The Vig

A few weeks back, Dylan B. and I snuck in to the Rose Garden club level to see how the other half lived. We did it solely for research purposes and certainly don’t condone crashing others parties.

I believe it was during the second period of that night, as the attendant delivered Dylan and me our third helping of leg of lamb, MC Hammer’s “2 Legit 2 Quit” came over the PA system.

“I wonder what it would cost,” I mused, “to bring Hammer up for a performance.”

Dylan didn’t take the bait. He was busy with the wine list.

“I bet he could be had for somewhere in the low five-figures.”

“That’s five-figures more than I’d pay for him,” he replied as he settled on a 2006 Quivira red zin.

“But think of it, we could fly him up a couple times during the playoffs. You know, when the team needed an extra oomph! He could be our Kate Smith!”

Dylan was not amused.

“Fine then. Who should be our Kate Smith?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“I’ve got it!” I said. “Storm Large!”

With that, Dylan bolted upright. His eyes alight.

“Good God!” he exclaimed, spitting asparagus tips into the 100 level, “that’s genius! Imagine Storm coming out and singing God Bless America before a big game. THAT would be huge!”

Indeed it would be. And likely for a fraction of what it would cost to bring Hammer up just one time. Kids, I’m telling you, this must happen. At least once. Just show Storm this and let her take it from there.

The O says Luca Sbisa will be in uniform for the Hawks next Friday.  That means he’ll be in the line-up next Saturday against Seattle in the Rose Garden.  Here I thought we wouldn’t see him until after the Olympics.

Get your tickets now, kids.  The Winterhawks season just got really interesting.

I attended my first Winterhawks game in months tonight.  As Dylan B pointed out many times, there’s been a lot of changes while I was gone.  Wish I still had my media packet so I could go through all of them real quick.  Needless to say, there were some guys on the ice tonight that I don’t think I’d ever seen.  Guys with names like Doyle and Swenson and Pouliot(!).  And…well…that’s about it, isn’t it?

I told Dylan seeing the guys in white play so well was taking some getting used to.  The passing was especially noticeable.  No longer are guys panicking while trying to get the puck out of the defensive zone.  Passes leave sticks now with purpose and end up on the tape of teammates instead of flying into space.  And those teammates are found at full speed, charging up-ice.  I tell you, it’s a thing of beauty.  A distracting thing of beauty.  There were only a few players I really noticed on the ice tonight, and really not for any particular reason.  I’ll get to that in a moment.

The only real down note of the whole evening was attendance.  The official number was 1807.  I would guess there were half that.  As Dylan and I pondered the fate of the 50-50 game, he mentioned perhaps the Hawks were making up the difference to the player education fund.  I then mentioned Gallacher wasn’t running a charity out there.  Then, pondering the attendance, I said maybe he is.  Maybe they’re making it up on Fridays and Saturdays, but wow.  Dylan remarked he remembered when midweek games like this would have twice the attendance.  I do too.

Thoughts:

Carruth: The goaltenders each earned two of tonight’s three stars of the game.  An inspired choice, if you ask me.  Inspired by what, I don’t know.  But that’s one man’s opinion.  Carruth, I believe, is the kid they brought up to spell Curtis when he went down and Mucha wasn’t in town?  Or maybe it was Hamilton?  Like I said, I’ve been away too long.  The point is, he looked fine and stayed out of trouble.  But the #2 star?  I dunno about that.

Gabriel: “Quit picking on my Ollie!” exclaimed the lady in front of me during the second period.  Indeed.  With goals in three of the last four games, the guy is on fire.  I’m probably the only one who still thinks of him as Scott’s younger brother.  Unfair?  Absolutely.  I need to move on.

Pouliot: With the number 51 on his back, he’s going to get noticed when he hits the ice.  You know who he is.  And his play backs it up.  He’s gonna be fun to watch.

Jordan: I was waaaay too distracted with my iPhone tonight to be paying that close of attention.  Either that or Jordan has suddenly gone into stealth mode on the ice.  I used to notice him every shift he was out there.  Perhaps there’s too much other stuff happening now that I’m not always looking to be entertained by Employee 19 21 55.  He delivered a hit in the second period that had me scrambling to email his sister, a regular visitor to this site.  He remains both of our favorite player.

