From NEHJ: Bruins' Cup win may spur hockey renaissance
Forgive me if I didn’t take part in all the caterwauling that accompanied the Bruins during the 2010-11 regular season, with seemingly everyone lamenting the Hub’s 39-year Stanley Cup drought.
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When Bobby Orr, left, scored The Goal to clinch the Bruins' Stanley Cup in 1970, it spurred a hockey explosion throughout New England. Can the Bruins' current success spur a renaissance? (Getty) |
See, my personal Cup drought stretched way back before I was
born, in 1957. In 1972, when the Big Bad Bruins last hoisted Lord
Stanley’s trophy, I was a 14-year-old eighth-grader living in
upstate New Jersey. And the Bruins ripped my heart out.
Game 6 of the 1972 finals saw the Bruins come into Madison Square
Garden with a 3-2 series lead over my beloved Rangers. The Rangers
at the time hadn’t won the Cup since 1940 but were loaded
with talent, including Eddie Giacomin in goal, the league’s
second best defenseman in Brad Park, and the stellar Goal-A-Game
line of Jean Ratelle, Rod Gilbert and Vic Hatfield. Still, they
were no match for the mighty Bruins, who calmly waltzed into MSG
and throttled the Rangers, 3-0, to take home their second
championship in three years.
I quietly wept, curled up in my bed, the voice of Marv Albert
counting down the last seconds of the game on the transistor radio
pressed to my ear. The Bruins, admittedly, were downright
scary. Who could have possibly predicted then that it would be
almost 40 years before they would again be crowned Stanley Cup
champions?
Two years later, in 1974, my family moved to Manchester, N.H., and
I was transported to some kind of hockey utopia. Southern New
Hampshire, like much of Greater Boston, was reveling in the success
of Bobby Orr’s Bruins. I got my first glimpse of the
celebrated bumper sticker, “Jesus saves, but Esposito scores
on the rebound.” Rinks, both indoors and out, were plentiful,
making it easy for a carpetbagger like me to get assimilated into
the region’s hockey culture. Little did I, or Bruins fans, or
New England hockey players in general, understand just what a
magical snapshot those days were.
Shortly after the start of the 1975 season, the Bruins made it
easy for me to switch allegiances, trading for two of my favorite
Rangers, Ratelle and Park, while shipping Phil Esposito and Carol
Vadnais off to Broadway. I gladly jumped on the Bruins’
bandwagon, worshiping at the altar of Channel 38 and high priests
of hockey Fred Cusick and John Pierson. And the team began its
wandering odyssey, with a handful of trips to the Stanley Cup
Finals in 1977, 1978, 1988 and 1990, but no victory tour. Park
never got his name on the Cup. Neither did Ratelle nor Rick
“Nifty” Middleton nor Terry O’Reilly nor Gilles
Gilbert nor Cam Neely nor Joe Thornton (not yet, anyway).
So complete was my conversion to the Black and Gold that I
couldn’t even take some small measure of satisfaction in the
Rangers’ 1994 Cup win, one of the greatest playoff runs ever.
Same for Bruins great Ray Bourque raising the Cup as a member of
the Colorado Avalanche in 2001.
Of late, life has been even more difficult for diehard Bruins
fans.
Carolina’s Scott Walker’s overtime tally abruptly
ending the 2009 campaign, and the stunning implosion against
Philadelphia in 2010 had the Bruins faithful reeling much like Red
Sox fans after the Yankees’ Bucky Dent went yard in 1978, or
the Mets’ Mookie Wilson’s squibber snuck under Bill
Buckner’s glove in 1986.
Then, with one glorious — albeit nail-biting (three Game
7s!) — run through the 2011 playoffs, the bearded Bruins were
again champions of the hockey universe, parading around
Vancouver’s home rink with the Stanley Cup aloft over their
heads.
It was a cathartic moment for thousands of Northeast hockey fans
who call the Bruins their own. All of which begs the question:
Will the Bruins’ Stanley Cup crown usher a return to
hockey’s glory days in New England?
