RIT to go D-I

[Q]Here's a stupid solution employed by the WCHA (With the distance between schools probably 5 times that of the ECACHL): rotating sites (being rather unfamiliar with east coast venues, I have no idea what the venues would be)[/q]In the WCHA everyone pretty much has to travel a long distance anyway, except for the host team. "Centrally located" doesn't mean much when much of the league has to get on a plane anyway. Also makes sense to avoid a permanent home team for the tournament, which you could easily have if NoDak (cap 11000), Wisconsin (cap 14000+) or Minnesota (cap 9700) hosted.

Man, I love thread drift!

[Q]Will Wrote: I'm all for moving the tourney to Boston, because there's always stuff to do there. But isn't Springfield kind of a craphole?[/q]

I was one of the people championing more, more, more stats to figure out where the best location for the ECAC tourney was based on lat/long, highway miles, driving time, possibly factoring for fan base. Your solution is a bit more elegant: It's better to drive 8 hours to Boston and have something to do than 4 hours to Albany and be bored stiff by 10:30 pm Friday.

OK, in Springfield Mass you could drive 18 miles north to the world's largest women's college (thus getting shot down in numbers by Smith women) or visit the basketball hall of fame. But it ain't Boston.

[Q]Al DeFlorio Wrote:
While I'd selfishly love to see the tournament back in Boston, um...if Boston is so great a location, why did they feel need to move the tournament from there to a God-forsaken place like Vladivostok...I mean, Lake Placid?[/q]

Actually, Davos, Switzerland is a better analogy for Lake Placid. If only they would move the Spengler Cup to Zürich, I'm sure everyone would be thrilled.

And I'm really trying to avoid having the Placid/Albany argument again, but keep up the smug snide comments, and you may draw me into it.

Look what it did for Big East basketball. Before the Big East & NYC, Niagara & St. Bonaventure were about as big as Syracuse.

Move the tournament to Toronto, corner the market on Canadian talent, win a few national titles, then go back to Boston and kick Hockey East to the curb.

Have we compared the attendance numbers for Albany and Lake Placid somewhere?

To my mind, transportation links are paramount.

Lake Placid was difficult to reach by car or bus, expensive to reach by air, and impossible to reach by rail. Hartford, Springfield, and Albany, at least, can be reached by all major modes of transportation. (I'm sorry, balloonists, but I don't care about the lack of landing facilities in downtown Albany.)

If you're willing to fly and have the dough, knock yourself out. I'm sure you're also willing to pay the cab fare or rent a car. You are not my concern. If you want to "ride the 'Dog,'" my blessings, good sir. What I'm concerned with is the train.

(My friends groan here.)

For Bostonians, Hartford and Springfield are suprisingly convenient by train, while Albany is inconvenient. (Of course, your best trip for each will be using the Lake Shore Limited which, well, is not known for its on-time performance. But, hey, the Berkshires are beautiful!) For New Yorkers (and the rest of the NEC) Hartford, Springfield, and Albany are a wash--service is frequent and timely. Access to the arena from the train station is more convenient in Hartford and Springfield than in Albany (Bussin' it! Oh yeah!). Purely selfishly, I know that I have a reasonable chance of even making the early game coming from Chicago in Albany, while I'd miss the early game in Springfield or Hartford.

So, for the carless, those coming from the West would prefer Albany, those coming from the East would prefer Hartford or Springfield. Those coming from the South don't care. And those coming from the North? Well, enjoy. Maybe the tournie should be in Pittsfield! Yee-haw!

Lake Placid isn't entirely inaccessible by train. According to the Amtrak site, you can get a train to Westport and then take a 45-minute bus ride to Lake Placid. From Penn Station in New York the trip will take over six hours.

Exactly. Lake Placid is inaccessible by train.

The rink in Pittsfield is in the Boy's Club ...and on the second floor!

(The only rink I knew growing up that wasn't on the ground floor --apparently it was added to the plans after construction had started. Chelsea Piers Rink in NYC is also not on the ground floor --how's that for useless trivia!)

