Continuous hockey coverage throughout the season

Posts: 1707 · Posted: Aug 15, 2006 5:33 pm

What we have here is an area that isn't covered by most fantasy sites. Hockey is often treated like the ugly stepsister of fantasy baseball, football, NBA, and even Nascar. While it's never thrived as much in the U.S. as it has in Canada, the game clearly took a step forward with the excitement generated both on and off the ice, particularly during the playoffs.

The games were higher-scoring and more exciting. The skill of the players was on display a lot more, rather than the clutching and grabbing which most people associated with the NHL over the past decade. Fans across NHL cities clearly noticed, as the league (coming off of an entire season missed due to the lockout) shattered attendance records from start to finish. While the owners had been hoping that they'd be able to boost the cap from $39 million to $42 million based on their most optimistic projections of revenue last season, they surpassed it significantly.

Covering hockey all season is going to take some man hours from both myself and other writers on our site that may be interested in devoting some time to it. I'd love to be able to post rankings each week, possibly write a weekly column, and keep a semi-weekly blog on the happenings each night.

What I'm doing here is trying to see who (and how many of you) would be interested in this. My question isn't pertaining to who would like to help out by writing some hockey material for our site (that would, of course, be something that would be handled through the author submission process that can be found on our front page. My question is how many of you would be interested in reading our content on a weekly or semi-weekly basis.

How our draft kit, a project that I put about 200 hours into over the past month, is received will obviously be a contributing factor to how much coverage hockey gets throughout the season. However, I also want to see just how many of you would want to see some hockey coverage on the board as well.

I'm setting up a list of options for all of you, which will cover varying degrees of hockey coverage that we could have during the upcoming NHL season. Please pick the option that you think best suits your need as a user.

A little description on the options:

Rankings - Rankings would be updated once a week throughout the season and shown somewhere on the front page.

Blog - With our blog system currently down, I'm not so sure that our site could host it here. I may have to go to an external source or see if there's somewhere that Carlos could set it up for me. Blog entries would be relatively brief observations, focusing primarily on a couple of trends that I'm noticing, and wouldn't go nearly as in-depth as a weekly column.

Weekly Column - The weekly column would be something similar to what we do with "The Hook" each week with hockey. I'd have a few recurring segments of the column (I.e., let's play two for the two-start pitchers/A Closer look for the bullpen discussions, etc.) along with a lead that I focused on each week which would be similar to a blog entry.

Please feel free to post any feedback that you may have on the subject of hockey coverage here as well.

Posts: 2008 · FIC Hall-of-Famer Joined: 29 Apr 2005 Posts: 2008

THANK YOU!!!!!!!!! Finally hockey will get it's just due here. I can't wait for the season to begin and to talk shop with everyone.

Thanks Again

Posts: 14738 · Posted: Aug 16, 2006 12:20 pm

I certainly hope this brings a decent faction of hockey fans to the site. We already have a decent NBA fan base. It would be nice.

Posts: 1707 · Posted: Aug 16, 2006 3:31 pm

I realize hockey hasn't been as big as most of the other fantasy sports for some time, and I realize that the majority of our users are more geared towards football and baseball, but I'd like to think that we have more than five hockey fans on the entire site. Anyone else have any interest here?

Posts: 6174 · Posted: Aug 17, 2006 2:33 pm

Hope I am not too late when I say I have interest.

Posts: 7960 · Posted: Aug 17, 2006 2:42 pm

Mcdoogle wrote:

Hope I am not too late when I say I have interest.

Me too. While my knowledge of hockey stops after NCAA Hockey, I am trying to build my NHL knowledge.

Posts: 1707 · Posted: Aug 17, 2006 3:02 pm

Nobody's too late... I figure this thread will start getting a little more attention next week when the kit is up. I certainly love the enthusiasm I'm seeing out of those of you who are saying you'd like to see some hockey content on FIC. Just trying to get everyone involved!

Personally, I'm amped up for the upcoming hockey season, and it's good to see a few of you sharing my enthusiasm. We'll be working on some ways to get other people who aren't familiar with our site and content to notice that we're pushing hockey coverage a bit as well, which should hopefully get a few more puckheads on the board.

Posts: 1465 · Posted: Aug 17, 2006 3:11 pm

I'm in.

Posts: 756 · Posted: Oct 01, 2006 4:28 pm

Weekly Rankings, Weekly Column, and maybe a Weekly Wrap Up Blog consisting of a Who's Hot/ Who's Not, Buy Low/Sell High, Hot Pickups and Dump of the Week, would be nice...the more info for fantasy hockey the on the net the better, I am somewhat of a novice with fantasy pucks, but I am in a 2nd year keeper, and trying to find early player rankings, let alone keeper rankings was an adrious task throughout September.

Posts: 2120 · Posted: Oct 01, 2006 6:15 pm

I am a hockey dumbass, but I would love to watch a lot of it this year. Last season I was genuinally interested in the games, so I would love to see alll of the above!!

Posts: 14738 · Posted: Oct 01, 2006 8:03 pm

Idahofan wrote:

I am a hockey dumbass, but I would love to watch a lot of it this year. Last season I was genuinally interested in the games, so I would love to see alll of the above!!

This all falls back to no local hockey coverage in your area. IMO, this is the stupidest thing Bettman has done in his tenure. He expanded the league, but did not expand his economic base. It doesnt work in any market in America, why he thinks it would work in the NHL, I will never know.

Every market in America should have some NHL team in their market. I know there is no team in Seattle, but you are so far north and so close to Canadians, Canucks coverage would generate huge money. But anyhow, yeah Idaho, I found out I need to get the package.

Posts: 2120 · Posted: Oct 02, 2006 7:59 pm

its a shame. Last year I watched the free week religously, but saw five more games the rest of the year.

Posts: 388 · Posted: Oct 03, 2006 10:32 am

Hockey....

Posts: 2402 · Posted: Oct 03, 2006 1:03 pm

Go Bruins :)
Im in!