* * *
The short answer is, probably not. At least not to the same
extent. The game caught lightning in a bottle in the early 1970s.
The economy was healthy, and the Bruins — led by the
preternatural Orr and other supremely talented players such as
Esposito, Gerry Cheevers and Derek Sanderson — captured the
imaginations of fans young and old throughout an entire region.
Percolating enthusiasm hit critical mass, and the game’s
popularity exploded.
Today, the landscape has changed irrevocably. The evidence can be
found in the TD Garden, with its pyrotechnics and high-def
Jumbotron, ear-splitting soundtracks and those all-essential luxury
boxes. It is a far cry from the old Boston Garden. Consider this:
an eight-ounce Budweiser today costs about the same as a ticket for
a regular-season balcony seat at the old Garden ($7 for the
latter).
Here’s another hint. Check out the Bruins popping open
expensive bottles of French champagne during their victory
celebrations. What a waste of quality bubbly! In 1972, cheap beer
wasn’t just good enough for the champion Bruins, it was
preferred. And I won’t even start on the player salaries.
Still, the fans have returned in full force. Everyone loves a
winner. The true fans never really left, but many of them did go
into hibernation. In a city where the undercurrent of hockey runs
likes a riptide, Boston’s celebration was a heartfelt
outpouring of emotion, as healing as it was exuberant. And it was
genuine.
“The Bruins were huge for us,” Boston bar owner Jimmy
Statires said. “I can compare it to what we got three years
ago with the Celtics, but this got a bigger buzz.
“The Bruins are definitely the talk of the town right now,
and until another one of our teams wins a championship, it’s
going to be that way,” he said. “The big thing with
these guys is that they’re easier to relate to than a Boston
Celtic or a New England Patriot, because they just seem like
guy’s guys. They’re around town. They’re not the
big shots, not talking to people. They’re out having fun with
people.”
Statires co-owns two establishments that couldn’t offer
better locations for a Bruins’ Cup party — J.A. Stats
Restaurant and Tavern in Boston’s financial district and
Stats Bar & Grille in South Boston. Late in the playoffs, both
places were “wall-to-wall,” he said.
“It wasn’t just guys, either. I remember looking
around the place during the Stanley Cup finals, and half the people
in here were women in Bruins jerseys,” Statires said.
“Plus, it’s a different crowd (compared to the average
Red Sox or Celtic follower). I would look at the Bruins fans as
more hard-core fans.”
The Bruins’ victory parade also was a fairly accurate
indicator of where the city’s allegiances lie. Most estimates
put the crowd at between 1 million and 1.5 million, dwarfed only by
the Red Sox’ World Series rolling rally in 2004. Need more
proof? According to NEHJ Bruins beat writer Jesse Connolly, the
Bruins’ annual development camp last month, which is little
more than a dry run for minor leaguers and draft picks, drew big
numbers.
“The weekday events had pretty large crowds, but it was so
packed on the weekend days that they turned some people away at the
door for fear of being over capacity,” Connolly reported.
“Very vibrant, knowledgeable crowd, but plenty of young kids
mixed in, too.”
Plus, the Bruins themselves are enjoying the fruits of their
championship labors. They’ve confirmed that they’ve
sold 12,000 season tickets for next year, with a waiting list (at a
cost of $100 per seat). That, my friends, underscores some serious
commitment.
* * *
How does all of that fanfare translate to the region’s
hockey ethos, and the growth of the game? There’s little
likelihood of another boom of “Bobby Orr rinks,” given
the current economic climate, and the dozens of 1970s era rinks
that went bust. “The land costs alone are prohibitive, if you
want to be inside Metro Boston,” said Larry Abbott, owner of
Hockey Town USA in Saugus, Mass.
On Boston’s North Shore — in the footprint of my
daughter Brynne’s Agawam Youth Hockey program — there
are numerous skeletons that speak about the Bobby Orr rinks like
some archaeological dig. We lost twin rinks on Route 114 in
Danvers, twin rinks off Route 128 in Beverly, and a single-sheet
rink on Route 22 in Essex.
