Hockey season started back up just last week and my beloved San Jose Sharks had a pretty convincing win in their season opener beating the Phoenix Coyotes 6-3. I love ice hockey and I love the NHL. I think they’ve really done a great job promoting the brand in the last few years and they recently signed a huge deal with NBC which gives NBC stations exclusive rights to broadcast the Stanley Cup Playoffs through the year 2020. I could go on and on about how much I like hockey, but I’ll stop there and start complaining instead, about how little coverage the NHL gets in major news publications.
It’s not really a secret that America is not really a hockey nation. Canada, Russia, and Nordic nations are places where hockey is really engrained into the culture. But here in America, ice hockey plays second fiddle to football, baseball, and basketball (so fourth fiddle then, I guess). Because of this, hockey hardly gets any coverage in the major news outlets.
The San Jose Sharks are a great team and have done extremely well their last few seasons. But even when they go deep into the playoffs, they usually never garner front page of the sports section, which is usually relegated to the Giants whose season, by that time, is barely underway. And during the regular season you can forget about it. The sporting green is dominated by football, local or otherwise. Usually the Chronicle will include short game recaps on the Sharks and a tiny box with scores from around the league.
I understand the Chronicle’s position fully. It doesn’t make sense to give hockey the same amount of news real estate when it has half the popularity of baseball. Newspaper is a mass medium and the Chronicle is a big market. Newspapers are also more general interest publications and don’t have the luxury of catering to everyone’s interests.
I know inside that it’s nothing personal, but it’s hard not to feel discriminated against when you’re a minority (hockey fan).
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