MSG's rink is on the 4th floor (though the lower floors are Penn Station)

There are a bunch of rinks on upper floors. I recall reading a couple in NYC are like 10 or so floors up. It's not as tough as it seems because once you've got a clear span (support posts would be tough on defensemen skating backwards) there's not much weight to support - no furniture, no wall partitions, just a fraction of an inch of frozen water.

Chelsea Piers on NYC's west side is way cool because it has nice big glass windows so you can actually see ships going up and down the Hudson River. Not a good place to play pickup hockey if you're a daydreamer. Nice place to have a birthday party for your kid if you got a fat bonus in the year just ended.

Madison Square Garden is way un-cool because the new, now aging building destroyed one of the nation's finest pieces of architecture, the old Penn Station, and it's unlikely the existing MSG building will exist in 25 more years because of the demand for ever-newer, ever-fancier rinks. If there's anyplace that needs lots of luxury box seats, it'd be MSG. Heck, NYC could probably support side-by-side hockey rinks and basketball courts. Wouldn't it be cool to have one major city arena that is basketball-only? Not that we should give a rap about that, but once in a while, say when Magic posted up against Bird, it was kind of fun to watch.

But MSG was nice the one (or two?) times Cornell played there in a holiday tournament. My understanding is that Florida is nice for fans but a hassle for players to get to because they have to cut their short Xmas vacation even shorter.

[q]Heck, NYC could probably support side-by-side hockey rinks and basketball courts. Wouldn't it be cool to have one major city arena that is basketball-only?[/q]No, it would be economic stupidity. You can easily play both sports in the same arena with no loss of "atmosphere" (unlike baseball/football, IMNSHO). The two sports have sufficient off days that scheduling both sports can't be very difficult. So why would you want two arenas? Unless you think that the number of concerts, etc. that want to play MSG is so high that they could book both places every night of the year.

[Keeping this topic further OT] What better place for economic excess than New York City? A basketball-only arena is a far better place to watch basketball because you're a lot closer to the action, just as a football stadium without a track is a better place to watch a football game. A basketball-only stadium would also be a better setting for a rock concert, or indoor beach volleyball ... and it's a better place for fans to reach the court if they have weak throwing arms.

Not that it's going to happen. There's a lot of resistance to public expenditures for sporting arenas, especially since the NY Giants say they're willing to more or less fully underwrite their own 80,000 seat stadium in the Meadowlands of NJ (it would sit on state owned land) if they get to keep all the money.

I'm biased in favor of having lots of stadiums in and around New York's west side because the train (NJ Transit) would have me there in 50 minutes, as opposed to twice that for getting to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. (Safety in the Bronx during gametime is a non-issue for those who've been there and see the cadre of police. The real issue for the corporate set is you can't get there so easily from Wall Street or the midtown corporate canyons. And corporate skyboxes go a long way toward paying for the costs of pro sports teams.) Putting stadiums on the West Side in 30s (streets), rebuilding the Hudson waterfront, all those things would really help make New York a better place to visit or live. There is so much to like about NYC (I'm not a native but I'm getting used to the place) but it's still dingy in too many places and it's nothing like, say, Paris or Berlin or Vienna or Zurich or ... .

HDTV really is the best place to watch a game but there's the atmosphere you miss ... which we're all trying to recreate via sports bar gatherings if we can't make it down to the Everblades tournament.

And if Cornell ever gives up on the Everblades, or decides it can play two holiday tournaments, it would be great to see it happen again at Madison Square Garden. Which is where the Frozen Four belongs every, say, six to eight years, if only someone would light a fire under themselves and put in for it. (And doesn't Cornell show up in Final Fours disproprotionally when they're held in NYS or New England? Off the top of my head there's 1967 1970, 1972, 1973, 1980, 2003 in NYS, Boston, or Providence vs. rest of country in 1967, 1968.)

The idea behind the Everblades and teams invited there is that big schools from up north have lots of snowbird alumni who winter in Florida (you should see the size of Notre Dame contingent), and of course NYC has a huge amount of alumni of any school, plus bored-to-death undergrads.

I don't want to look - can anyone provide the size of a standard basketball court?

