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(01-04-2017 03:21 PM)ODU2K1 Wrote:  

(01-04-2017 02:22 PM)Cyniclone Wrote:  Hockey has evolved into a baseball-style minor-league system, and on top of those issues, the Admirals were stuck with an absentee owner some 2,000 miles away that couldn't divest of them fast enough and almost certainly will pull their affiliation at the first available opportunity. The ECHL they're in now bears little resemblance to the ECHL of the Hampton Roads Admirals' glory days — for starters, while they had a player agreement with the Capitals, player development for the next level was their only reason to exist, and the team was built for success at that level (and if an Olaf Kolzig or Patrick Lalime came out of it, hey, so much the better). Plus they had red-hot rivalries with a bunch of regional teams, and a blue-hot one with the Richmond Renegades. Now the Admirals are playing AA-level hockey with no natural rivals and for a parent club that tolerates their existence at best. It's a sad state of affairs, but when you consider that hockey in the Mid-Atlantic has eroded greatly in the past 20 years (only one minor-league team in Virginia, only two in North Carolina, and the Carolina Hurricanes are constantly subject to relocation chatter), maybe it's an inevitable close to this particular chapter of Hampton Roads sports.

The Ads may be better off next year when Edmonton rolls out of town and a new parent club comes in and the new owners having a full offseason to do things. The biggest error they made after the forced drop to the ECHL was not adjusting ticket prices to reflect the lower quality of play. My family had season tickets from 1990/90-2014/15. We dropped them after the move down to the ECHL due to the high ticket cost. My season tickets would have dropped $50. That reflected the reduced number of games at Scope rather than the drop in quality of play. The Ads are quick to beat their chests about how their ticket prices are in the lower third of the ECHL. While this is correct it is ludicrous to expect people to pay the same for ECHL hockey that they were paying for AHL hockey. Hampton Roads can be a successful hockey market if marketed properly. Sadly, it has not been marketed properly here in a while.

Hockey in the 90s was lightning in a bottle—the sport was quickly gaining in mainstream acceptance outside of its traditional markets, and it had been years since anyone tried to put a team in Virginia. Plus the play was a lot rougher, more fights, more acrimony—which compelled fans to stick around once the new sport smell wore off. The addition of nearby teams and the development of ugly rivalries, obviously including Richmond but also Roanoke, Greensboro and even Wheeling, helped that along.

Moving up to AHL was a blessing and a curse—it was clearly a level up in competition but at the expense of those teams that Admirals fans loved to hate. And while the play was better, it was also cleaner, so it wasn't as engaging as the more violent ECHL, and that combined with the higher prices probably drove those fans away. But if they didn't move up, the ECHL would have still decomposed around it; staying wouldn't have ensured Richmond or Roanoke's existence.

Now they're effectively forced into an ECHL that ends up being the worst of both worlds: still no rivals, but a lower level of play that nonetheless isn't quite the same as 90s ECHL. The AHL wasn't perfect for the Admirals, but it'd still be better than what we've got now.

(Hmmm ... it almost seems like this lesson could apply to another sports entity in the area ...)

I hope you're right in that the new owner and an affiliation with a more engaged parent club will help, but they're going to have a long road ahead. They're fighting a battle on two fronts: hurt feelings and mistrust among the current and former fans, apathy among everyone else. Marketing has its work cut out for it.