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Have another donut (bartls blog)

Monday, August 17th, 2009 | The Many Faces of Bartl

Reading today’s 30-in-30 coverage on NHL.com of the Nashville Predators makes me harken back to the 1995 NJ Devils Stanley Cup.

for those who didn’t know, throughout the late-spring/early summer weeks in which the New Jersey Devils plodded and trapped their way through the Stanley Cup Playoffs, the talk of the league was the potential relocation of the Devils, at the time a Cup-less, history-less, 13 year old team, to Nashville, Tennessee.  talk that seemed nearly as preposterous at the time as it does now.

obviously, the move never happened, the Devs won two more Cups after that year and lost in the Finals another time.  they are annually a powerhouse, have a brand-new arena, certified hall of famers, retired numbers and a burgeoning fan base of 20-somethings who aren’t even old enough to remember the Don Koharski “have another donut” incident, or Gretzky calling them “a Mickey Mouse franchise”, or even their head coach peddling mattresses (he got involved in the Western NY store franchise while playing for Buffalo and their minor league affiliate).

and here are the Nashville Predators, a perennially average club, drawing from an average fan base, and every once in a while making the playoffs so the guys on Versus have something non-Rangers to talk about.  i put them in a group with Phoenix, Florida, Atlanta and Columbus as teams that just float through the pro hockey abyss, rolling stones that gather no moss, and franchises that can’t seem to get their skates underneath them.

it wouldn’t feel so odd if when their awarding was announced, half of the hockey fan base didn’t scratch their heads to begin with.  but we did.  it’s hard to imagine how much more attention Ilya Kovalchuk might have received in his young career if he was playing in Detroit.  Peter Forsberg seemed to disappear from the hockey map after his trade to the Predators.  The Great One’s legacy has been tarnished by his less-than-great stint behind the Phoenix bench (while Winnipeg municipally clamors for hockey respect after having their team ripped from them and moved to the desert).  and do the Panthers even have a GM yet???

my point is this: its even more important what you do after awarded a team as what you do to receive the team in the first place.  hosting an NHL franchise in your city is a privilege, and you should be held to a higher standard once you get it.  this isn’t major league baseball, where the irrelevant franchises were once great, but have been beaten down by imbalance in the market place - this is the NHL.  you can actually build a great team through the draft, salaries are relatively suppressed since there’s a salary cap, and any team can win on any given night in the sport of hockey.

i don’t have a magic marketing theory about what these clubs can do to achieve relevance in the NHL.  but winning three Stanley Cups in a nine-year span helps.  Right Newark???

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Raise your hand if you correctly guessed which shortstop Derek Jeter passed on the all-time hits list among SS’s.  Luis Aparicio, a career .262 hitter, had just one season in which he batted higher than .280, and played from 1956 to 1973.  Baseball fans older than me talk about “power positions” that used to categorize players back in the day.  Aparicio definitely fit the mold of positional stereotypes that used to be accepted - namely, if you were good defensively, we’ll suffer through your terrible batting average.  times have changed however, and make no mistake about it, hitting .262 these days is not very acceptable, unless you have 30+ bombs.

gone are the days when an Alvaro Espinoza or an Alfredo Griffin could man the SS position with a sub-.200 batting average.  nor does it matter that you may have a first baseman with only 7 home runs in mid-August (right James Loney???).  power can come from any position on the field, and batting average is accepted as a quality substitute.

A-Rod, for example, hit most of his home runs as a SS, and only moved to the hot corner after becoming a Yankee.  i guess my point is, what does it matter if your first baseman can’t hit the long ball if your centerfielder or shortstop can?

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Whatever happened to hard Spree candy?  all of a sudden its on the endangered candy list.  i used to devour them by the roll on flights, their savory sour middle wrapped in a subtly-sweet shell bridging the gap between meals and little cups of water, their sugar keeping me alert.  now all of a sudden they’re nowhere to be found, no grocery store lines, airport snack shops… anywhere.  they’ve been replaced by the soft Spree, which is definitely a second-class citizen in my books.

the answer - i found them by the box-full at the Big Lots in the Northeast, if anyone has an addiction like mine.  or, you can visit my desk at the Condors office; i filled my candy dish with their gloriosity.

Kevin Bartl is the VP of Communications and the “Voice of the Condors” entering his 7th season with the team.  His blog comes out every Monday, or whenever else he gets around to it.

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