Imagine for a moment you’re Blazer GM Kevin Pritchard.  The phone rings.  It’s Spurs GM RC Buford and has he got a deal for you.  He’ll send you the retiring Tim Duncan (remember…we’re imagining) in exchange for Batum, Fernandez, and Bayless.  AND, because he’s in such a good mood, Buford will even swap first round picks with you, giving the Blazers a chance to get into the next draft’s lottery.

The downside of this scenario is you’re only renting Duncan for a half a season and you’re giving up a couple of “future” prospects to get the deal done.  On the plus-side, you’re getting a future hall-of-famer who can still play and who might be able to lead this team to a championship this season.  If you’re Kevin Pritchard, what do you do?

I know what the real Kevin Pritchard would do.  He’d crap his pants.  And then say no.  He loves his guys and he (along with his owner) doesn’t want to make another mistake along the lines of the Jermaine O’Neal deal.  So he stands pat.

Winterhawks (one word) GM Mike Johnston has a lot of the same problems Pritchard has.  He’s got some serious young talent that a lot of folks would no doubt like to have.  After years of neglect under previous ownership, the Hawks are revitalized and once again a force in the Western Hockey League.  It seems strange to say it, but I think it’s true.  The Hawks are on the move.  And they’ll only be better next season.

So after declaring last week that he’d likely stand-pat at this weekends trade deadline, Johnston went out and made a move that even got Dylan B. excited.   The Winterhawks traded 17-year-old defenseman Daniel Johnston, 18-year-old forward Jacob Berglund and their first round pick in the 2010 Import Draft to Lethbridge for 19-year-old defenseman Luca Sbisa, Lethbridge’s first round pick in the 2010 CHL Import Draft and a fifth round pick in the 2011 WHL Bantam Draft.  Ummm….wow.

Why wow?  Try this on for size.  In the WHL, youth is king.  A team’s roster is made-up of mainly 17-to-19-year-olds, with a few 16s thrown in.  A team may have no more than three 20-year-olds.  So in general, you don’t give up younger players for older ones, unless you’re making a playoff run.  So there’s that.

What makes this even more daring is the fact that Sbisa will only be available to play in six regular season games for the Hawks.  That’s it.  Why?  Because he’s on the Swiss Olympic team and he’ll be playing with them in Vancouver next month.  There’s a chance he could be back as a 20 next season, but given the fact hes a first-round pick of the Philadelphia Flyers, he’ll likely be playing there next season and not here.

So the Hawks get six games and the playoffs in exchange for some of its youth.  Ballsy.  This is the sort of stuff we were promised under the previous regime but never came to pass.  It’s also the sort of move we keep waiting for Pritchard to make, but he hasn’t yet.

I’ve been away from the Hawks for far too long this season.  As you’ve read, I’ve had some other stuff going on.  This ends when they return home on the 20th.  You might want to wander down to the Rose Quarter and check them out yourself.  I’m telling you.  Something big is coming.

I got the news yesterday as I sat at Big Al’s watching Matt Leinart play his way out of the NFL; the Winterhawks had traded away the guy Mike Williamson once called the team’s biggest leader.  Were it not for the fact a goaltender cannot wear the captain’s C, Kurtis Mucha likely would have been a third year captain this season.  Of this I have no doubt.

Like Dylan B., I was initially shocked by how little the team got in return for him.  I was also shocked at what a crappy team he’d been sent to.  As soon as I read Steve Brandon’s article, the whole thing made a lot more sense to me.

Here are some facts Hawks fans need to take to heart:

1. The Portland Winterhawks aren’t going to win a championship this season.  They will consider the season a fortunate success if they get through the first-round of the playoffs.
2. The Western Hockey League is a developmental league.  That is to say, the primary purpose of each organization is to prepare players for the next level of hockey.  Players, especially players with skill, should seek every opportunity to maximize and showcase their skills.
3. Teams in the Wertern Hockey League who are building toward a championship in two or three seasons understand ice time is precious, especially for younger players who are developing.  Older players can only clog things up.

