That would depend on who they are playing and how well the fans travel. I’ve been to all 3 games and there have been very few Caps fans in the Arena. Now in 05/06 when the Sabres and Canes played in the conference finals - it may have been a majority Sabres crowd. I drove down for the game and so did many others from Buffalo.
Canes just beat the Caps. Advance to play the Islanders.
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Double overtime win!!! Huge to defeat the defending champs in our first return to the playoffs in a decade!!!
Anything can happen now, let’s go!
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Congratulations Canes ! What a 7th game !
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Man - stayed up way too late to finish watching that game. Great game though and great win.
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Me too but glad I did. This is big for Raleigh. Fantastic! Well done Canes.
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After winning the Stanley Cup, can we move the arena downtown? Sorry, getting ahead of myself.
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Talked to someone behind the Canes watch parties over on Tucker Street. Very tough to pull off cause it’s usually short notice. He told me the Ale house will do round 2 but probably not after that.
If the Canes go deep, the city needs to pony up and do a city plaza watch party for every away game!
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The NHL has been an impediment to these watch parties in the past. They’ve prevented the Penguins from doing them for away games. Since Ale House was essentially doing them on their premise, the league might not have intervened but if the City tries to do them in a public place they could face the wrath of Bettman.
What’s the rationale behind that? Lower TV viewership numbers?
But wouldn’t the people at the watch party be watching it… on TV??
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Mostly also I assume they just like keeping with their Best Sport Worst League branding.
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But they don’t count as a rating point. It’s also could be something NBC isn’t cool with as the rights holder. Round 1 is also carried by local broadcasters but everything beyond is NBC exclusive so I would expect push back on any watch parties for away games.
How are ratings counted when sports bars show games? Seems like this would be a similar type of thing.
How many people can a typical sports bar hold opposed to a place like a city plaza ? Also how do you police sportsbars if you’re the NHL or a rights holder ? It’s much easier to target one large gathering with thousands of people, especially if you have leverage over a team that’s a member of your league or a city that is going to want future special events (draft, all star game, outdoor game etc)
Here’s a story from 2016 on watch parties. It looks like the NHL will allow one large watch party per series. They also allow and promote watch parties at local venues like sports bars because they can monetize it through sponsorship and cross promotion.
An argument could be made that it’s best to capitalize on the Canes returning to the playoffs to create more fans via large group watch parties but then you remember that this is a league run by dinosaurs.
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Yeah, sounds like TV viewership numbers drive ad revenue so anything that could reduce that, it’s natural to be against. It seems like the NHL could create a “viewing party package” (insert better name) and each city can “buy” the package which means to hold a viewing party like these, sponsors X, Y, Z need to be displayed like so, sponsors A, B, C, need this and that, etc.
They could also require headcounts which are reported upwards as part of the ad buys. I guess this just takes work which some people may not want to do. How lame of the NHL.
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Good points.
But as others have said. Seems like it would promote overall fan interest for the NHL which would be good for the league long-term. In particular for non-traditional hockey cities like Raleigh.
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Interesting. I actually watched the Capitals clinch the Stanley Cup last year at a big watch party in Bethesda, Maryland, not because I am a particularly big fan of hockey, or of the Capitals, but just because I happened to be stuck in Bethesda that night, and there is not really a whole lot to do in Bethesda. It was, however, a pretty fun experience getting to just enjoy the shared experience with a big crowd of people who were clearly very, very into this thing.
This was at a place called Bethesda Row, which is sort of like what Cameron Village would be like if it had vastly less parking and vastly more retail space instead (so like, if CV were vastly better than it is), so I don’t think the NHL was monetizing it. I had no idea that I was being such a lawless rebel attending a wildcat watch party!
The problem is, though that most of the time, the promised development around the stadium never actually materializes. Just Tuesday night, actually, HBO’s Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel aired an expose on District Detroit, the development that was supposed to spring up around the new Detroit Red Wings arena, but hasn’t. The Guardian also covered this really well back in October. In fact, so far the project has been a net deficit for jobs in the area.
But that’s hockey. What about baseball? Well, in 1992 Baltimore famously unveiled Camden Yards, and it revolutionized the way that baseball parks are built across the country. But it distinctly failed to revolutionize its surrounding neighborhood. Bloomberg wrote an article in 2013 (behind a paywall) which found that the number of jobs in the surrounding area had actually gone down since the stadium opened. The Baltimore Sun did a retrospective in 2017 that found that the ballpark didn’t really do much for the neighborhood. The Orioles’ EVP actually had a quote that made a great point, although not the way it was intended to: “If Camden Yards isn’t a great investment, then no sports facility is.” Indeed.
You can find a handful of cases where a stadium was built, and then a bunch of development later followed (Coors Field, National Park, DBAP), but they’re always in cities that saw a ton of revitalization throughout the city, including in areas far away from the ballpark, so it’s not always clear that the stadium actually caused the development. And those outlier cases are vastly outnumbered by examples like these where a ton of redevelopment was promised but never materialized.
I think the main difference between public transit stops, which really can and do spur development (just look at Union Station), and sports stadiums is that the universe of people and business that want to be situated close to a transit stop is much, much larger than the universe of people and businesses that want to be situated close to a sports stadium.
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