That new Florida owner sounds like a know it all dumb ass to me. He’ll learn. Good luck with that marketing plan in Miami, because NOBODY there cares about the Panthers or the Marlins. Miami fans are great on jumping on the bandwagon though, so if the Panthers or Marlins ever win, they’ll show up in droves for the playoffs and pretend that they were always there.

But anyway, let’s suppose we could ask the average Thrashers fan the following. Here are your choices. Pick one.
1) Your team will keep Ilya Kovalchuk but never get past the first round of the playoffs, if it even gets that far.
2) Your team loses Ilya Kovalchuk now but will win the Stanley Cup next year.

I’m pretty sure that given that choice that almost everybody would pick #2. And besides, what Siegel doesn’t know is that basically nobody in the NHL outside of Ovechkin and Crosby has any national stature. Sorry, but that’s how it is. Why doesn’t he ask somebody at random if they know what Evgeni Malkin does for a living? Or Anze Kopitar? Or any of those faceless bums that play for the Panthers? I’m not kidding. Off the top of my head I can’t name even ONE player, not one, who plays for the Panthers right now. Talk about not marketing somebody! The Panthers are the only team in the NHL for whom I honestly can’t name a single player who plays for them.

Like it or not, the fact is that hockey is a bit of a fringe sport. And Kovy does get some marketing here in Atlanta. I just asked the women in my office is they ever heard of him and half knew who was and none of them are regulars at Thrashers games. My sample size was small for sure, but I don’t buy Siegel’s argument.

A recognizable superstar and deep playoff runs are required to establish fan bonds. Obviously, the latter is more important. Most Atlantans have no clue as to what a playoff run involves.

Folks, we’re forgetting the elephant in the room: Kovy’s a European, a Russian, in fact, and that doesn’t go down well in a city whose sports heroes are named Aaron, Jones, Murphy, Wilkins, Ryan.

Hockey is foreign to most U.S. people to begin with, especially with Atlanta’s large black population plus many white Southerners who have no connection to the sport.

As someone who was a former Flames fan in Alabama (I was 18 when they left for Calgary), I think this is why people are extremely slow to embrace hockey again: when they left, the league was 99% North American. Now, it’s increasingly foreign.

Also, we’ve also come through the ESPN “Attitude” era; we want our athletes to have flash and sizzle on AND off the ice, and embrace an open mike once in a while. Foreign players just don’t do that for most of the public. Known any hockey players that transcend the NHL? (Rhetorical question.) Now, how many NBA’ers transcend basketball? You need more fingers and toes to count…

But you need the winning team to maintain and grow the excitement.

I was in San Jose when the Sharks got started and here when the Thrashers came into the league. I’ll grant that they’re very different markets (SJ was a big city starved for its own sports identity), but the marketing the Sharks did to launch the team had an amazing impact. They created a monster buzz for a team that played its first 2 seasons in a 60 year-old cattle auction barn 40 miles north of San Jose. I never felt that same buzz here when the Thrashers started.

-1 for the Thrash.

Then, in their 3rd season, SJ managed to knock off the #1 Wings in their first playoff appearance and get within a crossbar ping of the Conf. Finals in round 2. They absolutely owned that town at that point. And outside of a couple of down years they’ve consistently filled the building for 15 years since.

The Thrashers are past the point where marketing will create the buzz. They need the playoff victories.

What does it say when Garnet Exelby was the team’s “ambassador”?

Evander Kane may be the perfect person to step into Exelby’s shoes…off the ice, that is.

Speaking of piss-poor marketing, could someone please explain to me what the hell “That’s the Hockey Way” supposed to mean??? You could get away with a slogan like that in Minnesota, Boston, or Canada, but down here?

I have a (never-used) marketing degree, but I had to do a face-palm the first time I heard it…