Let’s be honest.  We all love Mucha.  He poured his heart and soul out for an organization that had no business asking anything from him.  But for whatever reason he stuck it out.  I have no idea why.  Yes, things are finally headed in the right direction here, and that’s a fantastic thing.  That said, as fantastic as he is, this year’s Winterhawks team isn’t going anywhere with him.  Understanding that, the team needs to free up his position in order to develop a younger net minder with the hope that in two years he can be the guy to bring home a championship.  Will that be Carruth?  Hamilton?  Someone else?  Who knows.  The point is the team needs to start down that path now.

Does it smart for Mucha?  Yes.  I think he wanted to finish what he started in Portland, and  I don’t blame him one bit.  The simple fact is he wasn’t going to play here as much as he needs to.  He needs to develop and he wasn’t going to be able to here.  Maybe he can in Kamloops.  Perhaps he’ll get traded to a contender beyond that.  There are opportunities out there.  There aren’t any in Portland.

It was a coin-toss on whether to attend last night’s game.  Those who were there may have noted my absence.  As Dylan B. pointed out on his Twitter feed a week ago, the Hawks didn’t necessarily need to announce their attendance for the Brandon game, they could have just had everyone introduce themselves over the PA.  Last night wasn’t much better.

A friend asked me last night why I wasn’t at the game.  I told her the same story I wrote here last year.  There was a time not so long ago when I would have come to a mid-week game like last night just to see what happened.  I think those days are over.  The Hawks might win, they might lose, but if no one’s there, what’s the point?

Dylan B. got in a gentle dig at this reporter earlier this evening.  It takes real effort for me to be sly sometimes.  Dylan makes it an art.  I’ll take the bait.

Who exactly have the Winterhawks alienated with their price increase?  The same dead-enders who were there every night of the Goldsmith-era were sitting in their same seats last night, and paying 30-percent more.  From Piper’s perspective, what wasn’t to like?  Especially on a Wednesday night in November when the entire town is discussing the pending Blazer implosion.  Piper’ll take what he can get mid-week.

Now, this will be the first Saturday home game in almost a month.  Hopefully the Hawks have been pounding the phones to get folks out there.  They’re in the Rose Garden on a Saturday night against Seattle.  It should be an easy sell, but who knows.  This thing isn’t going to get rebuilt in a day.

In other news, the team is beginning to make Goldsmithian noises about renovating the Coliseum.  A five or six-thousand seat arena inside the Glass Palace would definitely be a community asset.  I wonder how much further this idea would get if someone were to jump on the Green Line and spend an afternoon talking to the folks at PSU about joining in.  The Vikings are in serious needs of new digs; if they were to join together and wrap the whole thing in a big green bow, I bet they could get something done.  It would be a win-win.  Goldsmith never pursued this.  Perhaps Piper will.

Alternatively, I had an enlightening conversation a few weeks back with a longtime observer of the local sports scene.  The subject turned to the new Beaver baseball stadium.  I mentioned they were talking about building the thing at the Clark County fairgrounds in Ridgefield.  I told him I live in Vancouver and Ridgefield was too far to drive to watch a game.  When I mentioned that, his eyes lit up.

“If the Beavers moved there, they would own Vancouver,” he said.  They would no longer be competing with all the other noise in Portland, they could just concentrate on that one location.  He argued it’s too difficult to market minor league sports in Portland.  A move to the suburbs would solve that.

It’s an interesting point and one I hadn’t considered.  This all works for the Hawks as well.  The dead-enders will all gladly make the drive to Beaverton or Vancouver to watch the team.  So they’re really not going to lose anything.  If anything, the team will gain.

Beaverton has its own paper, which you don’t read unless you happen to live there.  We have one up here in The Couv as well.  Either paper would be more than happy to put “their” team on the front page.  And locals would love to go see “their” team.  This theory is working all over the Puget Sound right now with both baseball and hockey.  That one conversation turned my thinking completely around on minor league sports and the suburbs.

