-said, he-said thing. We're never going to agree on what happened, but one thing is clear: In the long run, both sides are better off.
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Jul 30, 2013 21:15
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He told me what he thought, then I told him what he thought. It's a he-said, she-said thing.
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Jul 30, 2013 21:20
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Holy gently caress the conceit of that article is peak Simmons
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Jul 30, 2013 21:30
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Groucho Marxist posted:Holy gently caress the conceit of that article is peak Simmons he got a 45-minute interview with an NBA championship head coach and used it for this. a forty-five minute long interview.
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Jul 30, 2013 21:33
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I got a huge kick out of him spending a paragraph and a half trying to justify the Bargnani trade because that is absolutely a Simmons thing to do. Also love the silliness of subtly mocking Kobe's twitter antics as an "eighth-grade" thing and then writing that entire last footnote about him and Doc.
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Jul 30, 2013 21:52
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Speaking of Grantland, the #hotsportstakes on A-Rod is pretty spot-on. http://www.grantland.com/blog/the-triangle/post/_/id/69942/hotsportstakes-alex-rodriguez-turned-the-american-dream-into-a-nightmare
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Jul 30, 2013 21:54
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The broken bones posted:he got a 45-minute interview with an NBA championship head coach and used it for this. Did you expect some ESPN/Grantland article about their "talk" ?
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Jul 30, 2013 21:58
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Fag Boy Jim posted:Speaking of Grantland, the #hotsportstakes on A-Rod is pretty spot-on. It's really awesome that Grantland has a regular column dedicated to more or less openly mocking First Take and Rick Reilly.
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Jul 30, 2013 21:59
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Geno posted:Did you expect some ESPN/Grantland article about their "talk" ? I would've rather he spent that call asking questions about his tenure as the Celtics coach, what he learned, what he wishes he would've done differently, loving ANYTHING he would open up about, as any other half-decent reporter would've done with 45 loving minutes to take to a head coach. 45 minutes is a loving lifespan for interviews. Some of the best poo poo you've ever read came from a 45-minute interview. There are plenty of people working in the Boston news corps who would've loved to spend that much time with Doc. Instead, he took that time trying to force Doc into saying BS was right about some stupid unimportant theory of his. That's Bill Simmons in a nutshell.
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Jul 30, 2013 22:21
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That was a stupid article, but that doesn't really strike me as a formal interview that was being done.
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Jul 30, 2013 22:24
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The broken bones posted:I would've rather he spent that call asking questions about his tenure as the Celtics coach, what he learned, what he wishes he would've done differently, loving ANYTHING he would open up about, as any other half-decent reporter would've done with 45 loving minutes to take to a head coach. 45 minutes is a loving lifespan for interviews. Some of the best poo poo you've ever read came from a 45-minute interview. There are plenty of people working in the Boston news corps who would've loved to spend that much time with Doc. I have no idea why you would consider BS a reporter or expect him to be one. Their talk was probably something ESPN/LAC made them do and was off-the-record so it was surprising to actually hear something outside of that tweet of them having a conversation.
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Jul 30, 2013 22:29
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OK, I see it was a footnote to the story and not any main part of it. That makes more sense. Still, gently caress Bill Simmons.Geno posted:I have no idea why you would consider BS a reporter or expect him to be one. I don't, I'm mad he has this access and he used it for his stupid poo poo. There are plenty of other people who write things for a living and could've destroyed an interview with Doc.
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Jul 30, 2013 22:41
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MourningView posted:It's really awesome that Grantland has a regular column dedicated to more or less openly mocking First Take and Rick Reilly. It's from Andrew Sharp, who did Troll Tuesday over at SBN. I'm guessing there's a portion of Grantland readers that doesn't get it.
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Jul 30, 2013 22:48
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Heaf posted:It's from Andrew Sharp, who did Troll Tuesday over at SBN. I'm guessing there's a portion of Grantland readers that doesn't get it. There are routinely people in the comments talking about how horrible the articles are and making sincere arguements against it, so yeah. They started adding a disclaimer to the top letting people know that it's intentionally awful, but a bunch of people still miss it.
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Jul 30, 2013 23:55
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I always liked Sharp on the few occasions we crossed paths at SBN. I'm glad he's carrying on the trolling tradition at Grantland 
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Jul 30, 2013 23:58
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Groucho Marxist posted:That was a stupid article, but that doesn't really strike me as a formal interview that was being done. The real interview will secretly be on the Grantland youtube, with Jalen Rose lending Doc Rivers his bat. Also, just inquiring, but what are the rules as far as inquiring on SA for people that want to write for fun/submit good columns for a (non-profit) website? I had an old (year old) website with a nice template / scheme that I wasn't using (aka not a lovely wordpress blog) and wanted to start up something for fun with people that enjoy writing. I don't know if this is the place, but anyway, it's pretty brand spanking new and I thought I'd just extend the offer to goons that like/are good at writing to have a soapbox of sorts. I'll edit this out if it isn't allowed, but yeah!
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Jul 30, 2013 23:59
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