Quote:
Originally Posted by Poe969
This has been an average at best team most years, for the past 20 years. Once in a while, they'd be decent or even good, but for the most part they've been....meh.
If they commit to a direction, and are actually honest about it, it may suck for a year or so but if they get a really good young player because of that, things will improve.
They don't have a good team, so they're not selling lots of tickets. The best way to get a good team is to draft good players. To draft good players, you need to do poorly. If you do poorly, you won't sell lots of tickets. They want to get better so they can sell lots of tickets, but they don't want to do poorly in order to get better. They want to be just good enough to keep fans interested so they buy tickets, but they'll never really improve that way.
The Flames are in a tough spot because for so long, they've just tried to be good enough and now people are tired of it. They need to make a choice, be bad to get better which would result in some bad times at the gate or just keep trying to be good enough and risk people losing interest in a team going nowhere
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Ya I don't buy the narrative that people won't show up. The team is bad with no high end prospects, no superstars, and people are still interested. A lot of people just go to games as something to do. Events and experiences have never been bigger. This is a Canadian market where hockey is huge and really there are limited things to do for a night out in Calgary.
The actual hockey fans would be easy to sell.
And if you have a few lean years then so be it. That's the cost of becoming elite. When you have a few new superstars to cheer for and a team filled with young up and coming talent, the interest in the team will rejuvenate more than ever.