Another friend took it one step further suggesting sticking an NHL arena somewhere in Washington County and booking the heck out of it.  The Blazers, for whatever reason, don’t seem at all interested in maximizing the Rose Garden.  They’ve missed out on dozens of shows (AC/DC, Depeche Mode, and Fleetwood Mac…as well as the seemingly never-ending Springsteen tour, just to name a few) that Mike Scanlon would have booked in a heartbeat.  A properly run big-league venue somewhere out Highway 26 could definitely work.

I was too busy watching the Cardinals take a giant step toward their 5-11 destiny to make it down to the Hawks game tonight.  The Hawks won 5-1, but that doesn’t seem to be the story of the night.

Dylan B., take it away!

I have to admit, I was on the fence about attending tonight’s Winterhawks game.  A friend of mine and I had been planning on another activity tonight, but at the last moment she decided she’s like to check out the hockey fights instead.  And boy, is she glad she did.  And so am I.  This “new” version of the Hawks is night and day different from the teams we’d become accustomed to during the Goldsmith era.  The difference was noticeable almost immediately.

I wish I could remember who it was in the first period who took the puck out of the defensive zone and skated it through traffic and into the attacking zone, by himself.  I just sat there with my mouth agape.  I turned to John G. and mentioned it’s been a while since we were able to skate the puck out of our own zone.  Yes sir, this is a new team.

The off-ice stuff had some notable changes as well.  The Hawks front office has put a lot of thought and effort into the game “experience” and it shows.  Gone are the prize blimp and accompanying roving horde of grade schoolers chasing after it through the arena bowl.  Gone too is the Power Squad.

Sidebar: After reading their posts on the O-Live board and one (since erased) Tweet, I’m going to say their departure was for the best.  Scooter, as usual, sets the bar for how to deal with a bitter separation with class and dignity…mostly by a) saying nothing but nice things about his former employer and b) shutting up about the rest.  The former Power Squaders would do well to follow his lead.  It’s been almost a year, ladies.  It’s time to give it a rest.

I’m going to try and not dwell too much on the new PA announcer.  John G. was grateful they’d turned him down some.  But other than that…  Yeesh.  He’s still figuring out the gig, I suppose, but I really expected more.  There’s some serious talent around town.  Talent who would have killed for this sort of opportunity.  Instead they turned it over to this guy.

Dylan B. announced after the pre-season game that he’d done a 180 on the dance team.  I’m not so sure.  Again, it’s a work-in-progress.  I don’t know that confining them to the corners at ice level is the best place for them.  I always figured they’d be up at the main concourse.  But who knows.  We’ll see where they stick em in the Rose Garden.

Update: Dylan B. writes in to say his 180-thing was a joke.  Evidently the cheerleaders didn’t attend the pre-season game.  Which is another reason things were much better that night next door.  See, the UFC has the Octagon Girls.  And…well…Arianny and I would make quite a couple.  Me and Amelia?  Not so much.

My friend kept asking who was in charge of the team marketing.  She wanted to give them a piece of her mind.  Look, the marketing folks are doing fine.  They’ve got ads on TV.  They’re getting faces out into the community.  And they’ve finally got a team worthy of putting in the papers.  It’s going to happen.  People are going to start coming.  For the first time in a long time, I thought tonight’s crowd felt bigger than it was.  Good things are on the way.

Thoughts:

Mucha: John G. asked after the game how many games Mucha would win if he only faces 20 shots in a night.  The question perplexed me at first.  I knew he was being complimentary, but what in the hell does that mean?  Then I figured it out.  He’s thinking along the same lines I was mid-way through the third period.  There were nights last year when he’d get peppered with well over 50 shots in a night.  Certainly he never saw less than 35.  Tonight he saw 18.  Yeah, it’s a lot easier to be the goaltender when you’re facing half the shots you did last year.

Rutkowski: Got pants a couple times skating in his own zone.  I love the kid, but he’s got to start knocking some people off the puck rather than just letting guys skate by him with it.

Johnston: Stud.  It’s coming back to me why we’re just now seeing him.

