Hockey season started this week, and, uncharacteristically, I barely noticed. Oh, I watched two NHL games on Thursday, but my enthusiasm was nowhere what it's been in years past. Time was when I looked forward to Opening Day almost as much as I look forward to Christmas morning. This year, it barely even registered.
Here in Portland, we don't have an NHL team. We do, however have a team in Canada's top Major Junior league, the Western Hockey League. The talent level is just below American NCAA Division I college hockey, and the players run between 16 and 20 years old. Though no one outside of Portland may recognize this, Portland does have a long and proud hockey tradition. The Winter Hawks have won the Memorial Cup (think Canada's version of the NCAA Division I basketball championship) twice, in 1983 and 1998, in '83 becoming the first team outside Canada to win the Cup. Over the past couple years, though, the Winter Hawks have become a running joke. I went to one game against Spokane last year that ended up in a 9-1 blowout...and the game wasn't nearly as close as the score indicated. This year, the Hawks are 1-6, and they've been shut out four times thus far. This on the heels of the team that at one point last year lost 22 straight. If you still drawing breath, you should be able to show up and win at least one out of 22 games, but the Hawks couldn't, and they looked beyond miserable doing it.
The fan base here in Portland, once solid and completely devoted to the Hawks, has quickly eroded in the face of ineptitude on the ice and an owner that seems to neither understand nor care what his stewardship is doing to the team. Now, the WHL is in the process of trying to arrange the sale of the team to a businessman from Calgary, and while perhaps that might help over the long term, this promises to be a long, hard winter for Portland hockey fans. The Winter Hawks, which used to regularly draw 6,000- 8,000, now are lucky to draw 2,000- 3,000, and Memorial Coliseum sounds like the moments before a Lutheran church service begins. Given the product they've been putting on the ice over the past two years, they're fortunate to be drawing anyone with a pulse these days.
OK, so it's not the NHL, but neither are we paying NHL prices. The quality of the WHL game is generally pretty good, and there's something to be said for youthful enthusiasm. Then again, if the Winter Hawks have demonstrated anything over the past couple years, it's that inept ownership can destroy a proud franchise in the same way it happens in the NHL.
I'd really like to be able to go to a few games this year. Hell, I can drive less than a mile, and than take a train to the arena's front door; it doesn't get much easier than that. Still, when the product put on the ice night after night is so depressingly inept, why would I subject myself to that? When I first moved here in 1983, the Winter Hawks had just won their first Memorial Cup, and the excitement in Portland was almost tangible. Now, you can barely find a mention of a Hawks game buried in the Oregonian's sports section...perhaps because there's no one in the stands. I've seen more excitement at your average Irish wake.
Portland is and likely always will be a town that lives and dies with the Trailblazers. Still, you'd think that the owner of the Hawks would be able to capitalize on the devotion of what really is a good hockey town. Instead, what we're served is a team that makes the '62 Mets look like Murderer's Row. How sad....
