Siding With Decency
Water is wet. Fire is hot. The NHL only cares about money. These truths we hold to be self-evident.
Remember the NHL lockout? It's a thing that happened a couple months ago that everyone was real butthurt about; and by everyone, of course I mean the extreme minority of sports fans in this country (and extreme majority of our friendly northly neighbors) who consider themselves die-hard. It pitted "millionaires against billionaires" in a hockey-related revenue percentage battle and other minuscule contract details that no one outside those meeting rooms (and I get the feeling that a few of the people in the meeting rooms) actually cared about. The fans were beyond irate; we just wanted hockey back. They held the game we love hostage, as if to warn us that at any moment, it could and would be taken away from us, so we should consider ourselves lucky a league even exists. "Thank you, fans"? No, thank YOU, league. Please, do us more favors.
I remember my feeling during the lockout; that anger-mixed-with-disappointment-wrapped-in-confusion feeling as to how a sport that brought in $3.2 billion with a $2 billion TV deal could be bickering over 49% instead of 51%. Most fans sided with the players; everyone knows who Crosby and Toews are, while not many people know what team Jeremy Jacobs owns (hint: the Bruins). It's easier to sympathize with the guys who make less money (even if it's way more than all of us ) and who fans can visibly see love the game of hockey, by virtue of watching them night after night. When Ovechkin scores a goal and jumps into the boards with his gap-toothed smile glaring... THAT'S hockey. When Brodeur posts a shutout and his teammates all rush to congratulate him... THAT'S hockey. When Mayers goes after Torres, Torres obliges, then the game continues unfazed and the Blackhawks whoop the Coyotes... THAT'S hockey. When two teams line up to shake each others' hands after just having gone to war for 7 games... THAT'S hockey. Hockey isn't suits up in the sky suites sitting with C. Montgomery Burns hands crunching numbers to see how much money the team is going to make in Q3.
Of course, the speculation once the lockout ended was "How is the NHL going to win back all these fans?!"1 What a great question. One for marketing geniuses to solve. After pissing off your only source of income and holding hostage all they love so dear, how do you get them to give you money? It's like kidnapping someone's child, then after giving them the child back, still asking for the ransom. Everyone had their own ideas, some good, others not. The best one I heard was free NHL Center Ice for the season, including playoffs. Let fans get back into the game by watching it on TV. It's the least they could do, right?
No, as it turns out they could do much, much less. No NHL Center Ice for free. Not even NHL Network for free. What did the league offer? NHL Network on a "free preview" for 12 days. Not even a fortnight. I'm not even sure the cost of NHL Network for 12 days is worth the cost of the paint they used to paint "THANK YOU FANS" on the ice after the last lockout. That was from the league as a whole; of course some teams did other things to thank their fans for support. Only a few on that list can I tip my hat to, and most of them were for season-opening games only. Okay, you got your gift... now get over it and give us more money.
And of course, give them more money the fans did, just take a look. Any time an article starts with "Despite a lockout that wiped out the entire preseason and 34 regular-season games..." you know you're in for some depressing news. Yes, not even a month after the NHL lockout ended, the report came out that the fans now had to pay more money to watch the sport they love.2 The sport they are loyal to more than the other sports. It would seem as though once hockey is up and running, all is right in the world and the fans forget just how greedy the business of hockey can sometimes be. But don't worry; we are never too far removed from being reminded that to the NHL, hockey is a business first, and all business all the time.
Last night, and again this morning, I was reminded of just that. While watching NBCSN last night, I overheard one of the announcers mention that Marian Hossa got another hit to the head in the game between the Blackhawks and Canucks. Since I don't have Center Ice (ahem), I went to NHL.com to see if they had a video of the play. Not only did they have it, but it was in the headlines section. When I got to the next page is when I got the idea to write this post. I'll let my subsequent tweet explain:
@nhl 15 second ad in front of a 20 second clip? Of a guy getting hurt no less? Your site has reached a new low. Shame on you. Seriously.
— Steve Esparra (@SteveEsparra) February 20, 2013
I was furious. This is a delay of game MAJOR penalty for the NHL. For years I have hated on the NHL website for over-saturation of ads on videos, so much so to the point that I've just grown accustomed to it (for a while I was even conditioned to put my computer on mute before visiting the site). Someone at the league, or whoever runs the site, put a 15 second ad in front of a 21 second video of one of the stars of the league getting what appears to be ANOTHER concussion, after suffering a vicious one last season in the playoffs. But it didn't stop there.
When I got to work this morning, I went back to not only look at the hit again, but to see if my tweet struck a chord with anybody and they had a change of heart. Guess what; the exact opposite. The NHL made me sit through now a 30-second advertisement (to buy NHL GameCenter on my mobile device, another thing that should be free this season) for a 21-second video of an injury.3 I'm not even sure if I'm more offended as a fan of the game or as a web producer. This is about as poor of a practice as you can have on so many levels.
First of all, advertisements should never be longer than half of the run-time of the video they precede. That's Internet 101. To have a 30-second advertisement before a 20-second video is asinine, obnoxious, deplorable, and, as J.R. would say, ADYSMAL (I think he was going for a combination of dismal and abysmal). On top of that, they put it in front of a video of a player getting injured. The exact type of injury they're trying to get rid of in the game. To put an advertisement, to try to garner more money, to waste people's time and build anticipation for a video of someone getting hurt is all the adjectives I mentioned above, as well as tasteless, classless, embarrassing, greedy and unethical. If the league were a person, Jamal Mayers would be justified to go after him just as much as Rafi Torres.
I noticed this once before, when the season first started. The very first Shanaban video of this shortened season had an advertisement on it when it first went up. The NHL rectified the situation, and if you'll notice, none of those videos come with ads in front of them anymore. Which is the right thing to do. Who knows who made that call; it could have been Shanahan himself for all we know. All I know is it's things like this that make me feel validated for taking the players side over the league in the whole lockout ordeal in the first place. The NHL can say it cares about the fans, or the game, or protecting player safety and all that, but at some point you have to start practicing what you preach
You can spare me the "Oh, the NHL is a business just like everything else, and the site can make money too" credo. I've been working with and on the internet my entire career; I know what good practices and websites are, and I sure as hell know poor ones when I see them. If you're reading NHL Webmaster, you and your team have some soul-searching to do; and you're not the only ones. I've always subscribed to the mantra that if you fix whatever internal problems you have, the external ones will work themselves out. Maybe, just maybe, if the NHL starts ACTUALLY caring about its players and its fans, and not just saying so, that will be the case. These are things that a 28-year old internet developer and general thinking person shouldn't have to tell a 96-year old sports league and multi-billion dollar industry. There are just some things you shouldn't make money off of; people getting hurt is one of them. You're not an insurance company. The game of hockey itself is a game of integrity and respect. Just don't tell that to the NHL; it might get in the way of their profits.
