May 2* - U18 Domination?, Rock On Hockey, Next Frontier of Media Rights, Video Highlights
It's a Great Day for Hockey ... From Wolfsburg to Wilkes-Barre
STORIES:
U18 Domination?
Slap Shots
Why 80’s Rock Dominates
Community Is the Next Frontier of Media Rights
This is Us
ALSO:
Top SHL Playoff Scorers
SHL Final Game-1 Highlights (Video)
Liiga Playoffs (Video)
“Name the Logo” Answer
This Week’s Quiz Question
U18 Worlds Move to Elimination
(via Simmer)
Yes, tournament hockey is similar to the stock market in that “past performance does not guarantee future results”. But if the early going of this year’s Under-18 World Championship is any indication, Canada is on it’s way to a title game. Shane Wright and Mason McTavish both scored two goals as the Canadians finished atop Group A with a 5-2 win over Belarus. Playing four games in five days, the Canadians earlier defeated Sweden 12-1, Latvia 4-2, and Switzerland 7-0.
They’ll take on the Czech Republic of Group B in the 1 versus 4 crossover quarterfinal on Monday.
The only knock may be that Canada seems to have had an “easier path”. The group B triumvirate of Russia, Finland, and the United States were more competitive. Does that factor better prepare you for the next round or does harder hockey just help wear you out? Fortunately, teenagers are resilient.
All three have had doses of high-pressure hockey. How about these results: Russia 7, USA 6 in overtime, Finland 4, Russia 3 in a shoot-out, and USA 5, Finland 4 in overtime. When all the goals were totalled and the points settled, Finland finished on top of the group, Russia second, and the USA third.
Russians and Finns dominate the scorers table. Matkei Michkov leads the way for Russia with 9 goals and 2 assists in 4 games.
Linemate Nikita Chibrikov is next with 2 goals and 8 assists for 10 points. Finland’s Samu Tuomaala and Ville Koivunen have 9 points each, both tied with Russia’s Danila Yurov for third.
The tournament runs through the medal matches on Thursday, May 6.
Slap Shots:
The Women’s World Championship in 2021 has been re-scheduled for August 20-31 at a site in Canada to be determined, it was announced Friday by the IIHF. The government of Nova Scotia cancelled the original dates of May 6-16 in Halifax and Truro due to Covid-19 concerns.
Kladno, a team owned by Jaromir Jagr, and for whom he plays, beat Jihlava 5-2 in Game-7 of their series this week and earned promotion back to the Czech Extraliga. Jagr started his playing career in Klado in 1988. This season he played 19 regular season and 16 playoff games this season. Jagr, who turned 49 in February, says he will be back to play for Kladno for his 34th professional season.
"I cannot quit. We have an [outdoor game] sold out," Jagr told nhl.com. "But honestly, I know I have to be much better. I want to get better to help my team. … What I know for sure is that I will do anything possible to help my club."
Denmark made hockey history this week by beating Sweden 3-2 in Malmö, Sweden in a preparation game for the upcoming Men’s World Championship in Latvia. Not only was it their first win over their neighbours, Denmark had never even managed to take a point in a game against Sweden. Nicolai Meyer, who played for Pori Ässät in the Finnish Liiga, scored the game-winner early in the third period on the powerplay.
They’re Playing Our Song: Might as Well Jump
(Via Risto)
When the Chicago Blackhawks beat the Vancouver Canucks in the 2009 Western Conference Semifinal, Mats Sundin sat on the bench and hummed along “Chelsea Dagger,” the Hawks’ goal song.
Maybe it was the sudden shock of his realizing that not only was the Canucks’ playoff run over, so was his career.
Or maybe “Chelsea Dagger” is simply a hell of a catchy song.
“Music is such a big part of hockey games that music has been played at games even during the pandemic when there have been no fans in the stands,” says Kaj Ahlsved, a Finnish researcher who wrote his PhD thesis at Åbo Akademi’s musicology department on music in sports events. Hockey was one of the sports he studied.
“You can’t think of a hockey game without music,” he told Hockey Wanderlüst over Zoom.
"The first time I played [in Las Vegas] when I was [a Canadien], I texted my wife after the game about how this barn is crazy, the fans are out of control … the music… and the players feed off of that."