Getting to Yankee Stadium from Wall St. or midtown is a breeze - hop the 4 or D train and you're there very quickly. A riverside location might take just as long to get to from Wall St. since you'd have to change trains.

While rebuilding the Hudson waterfront might be a good thing, it's hardly fair to say that the current "dingy" state detracts from the city. You could spend weeks visiting and never have any reason to go to that area. It would improve quality of life for folks that live down that way though.

Bill, if you think HDTV is really the best way to watch a sporting event then I think you need to get and attend a few more games. Given the choice between free HDTV broadcasts of every Cornell hockey game and going to every game I'd be forking out cash for every game. And that includes holiday games where there really isn't any atmosphere. You just can follow the game much better in person. The same is true in mind for every other sport. Yes, certain things are more easily viewed on TV (e.g. ball-strike calls on baseball) but you lose the perspective of the whole field and are stuck with what the director chooses to provide. Not to mention inane commentators.

[Still OT] A basketball court is 50 x 94, or about one-quarter the size of a hockey rink. (Some HS or college courts are 50x84.)

The best sporting experience is an alternating combination of good television and being there in person. For me it's a 4-5 hour drive to Ithaca and I have kids playing sports every weekend for the next, say, eight years. Lynah in person is pretty much an occasional thing supplemented by the annual game at Princeton, at Penn (oops, no hockey team), sometimes at Yale (I have a blind date with Al DeFlorio all set up for that one).

If you're a fan of the team, then there's nothing better to be there in person, especially at a college where you're at worst 15 or 20 rows up in an indoor sport, but you're going to miss a lot of plays. Was that goal a tip-in or did it go straight in from point? Maybe it hit Dov's skate first? Who knows? So you're jumping up and down and singing Davy -- gotta love that. But still don't you wish you could see a replay right then and there, and not the low-res, big-screen jumbotron replay that still looks like a lot of colored lights more than a TV picture?

If you're a fan of the college team, your alma mater, and you take your kids, are you going to enjoy a decent experience? You can't take your father in law because all the noise drives him crazy. You take your kids, are you going to hear a bunch of obscenities and too-cute-by-half signs? My kids swear it's not merely "you suck" they hear in the din of Lynah.

Someone gave me a $150 ticket to the World Series at Yankee stadium a couple years back, won something like 10-7 on about eight home runs, and the only thing you saw from "behind third base," as the ticket was described but which means really more like not so shallow right field, was the stadium standing as one every 20 minutes to try to see the ball sail out of the stadium. That sucked.

With TV, especially pro caliber TV with multiple angles and a good camera crew and a balls-and-strikes camera or an in-the-net goalie view camera or a first-down stripe, and more often now in HD, you're going to see the plays better than the coaches event. Not the same atmosphere, to be sure. And now from home with a laptop you can log on and get real time stats, too, rather than in person waiting for the end of the period to maybe be able to hear the total # of shots on goal for the period. On TV, you have to endure insipid sidelines commentary from a former Miss Texas trying to extract something thoughtful from a player who just fumbled the ball away in the final five minutes, and there are stupid graphics like the ESPN lacrosse broadcasters put up in the upper left corner that obscures where the goaltender is (upper left corner when the play goes right to left). You can put seats courtside to soak up the extra space but past the first say two rows the sightlines aren't very good.

At outdoor stadium pro events, you freeze your tail off the last month of the extended season. And you go broke paying for it. A pair of season tickects to the NFL plus parking plus mandatory food (can't bring in food) and you're looking at $2000 a year maybe. Makes Cornell hockey a veritable bargain.

I just don't buy the "real fans are the ones who go in person" argument. It doesn't mean I'm hostile to being there. I want to. But when I want to see the artistry of the game up close, TV shows help me better. Okay, in person I can focus on the whole forward line racing up ice, not just one guy with the puck. But part of that is because when you do a wide shot with standard def, you don't see a whole lot, so the cameras are torn between going close in and losing track of the puck (in hockey). And who says in 5 or 15 years you can't have 2-3 angles to choose from for your HBO NFL Sunday or all-week hockey package?