Niederreiter: John G. couldn’t quit saying good things about him.   I barely noticed him, choosing instead to try and figure out why kids were wearing such odd numbers.  37?  Are you freaking kidding me?  But then it happened.  He was skating the puck into the offensive zone and as he hits the blue line, a Seattle player comes out to challenge him.  Niederreiter throws a forearm that sends the kid flying while still maintaining possession.  I mean…you can do that?  What a revelation.  He’s an early favorite to become my favorite player on the team.

Jordan: +1 with 0 PIM.  A weird line for the guy who’s currently my favorite player.  But #55?  Any particular reason?

My Cardinals play the Sunday night game tomorrow, so I’ll be absent.  Hopefully it’s one of the few games I miss this season.  It’s been a while since I’ve been excited about hockey.  I can’t wait.

The press release announcing the departure of Winterhawks public address announcer Dan Folwick wasn’t in my inbox five minutes before I’d hit reply and inquired as to how one would apply for the vacant position.  Like a lot of folks, I’d sat by quietly whenever someone would fill in for Dan and thought to myself “I can do better than this”.  But…it was Dan’s job until Dan didn’t want it anymore, and I wasn’t going to go knocking on doors trying to replace him.  Like every other Hawk fan, Dan’s was “The Voice” and I didn’t want to see him go.

But his time came and I wanted to pounce, if for no other reason than to say “I gave it my best shot.”

After a few emails back-and-forth, we agreed to get together in the first week of August.  The Hawks forwarded me a script to practice with and asked me to add some flair to a couple of different spots.  So I got together one Saturday afternoon wit local radio personality Rick Emerson and we reworked the script.  What we came up with, I thought, was fresh and rousing.  We even slipped in a nod to the Portland Timbers Army, which I thought would be fun.

I spent the next several days working on it in the shower and in the car.  Getting my inflections right.  Getting my voice right.  When the day finally came, I thought I was completely prepared.

They brought me back into the Hawks’ lockerroom where they had a microphone and amp set-up, as well as a video camera.  They told me they were looking at several folks and they’d be reviewing the tape with Doug Piper.  As the tape rolled, I hit everything just as I’d hoped.  My voice and inflection were both strong. I did the team introductions flawlessly.  Even got in that nod to the TA.  Everything.

The three folks in the room commented afterward that they really liked my rewrite.  They then explained the rest of the audition process.  They would call back the folks they wanted to see again, and they’d have them audtion live during pre-season action, to see how they did in front of a crowd.

I was pumped.  Win or lose, I’d done my best and din’t feel like there was anything else I could have done.  Now I just had to wait for the email letting me know when the next audtion would be.  They assured me it would be by the end of the following week or the beginning of the next.

So I waited.  And I waited.  The next week came and went.  As did the one after that.  I emailed my contact and asked what was up, and never heard back.  After three weeks, I was beginning to get the message that I hadn’t been selected.  I emailed again to check in, and again…silence.  Perfect.

The pre-season intra-squad tournament happened at the end of August.  I went to one of the games and didn’t see anyone “trying out”.  Nor did I hear about any of it on-line.  The pre-season game was played on the 28th while I was next door at the UFC event.  It would seem the Hawks have settled on their new voice.  The guy seems to embody Dylan’s worst fears.  Whatever.  It’s what they want, and that’s fine.  I’m honestly not upset they chose to hire someone else.  What I am upset about is the lack of communication and the fact they seem to have wasted a lot of people’s time.  If, as I sort of believed all along, they already had their new guy ready to go before they let Dan go, why then go through the trouble of bringing people in to “audition”?  What was the point of that?  I’ve no idea.

Shortly after the pre-season game, I traded emails with another member of the Hawks front-office.  We talked a little about the new PA guy and I asked why no one ever followed-up with me after the audition.  My answer came a few days later.

Thank you for your interest in the position of PA Announcer for the Portland Winterhawks. I would like to inform you that the position has been filled and I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.

Classy.

I’d like to say I went into this with low expectations.  I’d be lying.  I really thought I had a shot at this gig.  And I would have loved every moment of it.  Looking back, I probably should have been more upfront with the Hawks and found out if the position was really open or if they’d already made a selection.  If they had, I really wish the Hawks would have been straightforward with me.  There would have been absolutely no hard feelings on my part.  Instead we have this.

