Yet More!

One of the things about writing for one of the 10,000 most popular blogs on the intarweb is that–in addition to the predictable crates of panties, requests for autographs, marriage proposals, and the like–is that one is burdened with requests to write about topics sadly neglected by the author but of intense interest to the audience. If I’ve gotten this email once, I’ve gotten it a million times: “Why can’t you blog more about hockey? You do it so rarely, and the comments threads get so long I feel lost! And would it hurt you to fire off the occasional post about abortion or unprincipled faux-libertarians?”

Well, who am I to ignore my readers? So you can see me lowbrowing Michael Berube’s place up, discussing the New NHL. I’m afraid my need to fill the space that would otherwise be consumed by doing something useful has trumped my labor solidarity.

As an addendum to my point about attendance, I’m not sure what the averages are; versus the previous year, the median attendance is down, but the median capacity filled is up. (Considering that there was a labor stoppage that killed a whole season, that’s pretty amazing.) The really interesting comparison is with the NBA: the NHL has a median attendance of 16, 820 and 94.5% capacity, compared with 16,925 and 87.5% for the NBA [whoops–edited!]. And this has generally been true: the NHL more or less has the attendance figures of the NBA–which I think would surprise most people–but can’t get Americans to watch on TV at all.