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NHL

Alexi Lalas Wants To Slide Tackle Hockey

Posted Jul 23, 2007 1:42AM By Greg Wyshynski (RSS feed)

Filed Under: Los Angeles, Soccer, General NHL, Kings, NHL Fans, NHL Media Watch, Stanley Cup

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I really liked Alexi Lalas better when he looked like he had just stumbled in from a Phish jam, missing one shoe and with his arm around some girl who calls herself Delirium and smells of patchouli and coffee grounds. Look at him now, sitting next to Posh's husband -- as Billy Walsh from "Entourage" might say, "There he is, fresh from the dry cleaners, my one and only favorite suit."

Besides going corporate, now Lalas has gotten on my bad side as a hockey fan. The president of the L.A. Galaxy told the Globe and Mail this weekend that surpassing the NHL in the U.S. is one of his top priorities:
With Beckham's handsome face to market, with a broad participatory base and with an ever-expanding soccer-mad Hispanic community in the United States now roughly equivalent to the population of Canada, soccer has a leg up on at least one other exotic game struggling to gain a foothold in much the American market – a game that once tried dropping its own golden boy into Hollywood for a time.

"I think that we can – and I say this with all due respect for Canada, which may be the only the only place where I'll get a major argument – pick off hockey here, and then we'll move on to the next major-league sport," Lalas said. "We can start picking them off one by one."
If I had a yellow card to pull, I'd thrust it in the air and ask Lalas for a clarification.

If he's talking about soccer as a whole, then it may have already picked off hockey -- consider that the finale of the Gold Cup tournament drew 40 percent more television households than the final game of the Stanley Cup Finals, according to the New York Times. If he's talking about MLS, Lalas needs to loosen that tie and get the blood flowing back to the 'ol noggin. While MLS average attendance is close to that of the NHL, that's in almost a third of the total home dates for hockey and with rock-bottom ticket prices: According to Team Marketing Report, the average ticket price last season was $18, much lower than the NFL ($59), NBA ($45), NHL ($43) and Major League Baseball ($22).

I'll never begrudge the growth of MLS -- I'm a fan with a Meola-era NY/NJ MetroStars jersey in my closet -- or its potential for continued expansion. But the NHL packs in over 15,000 fans per game -- over 41 home dates and in stark contrast to MLS's "take the whole youth league to the game" pricing plans -- in 17 different U.S. cities; quite a feat for a league still stuck in a post-lockout mire.

MLS is getting its moment in the sun thanks to its tabloid hunk and his pop tart wife -- just like it did when it had its unicorn at the circus 14-year-old prodigy -- but Lalas, of all people, should know that it's a fleeting reprieve from mainstream apathy. The reality is that both MLS and the NHL are huddled together in the same pop culture ghetto, and in the back pages of the sports section. At this point in their respective histories, MLS "picking off" hockey would be like a song jumping from 19th to 17th on the Billboard charts.

Tags: Alexi+Lalas, AlexiLalas, David+Beckham, DavidBeckham, Freddy+Adu, FreddyAdu

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