Generic Off Season Thread

[ugarte]

Lake Placid is in the middle of nowhere, reachable only by expedition. Fuck that. They may as well take the alternate-site venue that the Big 10 isn't using.

[Jim Hyla]

Adam, I'll address it to you since you seem to be the only one pushing LP, no one has talked about the housing problem that Beeeej mentioned. Some history for those who were not there. To get a room in town, at a convient place you had to put down a non-refundable payment. I don't remember how soon you had to do it, but it was certainly before the quarterfinal games. Therefore you had to put your money down when you didn't even know your team was going to be there. And if you took a place outside of town, finding an easy place to park in that town was not nice. If you thought you might just drive up for the finals since your team won the semi, good luck. Close hotel rooms were generally taken and as I said no easy parking. All in all, not an easy place for that last minute fan.

My daughter will be out of the house, so we'd probably book and pay for a room the year before, as we'd go even if CU didn't. However I don't think many would be happy with that. Thanks Beeeej, I'd forgotten how awful this was. No, LP seems worse all the time.

It sounds like Albany really wants us back, let's give them a chance again. If Union stays up there, I have to think attendance will be good. With them, newsprint will be good, and the casual fan will drop in. You can decide a few days before that you want to go, and you can still find a reasonable room. In fact cheap if you don't mind driving a bit.

If Providence or Worcester wanted to bid, I'd give that a try, but please not LP.

[marty]

It sounds like Albany really wants us back, let's give them a chance again. If Union stays up there, I have to think attendance will be good. With them, newsprint will be good, and the casual fan will drop in.

And it is perfectly acceptable to use the Times Union rather than the Daily Sun during introductions.  As for the Troy Record, the preferred method involves wadding it up almost as soon as the carrier makes his delivery.

Just for the Record

[Jim Hyla]

It sounds like Albany really wants us back, let's give them a chance again. If Union stays up there, I have to think attendance will be good. With them, newsprint will be good, and the casual fan will drop in.

And it is perfectly acceptable to use the Times Union rather than the Daily Sun during introductions.  As for the Troy Record, the preferred method involves wadding it up almost as soon as the carrier makes his delivery.

Just for the Record

I forgot, they used to give away free newspapers, didn't they. That proves we should go there, no complaints about the papers. Now if they'd only be as good about Snickers.:-D

[Beeeej]

The expectations for that team were very high, and we hadn't won a title in five years after coming fairly close in 2000 and 2001.  Again, I'll ask - did anyone on this board who went to Albany in 2003 decline to go to Lake Placid in 2002 because they weren't as excited about Cornell hockey?

Well, I recall things differently. Expectations may have been high in 2002 - but Cornell was ranked No. 1 for most of 2002-03, and raised expectations even higher. The fever pitch was monumental. Anything short of a Frozen Four would've been considered a disaster.  There was an enormous groundswell that built through the entire year.  I suspect you don't know all 8,000 people who showed up, so perhaps the group we all know would've went to 2002 and 2003.  But do you really believe there was not a huge upswing in interest that year from "the masses"?

First of all, you're kind of missing my point - I'm not saying attendance shouldn't have gone up in 2003.  Of course it should have, I just don't believe that the entire increase can be attributed to the better season.  What I'm saying, that you're misinterpreting, is that you need to look at 2002 in a vacuum, as if you're in 2002 now, without knowing what 2003 is going to be like.  2002 was an incredible year all on its own compared to 2000 and 2001, we had a much better shot than usual at a deep run, and attendance at the ECAC tournament should have increased from those previous couple of seasons, notwithstanding any objections to Lake Placid.  It didn't.

I will say this for certain, though:  You definitely recall things differently.  Cornell was ranked No. 1 for exactly ONE week in 2003 - March 24, after we beat Harvard in Albany.  That was it.  We actually bubbled around #7-9 for most of the first half.  And Cornell wasn't ranked No. 1 in the Pairwise until after winning the ECAC title game, either.

Tell you what - I'll ask Daina when she gets home why she didn't go to Lake Placid in 2002.  ::woot::

[judy]

Another thing to think about when considering the "Cornell bump" in a historical sense is that from 1996-2001, Cornell didn't have much success past the ECACs.  A league championship was all shiny and new to a decade's worth of fans.  Since 2002, when Cornell started becoming a regular NCAA attendee, I feel there has been a de-emphasis on the importance of the ECAC tournament in the casual-to-moderate CU hockey fan.  1996-97 was such a cathartic eruption and I feel we valued those League Championships more than recent ones.  The 2003 team drove a LOT of interest in the "we're here for the entire ride" sense. By 2005, I felt more people milled around saying "yeah, yeah, this is a nice cup...now, what regional are we going to?"  