“A lot of people in the ’70s didn’t have access
to ice,” Abbott said. “Prior to the Bruins winning the
Cup (in 1970), there were a limited number of rinks around. Now
there’s probably an over-saturation of rinks.”
Abbott’s family was ahead of the curve, converting an old
Melrose bus barn into the original Hockey Town in 1965. That sheet
proved so popular that the Abbotts added a smaller, second rink in
the basement (which is still famous among locals for the four
massive support beams that transformed the basement sheet into an
unforgiving obstacle course). Despite the beams, though, the sheet
sold out, a sure sign of hockey’s burgeoning popularity in
the late 1960s and early ’70s.
In 1972, the Abbotts built the three-rink Hockey Town USA complex
on Route 1 South in Saugus. They had plenty of company by that
time. With Orr and the Bruins making annual challenges for NHL
supremacy, and local hockey numbers skyrocketing, the number of
rinks mushroomed.
“In those days, we were going around the clock,”
Abbott said.
Even then, though, there were signs of cracks in that perfect
facade. Soon after the Route 1 Hockey Town opened, the oil embargo
hit, and the Abbotts converted a third, elevated ice sheet into a
street hockey venue.
“The cost of energy skyrocketed,” Abbott said.
“The state built something like 19 rinks, and there was a
whole bunch of new private rinks. It took about 10, 12 years to
shake out, and most of those private guys went out of
business.”
Moreover, Abbott questions just how hungry today’s players
are, noting there’s still plenty of ice available. The catch,
he says, is that it’s not prime-time ice.
“Here’s the problem. Everybody says there’s no
ice because they can’t get it when they want it, which means
they can’t find practice time between 5 o’clock and 9
o’clock, Monday through Friday. That’s four
hours,” he said. “Back in the ’60s, when we got
into this business, they were skating around the clock. And when
they said they couldn’t find ice then, they literally
couldn’t find ice. There might have been an hour between 3
and 4 in the morning.
“But now, most of these rinks are wide open after 10, 11
o’clock” at night, Abbott said. “And
they’re wide open in the offseason. There’s still a
surplus of hours.”
For many communities, public dollars are the only hope for
bringing a new rink on board, though municipal and state funding
typically dampens enthusiasm of private investors in the same
market, and is dependent on the whims of the Legislature. Another
option is to have a wealthy benefactor build a new facility (a
popular prep school approach) or a private owner bailing out a
floundering facility.
“You can’t be the first owner,” said Peter
Ferriero of Essex, Mass., who runs the successful Top Gun program
out of his twin-sheet IceCenter in Salem, N.H., and is father of
current San Jose Shark Benn Ferriero. “You have to be the
second or third owner.”
* * *
Still, the rink question is only one part of the equation. What
about the players? Not just the numbers but the quality. As Kirk
Luedeke noted in his coverage of the 2011 NHL draft in the July
issue of New England Hockey Journal, not a single New England
player was tabbed until the third round (Connecticut’s Mike
Paliotta, with the 70th pick).
“You’re seeing a bit of a down cycle, but the next few
years could be different” one New England-based NHL scout
told Luedeke. “Of course, the Bruins winning the Stanley Cup
could provide minor hockey a nice boost, but that impact
won’t be felt for some time.”
So, can the Bruins 2011 championship spur a renaissance for the
game itself, on par with the four Boston University kids who
famously helped propel the USA to miracle gold at the 1980
Olympics, and NHL stars such as Tony Amonte (Hingham, Mass.), Brian
Leetch (Cheshire, Conn.), Jeremy Roenick (Marshfield, Mass.) and
Tom Barrasso (Stow, Mass.)?
Absolutely. Of course, it’s still far too early to tell if
there will be any lasting bump from the Stanley Cup run. But in the
short term, local hockey officials are confident that numbers will
increase, and quickly.