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Insofar as NYC stadium location goes, sure if you're on Wall Street, you just keep riding the subway and you're there in the Bronx. But if you're one of the bridge and tunnel mass transmit people who don't live on Manhattan Island (and I think 2/3 of metro New York residents are not NYC residents), then the central point of New York City is the West Side between Penn Station and the Port Authority bus terminal, with the area just a quick shuttle ride away if you go into Grand Central.

OK, in order:

1) Basketball vs. hockey: From the court size figures I'd say that in a hockey/basketball arena you end up about 10'-15 feet further away from the court than you would in a basketball only gym, if you're sitting near center court. On the ends you'll be a lot further - probably 50 feet or so. Based on that it probably would be a better experience in bball only for the folks on the end. (I say this as someone who's been to exactly one squeakball game in his life, and that a Princeton-Cornell blowout.)

2) HDTV vs. being there: I wasn't trying to suggest that "real fans are the ones who go in person", just that I think the experience is much better in person. Yes, it would be nice to have replays sometimes or a better angle. But all things considered I'd rather be at the event any day.

Of course, I'm talking in the abstract here. While I'd love to go to 40 Yankee games per year I probably couldn't afford it even if I did move back to NYC. There are other factors in life that make TV much more convienent and affordable. I was reacting to your statement that "HDTV really is the best place to watch a game..." which struck me as saying that, all else aside, it was better to watch on HDTV than be there. Which I respectfully disagree with.

3) NYC locations: Yes, the West Side is more convienent from a mass transportation perspective for folks who live outside of Manhattan. It seems to me that Yankee Stadium is actually in a pretty good location from the point of view of someone who insists on driving to games (or would be if the roads around there didn't suck). But I say this as someone who never drives in and around NYC. Besides, you said The real issue for the corporate set is you can't get there so easily from Wall Street or the midtown corporate canyons, " which they certainly can do by subway. And getting back to Penn/Grand Central after a game is not really very difficult or time consuming. (Why am I arguing this? I think we'd both agree that Yankee Stadium is pretty easy to get to and a West Side stadium would be as well if they extended the #7 line.)

[Q]KeithK Wrote:
1) Basketball vs. hockey: From the court size figures I'd say that in a hockey/basketball arena you end up about 10'-15 feet further away from the court than you would in a basketball only gym, if you're sitting near center court. On the ends you'll be a lot further - probably 50 feet or so. Based on that it probably would be a better experience in bball only for the folks on the end. (I say this as someone who's been to exactly one squeakball game in his life, and that a Princeton-Cornell blowout.) [/q]But don't forget they add in seats to fill the empty space when the ice comes out and the basketball court goes down. I'm sure Jack Nicholson would be happy to have a permanent seat instead of a folding chair, but I don't think it makes much difference in the scheme of things.

Geez, Josh, you and me, it's supposed to be the season of good will, and we're going head to head on about three different forums. (At least we have in common the issue of first names that could be last names and vice versa.) So here goes on this one: The baggy pants, Escalade-driving, subwoofers-thumping squeakball (love that term) crowd puts out courtside seats in a hockey rink because they can, because they have to, otherwise it'd look ridiculous, dropping a 4,700 square foot parquet floor in the middle of a 17,000 square foot ice palace. At the ends they have mini-risers so there's some elevation, but not much, otherwise you'd block the view of the fans in the real seats behind the dasher boards. On the sides, I think it's pretty much flat and so you're close but you're looking between, not over, other fans.

I still say the right venue for real basketball is in a basketball-only facility, not a converted hockey rink, and that's why places like UNC's Dean Dome (sorry, Tar Heels, "Dean Smith Center') with its 21,750 fanatics breathing down on the court, not 200 feet away, there's nothing quite like it. Imagine what Lynah would be like with twenty-thousand (filled) seats.

I love hockey (and lacrosse), couldn't imagine a finer sport, but if Cornell was also top ten in college basketball, I wonder which game most Cornellians would go see.

I didn't mention the seats they add on the floor for bball because of the elevation issues and the fact that the gap means that the real seats on the ends are much further away from the action than their altitude would otherwise indicate. Definitely not ideal, but workable.