A little off topic, but I was talking to my Dad about various sports opinions from his school days (late 60's), namely about who the consensus "Greatest player ever" was in each sport at the time and a little bit about Crispy's retirement. This was in the days when the "original" expansion happened in '67, he was telling me that in Philadelphia at the time, if you went up to a group of middle/high school kids and asked who the greatest hockey player was, they probably would NOT have said Gordie Howe, they would have looked at you with a perplexed look because hockey was almost totally unknown there at the time. He said that the first few years that the Flyers were there, they would send buses around town and into the suburbs, they would roll up to schools and churches and ask who wants to see a hockey game, then they'd take a bus full of folks to watch the Flyers for free, just to get the stadium filled and expose people to the sport.
Anyway, not only had I not known that and thought it was pretty amazing, But I also though about the grief that this market used to get in our expansion days about not knowing the sport and how the Preds had to give away tickets and whatnot. Just goes to show that, sometimes the things we deal with online have to be put into perspective, a lot of the detractors we faced on message boards and social media were probably much too young to realize that their market was once in the same boat that our market was in.
On that topic, it's also funny to me that fanbases like Philly and Pittsburgh were ragging on us as the noobies in the league because they were firmly entrenched at that point. But those franchises were 31 years old at that point, a number that the Preds will be at before you know it.
Just a couple of interesting thoughts and stories to pass along.