The Hawks front-office is better than this.  I know they are.  But I can’t help but come away very disappointed.

I’ll admit I was a little taken aback by the Winterhawks season ticket announcement last week.  A raise in prices, especially “in this economy”, is kind of a shock to the system.  But after a few seconds, I got kind of excited.

Look, the Winter Hawks Winterhawks have been run like a family business for far too long.  They’ve lost money nearly every season since they won the Memorial Cup in 1998 and have done little to correct the problem.  Oh sure, a few playoff runs helped with the bottom line, but even that just slowed the hemmorage.  It never stopped it.  When the sale to the J³ group went through in 2005, there were whispers that had they not come in, the Hawks might well have folded.  And there’s no doubt in my mind that had Gallacher not come in last season, the Hawks wouldn’t have finished the season.  Or at the very least, they would have been taken over by the league just as the NHL had taken over the Phoenix Coyotes.  It couldn’t continue.

The new guys took their time last season figuring out exactly what it was they’d purchased.  They let some folks go and kept others around.  They did some nice things for the players like getting the XBox and plasma TV, doing away with cheap buffet dinners on the road.  That sort of thing.  And they brought in a new strength and conditioning coach.

Sidebar:  I’ve had a media pass for the last couple of years.  I hope they extend the priveledge to me again this season.  We shall see how that goes.  Anyway, I mention this because last season there were a couple of times I walked into either the Rose Garden or the Coliseum and I would find the entire team engaged in flexibility drills led by Rich Campbell.  I never saw this under Innes.  Maybe it was done, but I never saw it.  Particularly close to gametime.  Some folks have hailed Innes’ move to Tri-Cities.  Along with everyone else, I wish him the best.  But as was pointed out in the O-Live forum, there may have been a reason the Hawks were losing so many man games to injury.  We shall see.  End Sidebar.

Upgrading the franchise isn’t going to come cheap.  Not when you have big money in other cities doing big things.  You need to create an atmosphere that high school kids want to be a part of, and you need to do the same for the paying public.  And lets face it, under J³, no one wanted to be a part of it.  Kids had to have been turned off by what they were seeing in the front office.  And the public showed how little they cared by not showing up.  And when the public did show up, the regulars could hardly hide their distaste.  That’s some way to grow the fan base, huh?

So the franchise is doing what it has to do.  It’s raising prices so they can at least break even.  It’s giving the most vocal complainers, the season ticket holders, their own special sections so they won’t have to be bothered by thundersticks or kids running around when they shouldn’t.  They get to have their little hockey library with extra ushers to enforce the rules.  How very nice for them.  I wonder how many will take invitation and how many will tell the Hawks they prefer their old seats.  Hey, the Hawks tried to compromise.  If you don’t take the offer, don’t complain.

Back toward the end of the Patterson era, the Blazers made kind of a big deal about signing Joel Przybilla.  The team dragged the media down to the Portland waterfront and made them eat bad buffet food and watch Przy jet around the Willamette on a jet boat.  The media had a field day with that, calling it a desperate stunt by a desperate organization.  To me though it sounded exactly the right note.  It said the Blazers were done running around in secret.  they were done staring at their shoes as they tried to overcome the Jail Blazer era.  They were going to start taing some PR swings and they were going to change their culture.  It started with that dumb media stunt that the media didnt recognie at the time.  Now looking back, it’s generally acknowledged that’s when the Blazers fortunes started turning around.  That was the same draft when they passed on Adam Morrison and took Aldridge and Roy.  It all paid off pretty quickly.

These same moves are going to start paying off for Gallacher.  This team isn’t that far away from the playoffs and may be a year further from making some serious noise withing the league.  Add a little recruiting magic, and suddenly people are going to want to be a part of this.  Big time.  Yes, its up to the front office to perform.  I have every confidence they will.  It will be up to the fans to hold up their end of the bargain.  These aren’t going to be your fathers Winterhawks.  Those days are over.  The choice now is whether you want to be a part of this or whether you’re going to find something better to do.  I know which way I’m going.

Post Script:  Oh…I couldn’t figure out how to work in Dylan B.  So here you go.  As usual, he speaks truth.