“I think it’s going to grow the sport
dramatically,” said Keri Allen, the new president of
Massachusetts Hockey and chair of the affiliate’s Player
Development Committee. “We always see an increase after an
Olympic year, and our U-8 registrations increased more than 250.
With the Bruins’ Stanley Cup win, we expect to match that or
exceed that number.
“We might be a small state, but we have a large number of
hockey players,” added Allen, noting that Massachusetts
currently has more than 45,000 USA Hockey-registered players, from
adults to youngsters.
Pat Kelleher, USA Hockey’s assistant executive director of
membership development, and a Belmont, Mass., native, agrees with
Allen’s assessment.
“This should provide another boost to hockey in
Massachusetts and New England,” he said. “I mean, Mass.
and New England have been producing elite-level players for a long
time. They have huge participation numbers in all those states,
because hockey is ingrained. It’s tradition.
“This will hopefully bring in more people from outside of
hockey that look at the sport and say, ‘Maybe we should get
our kid in that,’” Kelleher said. “I think
you’ll see another boost in participation capturing those
people who may not have gotten their kids into hockey in the past
but got excited by the Bruins run and excited by the
sport.”
Even better, Kelleher said, is that the Bruins are “set up
and positioned perfectly to take advantage of this from the youth
hockey participation side” with numerous outreach
programs.
“We track the growth of the game at the entry level, the
8-and-under participation levels,” he said. “We
won’t know the impact of the Bruins until April of 2012, when
we finish up all of their registrations. But when we went to April
of 2011, we saw the No. 1 growth in 8-and-under participation in
USA Hockey was in Illinois. It’s no coincidence that followed
the Blackhawks’ Stanley Cup win.”
Providing further evidence that youth hockey programs follow the
lead of the NHL, Kelleher acknowledged that USA Hockey player
registration dipped significantly during the lockout season of
2004-05, and the following season as well.
Not only was the city of Chicago starving for a Cup, Kelleher
said, but the team also was “totally positioned to impact the
market at the grassroots, learn-to-play type level.” That
formula included team-sponsored programs and partnerships with area
rinks.
“Basically, all the stars aligned,” Kelleher said.
“We see no reason it won’t be similar in an even bigger
part of the country, all over New England. Not only Massachusetts,
but you also have New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Rhode Island,
Connecticut … at least the right side of
Connecticut.”
Like the Blackhawks, the Bruins have positioned themselves for a
hockey boom because “they’ve been working on these
sorts of grassroots initiatives,” Kelleher said. “When
a Stanley Cup championship happens, it pushes everything over the
top.”
For example, the Bruins have partnered with Facility Management
Corporation, or FMC, which manages a number of former state rinks,
to offer free G.O.A.L. (Get Out And Learn) skating and hockey
instructional programs for first-time participants.
“For those of us from Massachusetts, we know that the
programs have been established forever,” Kelleher said.
“Typically, if Dad or Mom played hockey, they’re going
to bring their child to play hockey. But we have a lot of families
that didn’t grow up with hockey, even in and around Boston
and New England, which we definitely think of as a hockey
hotbed.”
Likewise, the Bruins are also involved with One Goal, a joint
venture between the NHL, USA Hockey and its affiliates, and a
number of industry leaders that are looking at ways to grow the
sport by providing equipment and opportunities to skate.
“We have to have programs that make it efficient cost-wise
and efficient time-wise for people to get in,” Kelleher said.
“You can’t jump into a five-night-a-week program and
expect a family to be enthused about that if they don’t know
what it is. You get them involved in hockey, let them see that
their kid’s having a good time and good experience, and that
translates into a lifelong participants.
“One of the big things we’re doing, and I hope it
lengthens the bump from the Bruins winning the Stanley Cup, is a
national Try Hockey for Free Day on Nov. 5, partnering with all the
NHL clubs through this OneGoal organization,” he said.
“Obviously, by then, the Bruins are back playing.
