In 2004, Don Cherry was VOTED by millions of Canadians as the 7th greatest Canadian of all time - not just in hockey, but of ALL Canadians ever! According to you, this was AFTER his sharp decline. So what was he, #1 before that?!?
His passion for hockey is legendary and let's face it Canada isn't exactly the mecca for well known people countrywide.
Subsequently, Cherry maintained a HUGE following - almost exclusively among Canadians. Over a million Canadians were tuning in to Cherry's nativist rants whenever he was on TV - right up until his firing a few years ago.
This is a real slight on the part of Don Cherry being on HNIC and having an almost exclusive Canadian audience opposed to all those Russian, Swedish and Finnish international sports commentators that had multinational appeal that are so famous that I can't even recall any of their names or anything they said eh.
For decades, many Canadians simply denied that Don Cherry was nativist, or they just supported him anyway. That argument somehow became overwhelmed within public perception, but the evidence was always there. His 2019 comments finally got him fired, but they were actually quite consistent with his schtick while he was firmly Canada's #1 most popular hockey personality.
That's the thing it was mostly a schtick and every group of people in his age bracket across the hockey world had their prejudices right?
I learned very early on in University that some people applied the current (whatever the time frame) moral lens back on the previous generation only to have that same lens put them under scrutiny to the next generation's progress.
For years, Cherry had his own sticky thread at the top of this very forum - right up until his firing IIRC. That wasn't that long ago. No other Canadian hockey commentator has had that. Yet you want to pretend he wasn't recently popular in Canada?!?
You are in denial.
Denial is this Canadian bias crap, it's almost as embarrassing as your Crosby is a crappy 2 way player thread I refereed to up thread, just a completely different universe being described from the reality most of us can clearly see.
I don't think so, there's no media monster or hype machine like Toronto. Do you remember the insanity this year for marners point streak ? It's all they talked about for months like he had just broke Gretzky record
Montreal is a as is Vancouver as well but Toronto does have a huge hockey market so it is what it is.
But the point is that there are also a lot of other markets that aren't Arizona.