On Wednesday and Friday nights, the Vancouver Canucks begin their playoff run for the Stanley Cup, and every seat has been sold out from the moment tickets went on sale, with lowest prices in the mid $100 range, no surprise since since the Canucks have sold out every game for the last 200 plus. You also are lucky to get tickets for Ottawa and Edmonton regular season games, you can’t get a ticket for the Calgary and Montreal playoff games, and Toronto tickets of any kind are passed on in wills, and the Maple Leafs only rarely even make the playoffs. Not so in many US venues, most dramatically in Detroit, home of the defending champions and one of the favourites once again (they have most of the Swedish national team, that may well win the Olympic tournament next year in Vancouver) where the crash of the auto industry has put much of the fan base out of pocket.
But Detroit, New York or Boston will survive bad times with good teams while many US expansion teams seem doomed – read all those south of St. Louis, maybe including St. Louis, the Canucks’ first round opponent. In Canada there is a sense of Schadenfreude in all this as sporting greed forced flourishing franchises out of Quebec City and Winnipeg, which were deemed to be too small for big sports money, and put in places like Phoenix, Atlanta, Columbus, Nashville and Florida, where some will certainly soon go belly-up, and kept out of places like Hamilton and London, where their success is virtually guaranteed. So up here everybody is hunkering down for the beginning of six weeks of matchless sports entertainment, knowing that the annoying phone calls from down south for the latest information will soon be pouring in from a sporting public stuck with nothing but steroid baseball to look at.