– Max Pacioretty, Las Vegas Golden Knights, on The Ray & Dregs Hockey Podcast
Music has been part of sports and hockey games for … ever. Back in the 19th century, bands played at gymnastics and swimming competitions, and the organ made its way to hockey games at the beginning of the 20th century. The Chicago Stadium, where the Hawks played, opened in 1929 featuring one of the largest organs of its time, designed to be used at a circus, hockey games, boxing matches, bicycle races and other sports events, writes Matthew Mihalka in From Town Hall to 'Play Ball!': The Origins of the Baseball Organ.
The first organists came from the silent movie world with the skills to quickly find a suitable tune to comment to the action on the ice.
“We haven’t had the organ tradition in Europe, even though there were some attempts to import it in the 1970s. It just didn’t take,” says Ahlsved, who’s currently doing more research at Research Association Suoni.
Music played at the Carolina Hurricanes games last season
One possible reason is the European tradition of fans singing and chanting in the stands, with the crowd creating a lot of the sound inside the arena.
“Ideally, the music played in the arena makes the fans happy, so that they’ll clap their hands and sing. Recorded music isn’t simply enough to do that on its own. Now, there are differences in the fan cultures in North America and Europe,” he explains.
“The songs the DJ plays and the songs the fans sing aren’t the same but the DJ can help fans get into it by playing songs they consider ‘theirs,’ whether they’re classics that always get played, or their goal songs, so that they get both the avid fans and the more neutral spectators engaged,” he says.
Music creates drama, and it builds the story arc from the moment the fans arrive at the arena and wait to get in, to getting their snacks, to finding their seats, to warm-ups, building up energy only to release it when the heroes step on the ice.
The most popular songs, still today, are often from the Eighties, but according to Ahlsved, 80s rock songs don’t have a special hockey ingredient that would make them better than others that have a similar structure.
“The songs that seem to work best often have strong riffs and get right into it. The DJ only has a short window to work in, maybe 20-25 seconds, before the puck gets dropped again,” Ahlsved says.
“Back when Avicii was at the height of his popularity, his songs were played at all games everywhere,” he adds.
The sound landscape inside the arenas follow the times and take their cues from, for example, video games.
“Artists love to get their music on video games. If it gets played inside a game, it will also get played live in the arena. It doesn’t work the other way around,” Ahlsved says.
One of the lucky ones is Franz Ferdinand whose “Take Me Out” was part of NHL 2005 and Madden NFL 2005. It’s the band’s most popular song on Spotify, with almost 500 million streams. In comparison, their second most popular song has a tenth of that.
But music also becomes part of tradition. In Helsinki, IFK fans expect to hear Bill Misener’s “Let’s Play Hockey,” the 1976 Canada Cup theme song the Finnish team took as their own in the late 1970s, an audio nod to Carl Brewer’s legacy. Across town, Jokerit still play Bill Conti’s “Gonna Fly Now”, which they adopted in the late 1980s when the underdog team clawed their way back to the top division. The team has since won several titles and joined the KHL, but they still play the music from Rocky.
“Now that music has become so mobile, it’s easy to forget that back in the 1980s, songs were copied onto cassette tapes and that was it. That was the tape that was played and the songs just stuck in our heads,” Ahlsved says.
“They’re almost a part of the show. Fans expect to hear “Final Countdown”, “Jump,” “We Will Rock You” or “Thunderstruck,” Ahlsved says. “Players come and go, but the music stays,” he adds with a laugh.
While music is played even in empty arenas, and even though home teams seem to have a home-ice advantage even in empty arenas, Ahlsved doesn’t think music plays into it.
“I think the recorded music has a minimal impact, but the home team does have the advantage of having the power to choose the music,” he says.
If they choose it right, even the losing team’s players hum along. They’re literally in their opponents’ heads.
Community Is the Next Frontier of Media Rights
(via Ken)
It was another notable week at NHL HQ as the league topped off its freshly minted seven-year, $400 million US broadcast agreement with ESPN, adding Turner Sports and its owned networks (including TBS and TNT, along with HBO Max for streaming) for an additional package reportedly valued at or near $225 million for the same seven-year period.
Net-net the NHL has more than doubled the value of its US rights from its NBC agreement which expires at the conclusion of this season. The deal delivers important revenue growth to mitigate the losses of the pandemic, and positions the league for greater US exposure and fan development as it expands to 32 markets. Friday, the Seattle Kraken officially became a member of the National Hockey League and begins playing in the fall.
Media rights will continue to be a primary value driver for sports properties for the foreseeable future, but rights inflation, once a safe bet for the NHL and others to bank on, is now far less certain as we look to the future.
