Behind Enemy Lines
Registered User
Saw something interesting in the book Scorecasting. It looks at the Chicago Cubs over a century of futility. They make the point that despite this utter futility for 100 years the franchise attendance is always near capacity and financially successful. The economics makes winning irrelevant and thus a losing culture has little incentive for change. This is in contrast to the White Sox whose attendance and financial success is tied to their on field performance.
In fact, Cubs fans are 4x more upset about the increase of beer prices and virtually no pushback on ticket prices. A sad reality that there has been basically no financial incentive (likely the biggest criterion to inspire change).
This leads me to my issue with Oilers ownership. Full house or at least paid ticket wise, virtual monopoly market for entertainment dollar, merchandise sales, corporate sponsorship bucks and more. And a public paid palace to boot that will give even more money to feed the Katz private fortunes.
Now take that financial incentive one level down to a core group being paid on future potential versus the urgency of earning the paycheck by virtue of what they achieve NOW. Led me to an interesting question/hypothesis, on the basis of toilet bowl team results that continue; longstanding indifferent play and little sign of the extra effort and grit to play in harm's way to succeed and win, inability or indifference to change bad habits (one way play, little to no jam, or defensive zone effort, excuse making forgiving the sins of youth), could the Oil management removing the financial incentive of its harum of elite picks be reinforcing a losing culture instead of inspiring the culture change needed out of humiliation.
We hear a lot of passive complacency from the Oilers coach and players in interviews and bafflegab about process and not results while conversely seeing and reading the hard cold truth of accountability by Stanley Cup winning coaches like Babcock and Hartley, the latter's team fuels the incompetence exposure of Eakins, MacT up to Katz.
In fact, Cubs fans are 4x more upset about the increase of beer prices and virtually no pushback on ticket prices. A sad reality that there has been basically no financial incentive (likely the biggest criterion to inspire change).
This leads me to my issue with Oilers ownership. Full house or at least paid ticket wise, virtual monopoly market for entertainment dollar, merchandise sales, corporate sponsorship bucks and more. And a public paid palace to boot that will give even more money to feed the Katz private fortunes.
Now take that financial incentive one level down to a core group being paid on future potential versus the urgency of earning the paycheck by virtue of what they achieve NOW. Led me to an interesting question/hypothesis, on the basis of toilet bowl team results that continue; longstanding indifferent play and little sign of the extra effort and grit to play in harm's way to succeed and win, inability or indifference to change bad habits (one way play, little to no jam, or defensive zone effort, excuse making forgiving the sins of youth), could the Oil management removing the financial incentive of its harum of elite picks be reinforcing a losing culture instead of inspiring the culture change needed out of humiliation.
We hear a lot of passive complacency from the Oilers coach and players in interviews and bafflegab about process and not results while conversely seeing and reading the hard cold truth of accountability by Stanley Cup winning coaches like Babcock and Hartley, the latter's team fuels the incompetence exposure of Eakins, MacT up to Katz.
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