KK Members Blog

KK Members Blog

Kansas City Didn't Fail The Islanders

09/23/2009 at 1:24pm EDT

Last night the Los Angeles Kings and the New York Islanders met for a preseason game in Kansas City’s Sprint Center. As reported on the main page, Jim Baumbach seems to think that, with attendance just below 10,000 (around 9,700) in an 18,000 seat arena, Kansas City hockey fans missed a large opportunity to show the Islanders and the Town of Hempstead that they were serious about wanting a hockey team. Sorry, Mr. Baumbach, but our poor showing is your team’s fault, not our city’s.

First off, this isn’t our first dance with a team that wants to take us to the prom to make his girlfriend at home jealous. We fell for it hook, line, and sinker when Mario Lemieux and the Penguins used similar tactics to get the hometown crowd motivated to build a new arena for their team. So we went out and bought a sexy $275 Million dress and tarted ourselves up for a team that likely would have never been allowed to move out of Pittsburgh in the first place. Don’t blame us for being a little more demure and blocking off sections of seats when we hear the exact same words out of another team’s mouth. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

I’m very happy with the attendance numbers from last night’s game. It shows that there’s enough hockey-starved fans in Kansas City that we may just be able to support a team after all (something of which I’m still not wholly convinced), but not so excited as to horribly frighten the Town of Hempstead back home that we’re a threat. Tell me, what happens if 17,000 people show up to that game? Does Kansas City get any closer to having the Islanders move here? I don’t think they do. I believe that a very large turnout would only serve to scare people into getting the Lighthouse Project passed. The best thing those thousands of other Kansas City hockey fans could have done is to have either stayed home or gone out and enjoyed another wonderful pitching performance by Cy Young candidate Zack Greinke.

It looks as though Charles Wang’s plan might backfire on him in regards to adding pressure on getting the Lighthouse Project passed. If it does and the Islanders want out of town, I know about 10,000 hard core hockey fans who would be wiling to see them on a regular basis in Kansas City and have confidence there are thousands more who would come out to fill the attendance gap.

So, the only thing that Kansas City failed to do for the Islanders was play into a plan that would have kept them out of Kansas City. If that’s a failure on our part, then I’m happy to call it a loss. If you want a real measure of how excited the city is to have a tennant for the Sprint Center, quit playing around with these preseason games and bring a regular season contest here.

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