I think something related to this had been mentioned here sometime in the last year (note, I've lost all sense of time). There was a discussion about how we don't see as many traveling undergrads now as we used to. I think we picked up a lot of new fans in that period of time. After maybe 2005 (give or take), the number of new and more fanatical fans seemed to have tapered off. Maybe the championship was the shiny new toy. For the most part, I see a lot of the same people on this board posting but most of you are older than I am. There are probably only a handful on here that are very recent grads and are vocal here. The championship is no longer the shiny new toy, we expect to get to the NCAAs or the season sucked, and we'd been in Albany for a while. If Cornell makes it to the Frozen Four next year, I'm sure most of you reading would move heaven and earth to be in Pittsburgh. The average Cornellian, maybe not? Really, how many of us are willing to let 2-3 weeks of our lives be completely dictated by what a hockey team does?

As for ECAC location, maybe Albany was getting stale. I agree with Rita that maybe a rotation between Albany, Hartford/Bridgeport, and Providence might be a good solution. I used to be in the Lake Placid camp when we first moved to Albany but hey, life happens. My car has 160,000 miles on it because I drove it all over the east coast the first 5 years I had it, mostly to hockey games but now, you'd have a hard time to get me to be in it for more than an hour. This is why I'd rather go to Albany than AC. Geographically, AC is a hell of a lot closer to me but it means that I have to spend 4-5 hours in a car while I can hop on a plane to go to Albany. I'll probably go next year just to say that I've been but I'm not looking forward to the time in the car. At least it's not beach season.

Adam, I'll go to Lake Placid but you're going to have to drive me.

[Trotsky]

Cornell was ranked No. 1 for exactly ONE week in 2003 - March 24, after we beat Harvard in Albany.  That was it.  We actually bubbled around #7-9 for most of the first half.

We were #4 or better for almost the whole season after December, and #2 from mid-Feb on, though.

[Beeeej]

Cornell was ranked No. 1 for exactly ONE week in 2003 - March 24, after we beat Harvard in Albany.  That was it.  We actually bubbled around #7-9 for most of the first half.

We were #4 or better for almost the whole season after December, and #2 from mid-Feb on, though.

Yes, absolutely.  And that's a long way from being "ranked No. 1 for most of 2002-03."

[Beeeej]

Tell you what - I'll ask Daina when she gets home why she didn't go to Lake Placid in 2002.  ::woot::

Daina doesn't remember clearly exactly why, but she went home for spring break (which started the weekend of the ECACs).  She went to the regionals in Worcester to see us beat Quinnipiac and lose to UNH at the end of spring break, but that's because it was pretty close to her home in West Hartford.  Although she can't say for sure that she actually went through this thought process ten years ago, she says now that she doubts she would've wanted to drive to Lake Placid - and if the tournament had been in Albany that year, she almost certainly would have gone, because it was on the way home.

[Robb]

Jeebus.  Stop all this bickering!  I hate coming to the forum in the offseason and seeing 32 new posts!  There's never any good news in the offseason...  ::help::

[ugarte]

Jeebus.  Stop all this bickering!  I hate coming to the forum in the offseason and seeing 32 new posts!  There's never any good news in the offseason...  ::help::

This isn't generic either. Please change the topic to "Arguing with adamw about the merits of Lake Placid".

[judy]

Jeebus.  Stop all this bickering!  I hate coming to the forum in the offseason and seeing 32 new posts!  There's never any good news in the offseason...  ::help::

There's one topic that always gets beaten to death at this time of year that hasn't popped up at all! Maybe it's because we beat Michigan and exceeded expectations?

[Rosey]

Jeebus.  Stop all this bickering!  I hate coming to the forum in the offseason and seeing 32 new posts!  There's never any good news in the offseason...  ::help::

This isn't generic either. Please change the topic to "Arguing with adamw about the merits of Lake Placid".

Or "The relative mediocrity of ECAC tournament venue choices".

[CowbellGuy]

The other issue that hasn't been mentioned is (at least as of the ECAC's last trip) that the facilities are crap. Hot, nasty locker rooms that they won't let you put fans in, players sitting in the hallway, etc. I don't think you're going to get much love from the coaches for LP.

[Beeeej]

Jeebus.  Stop all this bickering!  I hate coming to the forum in the offseason and seeing 32 new posts!  There's never any good news in the offseason...  ::help::

There's one topic that always gets beaten to death at this time of year that hasn't popped up at all! Maybe it's because we beat Michigan and exceeded expectations?

Yeah, I'm still waiting for the annual "Fire Schafer" post.