King Kaufman's Sports Daily

The lack of glamour teams is a dumb reason to ignore the Stanley Cup Finals. The NHL's idiocy in preparing to betray its fans is not.

June 3, 2004 | A Calgarian reader named Miles wrote wondering about the "dispiriting thumbs down from the U.S. media," not to mention the public, about an exciting, hard-fought and increasingly chippy Stanley Cup Finals that have set Canada on its collective ear with excitement.

The Calgary Flames, carrying the hopes of a hockey-mad nation denied the Cup for more than a decade, are tied at two games apiece with the Tampa Bay Lightning, who fill their arena nicely with screaming fans but are otherwise met with indifference coast to coast. Game 5 is Thursday night in Florida.

"There's some [American newspaper columnist] who said, 'I wouldn't watch this series if I had a son playing in it,'" Miles continued, "presumably because he can't relate to Calgary and Tampa. Sir, you're an idiot. If the Packers are playing in the Super Bowl, does everyone complain? What about the Angels in the World Series? Or the Trail Blazers in the NBA Finals?"

I agree that this columnist must be an idiot for saying such a thing and I said so to Miles, who asked that his last name not be used. Then I went on to say that people did complain about the Angels -- and their fellow left-coasters, the Giants -- in the 2002 World Series, not to mention the Spurs and Nets in the NBA Finals last year, and even the Yankees having to play the mere Marlins last October.

And I find all of this idiotic too. It's ridiculous to me to be a hockey fan and not interested in the Stanley Cup Finals because of the teams involved. It's one thing if you don't like hockey. Fine, you don't care about the Finals. I don't like soccer and therefore am supremely uninterested in, say, the Champions League final.

But if you follow a sport, how can you not be interested in the championship? The attitude seems to be "I like my local team, but once they're eliminated, if the teams remaining aren't one of a very few glamour teams, I don't care." What a limited, emotionally stunted way to approach a sport. In most cases, your local team's only going to make the finals a handful of times while you're alive. All you're missing with this approach is a huge percentage of the greatest moments a sport has to offer.

This business of "who cares about Tampa Bay and Calgary?" is asinine, I wrote to Miles, winding up with a dose of dudgeon. They're the best teams in the league. Who cares about them is people who know or care anything about hockey.

And almost as soon as I hit "send," I got a letter from reader Joel Davis of Boulder, Colo., barking at me for ignoring the Stanley Cup Finals.

Next page: A perfectly good reason to ignore the Finals