There’s more media at that point, there’s more TV, and
people are saying, ‘We couldn’t do it in September or
October, but now it’s November, and we have another chance to
try it.’ And they’re more excited, because
they’re all still riding that high of the Bruins.”
Even Abbott, who is less than enthusiastic about the prospects for
private rink owners, says the Bruins’ Cup run should be a
boon for the sport in New England.
“It’s gotta help, because there’s more interest,
so it might bring the marginal person who wasn’t thinking of
it before to start watching the game,” he said. “Of
course, when they start watching it, the kids start watching it,
and maybe they get a little more excited about and decide that
it’s something they want to do.”
* * *
New England hockey retailers are banking on it.
“We see the Bruins’ success as being important to
the game of hockey in New England,” said David Nectow, owner
of Pure Hockey, a primarily New England-based retailer.
“While we don’t foresee people running to open more
rinks — like what happened in the 1970s — we do believe
that a whole new group of kids will want to participate in the game
both on ice and via street hockey.
“We’ve talked about this a lot internally, and the
consensus is that we will see some level of growth in the coming
years, but it’s so hard to quantify and prepare for,”
Nectow said. “We operate our business fairly conservatively,
and while we won’t rely on a tremendous influx of new
players, we would love to see that happen.”
Essentially, hockey retailers see the Bruins’ championship
run as a watershed event, one they want to make sure they can both
promote and leverage. Most recognize that hockey’s rising
cost has pushed the sport beyond the reach of many families.
“We continue to work with external partners to identify ways
to grow interest in the game at the youth hockey level,”
Nectow said. “In addition, we do all that we can to ensure
that kids who want to play the game but can’t afford to are
given the opportunity.”
Much like the Bruins themselves, manufacturers and retailers are
exploring partnerships, and new products, to build on the
team’s success, and make sure it translates to all fans.
“My personal feeling is that we’ll see a bump in
August and September, when people start gearing up again for the
season,” said Pure Hockey’s Jeff Copetas.
“Marketing-wise, we are planning on rolling out some starter
packages, which encompass, head to toe, what you need to get
started in the game. We have a partnership with FMC, and their
Learn to Skate program.
“But this is really the first year that we’re going to
sink our teeth into the starter package, and it’s really
going to be an amazing price, to accommodate what we think will be
a pretty good number of kids coming into hockey.”
* * *
Will the Bruins repeat? That’s a great question. My guess is
that the current club has the parts in place to at least make
another run or two.
As of now, though, I’m not worrying about it. I’m
going to savor this championship. I might even watch the finals
again, which I dutifully recorded on the family DVR. And I’m
going to watch them with my daughter, a second-year Pee-Wee and
bruising right wing for her co-ed Agawam squad.
My allegiance to the Bruins isn’t predicated on
championships, though I root for them in my own way (I’m more
of a Herb Brooks, fist-pump-beneath-the-stands kind of guy).
I’m a fan, especially now that Neely has infused a certain
edge to the squad, but I don’t live and die with the
team’s fortunes. Overall, the only thing the Bruins have to
do to maintain my loyalty is the play like they care, like they
understand and respect what the game means to us.
I enjoy the pro game, but my heart lies with the youth programs.
If bringing the Stanley Cup back to Boston means the Bruins have
supplied hockey at all levels with a much-needed shot in the arm,
I’m good with that. Does it mean that Boston has reclaimed
the title of Hockey Town? I honestly don’t know. Heck,
I’ve always thought it as a great hockey town, and a hockey
town to its core. I just want to see my daughter, and more kids at
every age level, get the chance to learn all the lessons this great
game has to teach.
If a few of them make it to the elite college level, or even the
National Hockey League, well that’s just a bonus. But it sure
would be fun to see a homegrown kid hoisting the Lord
Stanley’s Cup while wearing the Black & Gold,
wouldn’t it?
This article originally appeared in the August 2011 issue of
New England Hockey Journal.
Brion O’Connor can be reached at feedback@hockeyjournal.com