Oh I've told the organization how I feel with my wallet. I may be a west coast fan but I've spent a lot over 20 years going to games and buying memorabilia.
But hey you obviously feel the need to relentlessly defend a man who makes $1M as tank commander for some reasoning of "team doesn't owe fans anything" mindset.
If all my customers told me my company's product was garbage, and that I was doing a bad job, and the company was hemerging money I wouldn't be like, I don't owe you anything! You aren't a real customer! Now... how can I make a profit.
The Sens need to cater to a larger audience. They need to put out a better on ice product. Then they'll possibly get out of the red despite league minimum cap. They aren't different than any other business and their executives who get all the credit or all the blame depending how things go.
We’ve gone off the rails here. I’m not suggesting you stop posting in here, you suggested that and seemed genuinely upset in your post to me. I responded a lot harder than I should have, my apologies for that. I don’t agree with many folk in here in many things, but I don’t want to make people to feel unwelcome.
I can be tenacious in debate, if not unruly.
As for the original point; I don’t really care about the owner, or even the manager, much at all. I like the team the manager has assembled, and in general I argue moderate and patient positions, sometimes because I naturally push back on negativity because it’s my favourite team, but mostly because I really like what I’m seeing grow from the ashes (slowly obviously) and want to see it through.
To that point, when I say that the organization doesn’t owe the fans anything beyond a game on the ice, I mean it in a fundamental relationship manner. I’m not putting the team on a pedestal, I’m defining the fundamental premise of he relationship. Sure, the team and league LOVE the emotional attachment of fans, foster it, and play a ton of lip service to it, because it makes them a ton of money. But make no mistake, they are not beholden to it, and will move away from it when ever it suits them. Bluntly put, the team doesn’t actually owe the fans anything, it’s a business relationship that the team leverages to their advantage. They may harm that relationship at times, but it’s well within their wheel house to do so, and sometimes it’s necessary (like trading away star players to start a rebuild).
Fans who feel owed put themselves at an emotional disadvantage in the relationship, and allow themselves to easily become ‘victims’ of the teams behaviour.
That’s not to say that fans can’t be angry, but if you feel owed and are expecting recompense, or to be ‘made whole’ at some point, it’s simply not going to happen. At best the team will deliver platitudes with perhaps new people in place, and it will all be to scratch us behind the ears to calm us down, so that they can once again separate us from our money.
Once you get to a place where the team can’t emotionally harm you, as in taking responsibility for your fandom, then you are free to enjoy what you want, be emotionally agile, and focus on points of interest instead of getting bogged down by a bunch of entertainment drama that is so far out of our control.
Your post is written almost like it’s from the perspective of someone in a Sens boardroom as a plan to get more cash out of Sens fans, not what a bunch of fans should be expecting from the organization. You are expecting behaviour ‘company outwards’ from a ‘customer inwards’ perspective. You have already clearly lost the relationship power struggle based on your examples. NHL hockey isn’t like your company. What you call a garbage product is still generating enough money to sustain itself at the moment. Massive TV deals paying the team regardless of how you feel, and thousands of fans still going to games regardless of what you feel they are all ‘owed’.
Your perspective is more like someone in a sandwich board outside Walmart yelling at customers going in because you feels Walmart owes its customers better produce. In the end they don’t owe you any of that. Rather than pining for better produce at Walmart, and getting worked up about an issue that you can’t control, you could take back control of yourself. You can start buying your produce from a farmers market, and stick to buying things from Walmart that they are good at providing, like candy and cheap appliances or something.
(Warning: generalized ‘you’ coming up)
The level of anger that gets displayed in here is a shame, mostly because the only person in control of it all is the you. When it comes to sports entertainment, as in many areas of life, no one is going to fix it for you, and no one else is responsible for making you upset, it’s just you, you’re doing it, and you can fix it.
Anyways, long text blab that no one will read, but it feels better to write it out. This place has become so needlessly and pointlessly toxic. So much air time and focus on the warts of the team, and so little on the bright areas. Such is human nature I suppose, but it’s always a shame nonetheless.
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