Times Article for Hockey / Stats Geeks

Nate Silver has an article in today's paper that about 0.05% of the population could possibly get through, but which 25% of the people on this forum might read through the end. I'm part of the other 75% but wanted to share.

Most of the article wasn't too bad. It was so unlike The Times, some of the charts were built to be readable, rather than a tribute to the graphic artiste trying to conceptualize a new way of making data hard to parse. I lost it at the regress ticketrev gameyear table.

Silver says small Canadian cities with 50% of the population base rated as avid fans might be better NHL towns than, say, Houston or Phoenix wiht 2% avidity. But his definition of avid hockey fan may ignore that a barely-a-fan person might tune in the game and provide eyeballs for advertisers. And I think the NHL hopes a big city team can develop a fan base.

billhoward
Silver says small Canadian cities with 50% of the population base rated as avid fans might be better NHL towns than, say, Houston or Phoenix wiht 2% avidity. But his definition of avid hockey fan may ignore that a barely-a-fan person might tune in the game and provide eyeballs for advertisers. And I think the NHL hopes a big city team can develop a fan base.

That's obviously what the NHL was hoping for when they expanded into markets like Nashville and Tampa. The data, or at least the data cited in the article, indictes that they haven't really been very successful. The question is how long does it take to develop that fanbase in a non-traditional area and how long are the people fronting the capital willing to wait for it?

I really don't care whether ot not a Canadian team has won the Cup in a while. But I do think it's silly to put a lot of NHL franchises in markets that really have no interest in hockey when they could be in hockey-crazed markets instead. Especially when those franchises are in mediocre American markets like Columbus or Nashville.