Yes, in today’s media marketplace, “live” still stands apart in a sea of available content, but questions arise. What does the future of sports content consumption look like as younger fans consume the bulk of their sports diet on social media in micro-content form? How will multi-channel digital options further diffuse audiences?
The best hedge from the sea-change coming is an engaged digital community, an increasingly essential media strategy currently under-leveraged by most hockey clubs. These communities of fans on owned and operated (O+O) platforms might someday lead to comparable values to those of live rights today.
The trends and potential for value creation in the “attention economy” is already evident in music, fashion and culture and will soon accelerate across the sports landscape. Clubs have become increasingly clever in using social channels and have built content strategies around unique access to players and other exclusive content. Super fans, “influencers” and others use Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and Instagram.
For far too long, clubs have fueled social interaction and delivered content on these third-party platforms assuming the results equaled valuable engagement. While many clubs boast considerable social media followings in the hundreds of thousands or even millions, the avidity of these followers is questionable at best and first-party data ends up in a black hole, left to be mined by the social media giants.
If you take a closer look at these trends, engagement rates across the board on social platforms are largely dismal even as sports organizations continue creating and marketing in the space. Average view times are typically below ten seconds.
Drawing fans out of an endless loop of social media content and maintaining live broadcast audience levels will become increasingly challenging. In the daily fight for eyeballs, clubs need to continue prioritizing their O+O digital strategies in an effort to migrate audiences from social and build team communities with renewed focus on fresh club apps and web platforms.
Over time these platforms will achieve deeper fan engagement and thereby even greater importance as the backbone of club marketing, delivering a new generation of direct-to-consumer media rights values.
Who Be We?
Getting to know the founders of Hockey Wanderlüst.
Rob Simpson, in recent years for TSN and Sportsnet, “Simmer” has done TV play-by-play of Paralympic sledge hockey, the CWHL (women’s) championship, university national championships, major juniors and the Allan Cup.
Ken Yaffe, before joining the NHL in 1993, “Yaf” worked in athlete management under famed sports agent David Falk, who represented Michael Jordan among other NBA greats.
Risto “Puckarinen” Pakarinen writes this newsletter in Sollentuna, Sweden, home of Mats Sundin, Patric Hörnqvist, and Rickard Rakell.
Features:
1. Top SHL Playoff Scorers:
Joakim Lindström - Skellefteå - 12 games, 10 points, 4 goals, 2 game winners.
Rodrigo Abols - Örebro - 3 goals, 10 points in 9 games. Average 20:14 in ice time.
Simon Ryfors - Rögle - 8 of his 9 points are assists, in 10 games played.
Per Åslund - Färjestad - Best scoring percentage, with 8 points in 6 games played.
Richard Gynge - Växjö - 4 goals and 4 assists in 10 games played for top seed.
2. SHL Final – Game 1 Highlights
When the Detroit Red Wings first round pick in 2019, Moritz Seider, 20, tied Game 1 of the SHL final with a misfired backhander in the second period, he also made club history. It was Rögle’s first goal in an SHL final.
However, regular-season champions, Växjö, won the game 2-1, with goals from Richard Gynge and Pontus Holmberg (the Toronto Maple Leafs sixth round pick in 2018).
Game 2 will be played on Monday.
3. Liiga Playoffs
In Finland, the semifinal teams finished 1-through-4 in the regular season.
Helsinki IFK (2) beat Turku TPS (3) in the first game, but TPS got a split from IFK’s first two home games when they eked out an OT win in Game 2.
The series between Rauma Lukko (1) and Tampere Tappara (4) is also tied after two games. Semifinal series are played in a best-of-five format. Both Game-3’s will be played on Sunday (today).
“Name the Logo” Answer
This is the logo for SAPA Fehervar, a team based in the central Hungarian town of Székesfehérvár, that plays in the Austrian Hockey League. Founded in 1960 as an amateur club, the organization turned professional in the late 1970s and dominated the Hungarian League in the new millennium. They joined stiffer competition starting in 2007 - presently the league that features 8 teams in Austria, one in Italy, one in Slovakia and Fehervar. Until 2012 they also continued to play for the Hungarian championship. Their second logo is a more traditional castle upon a shield.
5. The Sunday quiz:
What is the record for the number of Finns seeing action in a single NHL game?
See you on Thursday.
Enjoy the hockey action !