BehindTheNet.org

Fourteen years ago, I was a lonely Virginia Tech student up in the rafters of the Greensboro Coliseum at his first live NHL game. Driving down, I wasn't sure I really cared which team won. Hearing "Let's go, Buff-a-lo!" from two rows behind, though, I decided that the guys wearing white deserved some cheers in their building.

The team's new home wasn't all that different culturally from my home of Central Virginia. But, put in a bad situation by a non-native team owner, the people of North Carolina took grief across the continent for being too... provincial? preoccupied? just plain dumb?... to appreciate hockey.

That wasn't so. A few of us knew it at the time. Now, I couldn't be prouder of what North Carolinians (and, yes, we Caniacs across the state line) have shown the once-doubting hockey world. What TSN's Pierre Maguire (who doesn't act nearly the fool on Canadian broadcasts that he does on NBC) called "the best All-Star weekend [he's] ever attended" simply put the exclamation mark on it.

"Gary Bettman was hired to implement the Bruce McNall vision for the NHL -- expand into non-traditional markets[, etc]. Of course, Bruce McNall went to jail."
  -- Stephen Brunt, author of Gretzky's Tears

Well, I guess we know how Brunt feels about Sun Belt markets. And I guess we also know whose book is coming off my Amazon wishlist.

It's taken me over a month to post this. That's pathetic.

OUTBOUND

• Delta 8, us -4. That's hours, as in the hours taken from our vacation when the 6 AM CHO-DTW was cancelled on our taxi ride to the airport (as opposed to the night before when we could have known to sleep in!), converting CHO-DTW-MKE into a second, 2-hour DL-paid taxi ride and a 6-hour wait for DCA-MSP-MKE.
• Fixed cars in Charlottesville at 9 AM 1, J in Arlington -$n, J sense of humor -eleventy brazillion
• Hertz/UA 2000, us 0 -- as in mileage accrual that got lost when converting a weekly rental from a downtown location into a 6-day rental at MKE because we came in after hours.
• Radio gamble 5, luggage weight 0. I left my XM gear at home this time, hoping to get by with local radio or just scenery, but somehow the mess above ended with a well-equipped Mercury Milan with Sirius in our Gold stall.

Dateline this, say, January 1996. Any time after August 14, 1995 actually works, though.

• Number of NHL-capable arenas in Winnipeg: 0

• Number of NHL-capable arenas in Phoenix: 1 (AWA, while nowhere near ideal, was an order of magnitude less bad than Winnipeg Arena)

• Number of ownership groups with a plausible business plan in Winnipeg: 0

• Number of ownership groups with a plausible business plan in Phoenix: 1

As I've said over and over, the best comparison for the Jets' situation in 1995 is that of the Seattle SuperSonics in 2006 (pre-Bennett purchase). The fans were more or less present, although not exactly filling their small, outdated arena for some bad hockey teams. Civic willingness to spend money on a modern arena, though, was not.

And that's what makes the continuing "Phoenix stole Canada's team, let's steal it back" narrative so infuriating. It's a pile of ahistorical assertions (and the usual gross misunderstanding of Gary Bettman's actual job) stacked chest high, leavened with ignorance of the demographic stagnation-to-decline of the Canadian prairie, and topped off with misguided triumphalism. Those of us in remaining Sun Belt markets will have to batten down the hatches for more of the same, too. Monday's Ken Campbell column tossing out half-baked assertions about LA and Carolina ownership turnover was just a foretaste.

The New York Times's TV sports columnist Richard Sandomir examines how showing a complete sporting event is antithetical to NBC's Olympic programming concept.

A hockey game cannot be sliced easily into a series of short events, like ski or luge runs, figure skating programs or speedskating races. If the network cannot chop a sport into two-to-five-minute elements framed with a lot of ads, it is not likely to be shown from 7 p.m. to midnight.

A hockey game lasts at least two and a half hours. NBC never spends two and a half hours on any sport during the Winter or Summer Games.

The catch is that NBC doesn't pay a price for this against the credibility of its mainstream sports programming, because NBC has no such long-term sports programming to speak of. One NFL game a week and the dying gasps of Notre Dame football -- that's it. NBC presents as little NHL hockey as it can possibly get away with, selecting from a seven-team menu, and abuses Wimbledon fans nearly as badly as it does hockey fans.