Men 's Gold Medal Hockey Game

There are two issues here.

1. You seem to think I was out to insult or discredit you in my original post.
2. Probably because of No. 1, you have completely missed my point.

 

http://sports.yahoo.com/nhl/blog/puck_daddy/post/Can-struggling-NHL-goalies-hit-the-reset-button-?urn=nhl,219891

So you're one of the ones who just starts watching when the olympics start.

Ryan Miller is very good, never said he wasn't. He's been the best goalie in the tourney and the reason the US might win the gold.

 

I don't watch much hockey, primarily because I don't understand it, but I'll be watching tomorrow. If that makes me a bandwagon fan, so be it. I like to think it just makes me interested in the Olympics.

 

" I don't watch hockey much but when I do it's Olympic hockey" / The Most Interesting Man in the World.

 

I don't necessarily disagree, I was just stating that he was struggling coming into the tournament, like I said every goalie has a rough spot, Millers happened to be just before the Olympics. Better it happened then, then through the Olympics.

 

Nothing wrong with this.

 

Seriously?

You said: "check his stats for a month and a half before the olympics."

So what did I do? I checked his stats for a month and a half before the Olympics. Your claim did not stand.

In response, you posted a blog item that refers only to games a week and a half before the Olympics.

C'mon, man.

(Oh, about that "you're one of the ones ..." bullshit: You don't even know me. So STFU.)

 

1. No
2. No

Let's not prolong this silly debate and limit our posts to the actual game, OK?

 

I'll be watching because I like hockey, but I am unashamedly the poster boy for fanboy nationalism, thank you. I don't care if an American is playing someone in friggin checkers, I back 'em 100 percent. The same can be said if a Tennessean is competing against someone from one of the other 49 states.

The most important thing for me from any Olympics, Winter or Summer, is the medal table. (see my thread in Anything goes keep track of USA vs. USSR).

 

They go away, like they always do. Anytime there is success, there is a bandwagon, and when the success goes away, the bandwagon falls off. Where I live, the local NFL team was something like the fifth-most popular team in town a decade and a half ago. Now that they've been to two Super Bowls, the city is a ghost town during their games.

However, the Olympics do bring in a lot of "casual" fans who will follow a good story for a couple of weeks, and then the athletes fade into anonymity. However, the US isn't completely full of a bunch of rednecks who only watch hockey once every 4-8-12 years whenever the US has a chance of medaling ... there are a lot of places in the country where hockey has a very large and passionate following -- Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, New England, parts of Pennsylvania, western New York, Colorado ... the game is followed as fervently there as it is in many parts of Canada.

Is Jim Bob in Atlanta suddenly going to buy Thrashers season tickets because of this? Probably not. But are the people who support an NHL and an AHL team in Chicago going to be glued to the game tomorrow? Absolutely.

Will it make the bandwagon bigger? Sure. I grew up a hockey fan in a region where basketball is king ... I'm sure a big reason why is my dad and his sports-fan siblings got turned onto hockey is the 1980 Olympics, and they started taking me to the local minor-league team's games, and I fell in love with the sport.

A few will jump off the bandwagon, but it will be bigger than it was before.
The family members who introduced me to hockey really don't follow it anymore -- they became rabid New York Islanders fans in the years after 1980 (our local minor-league team was an Isles affiliate for five years and won two league titles), and obviously, that became difficult to do a decade later, especially after the SportsChannel fiasco made the sport out-of-sight, out-of-mind for several years. Yet, there is a generation of hockey fans that came out of the 1980 Olympics, and these current national team players grew up in the developmental structure that was put into place in the following years. It's not a coincidence.

I'll be watching, not because of nationalism, but because I love hockey, and the Olympic tournament is my favorite tournament to watch, because it brings me and a lot of my friends who are fans of other teams together on the same side, and the "casual fans" whom I know all of a sudden are paying attention to "my" sport.

 

Why are you even bothering to post on this thread if you don't care about hockey or the Olympics? I assume you read the thread title

It's like me coming on to a NASCAR site and asking "Why are you rednecks driving around in circles?"

Show a little respect.

 

Pittsburgh did not become a rabid hockey town because of the 1980 Olympics.

It became rabid watching a kid who could not speak a lick of English named Mario grow up, and now they are blessed with a kid named Sidney.