Lightly Attended Preseason Game Somehow Deemed Newsworthy

The Phoenix Coyotes attracted only a few thousand fans to their first preseason game at home Wednesday night. Now, in any other year, would that be a newsworthy headline on any story? No, of course not.

But since the Coyotes are in Bankruptcy Court Limbo, under a microscope and expected by many to draw negative fans this season, it is. Anyway, the AP felt the need to publish the story. Some local outlets also weighed in giving even more grim numbers accompanied by pictures of worried fans. It was all really kinda manufactured and poorly reported.

First off, the difference in attendance figures was so drastic it almost seemed like no one was really counting. Each story trying to one-up the previous. The first example from the AP paints a bleak picture.

"With only a couple thousand on hand, if that, the Phoenix Coyotes began an uncertain pre-season with a 4-2 split-squad win over the Los Angeles Kings."

OK, so that doesn't sound good. But that's probably not too distant an attendance figure from many American hockey clubs during the preseason. But the Phoenix Business Journal one upped the AP and declared Phoenix a dying metropolis of sorts.

"About 1,000 people were at the 17,800-seat Jobing.com Arena for the Coyotes preseason 4-2 win over the Los Angeles Kings, according to stadium personnel and others."

So, the attendance got cut in half between the two reports. Seems like it was because the Journal took the time to talk to "stadium personnel and others." Since they didn't feel like giving full disclosure I'm going to assume "and others" means "we paid the bum outside five bucks to tell us how many people he thought were at the game and another five to write the story."

But hey, not everyone can go so in-depth into their reporting. The local FOX television affiliate, KSAZ, went one graver step forward. They not only painted a zombie filled doomsday scenario of the attendance but even took the time to go inside and take pictures of the people there. Careful! I hear that these days the remaining Coyotes fans only come out at night and feast on the living!

Last year the average attendance was in the thousands. Tuesday, only a few hundred people attended. Although the Glendale City Council continues to support a deal that would keep the Coyotes in Glendale, fans are disappointed in the sad turnout.

Read the second sentence of that quote over. It doesn't even make sense. I guess that's what happens when we're dealing with a FOX affiliate.

Regardless, it seems that no matter who we're asking about the attendance it was clearly sparse. I've got a problem, though. Since there was supposedly such a small crowd and the average hockey game takes about 2 1/2 hours, couldn't someone have actually taken the time to count how many people were there?

But this is starting to get way off topic. My main point here is that they're making news out of the fact that this team is getting a sparse crowd for its first home preseason game. So here's the scenario the news outlets are trying to convince us is shocking:

1) It is a Tuesday night. Clearly no one has to work on Wednesday.
2) We're in Phoenix in September, which means that it's acid rain season and there's no reason to go outside.
3) It's a preseason game (first one, no less).
4) The Coyotes were awful last year.
5) This bankruptcy thing has annihilated a fan base that was already one of the worst at the gate the last two seasons.

Actually, it would be more shocking if anyone actually went to a Coyotes game. You could ask them all sorts of fun things like: "on a scale of 1 to 10 how ironic is it that the team that moved here after deserting a city is probably deserting this one too?" "Wouldn't it just be more fun to actually set your wallet on fire?" and "Are you only here because you missed your tee time?"

But anyway, the team that doesn't draw many fans to begin with inhabits a warm, sunny climate and isn't playing a meaningful game for another few weeks drew a couple thousand fans -- maybe -- to a completely meaningless game that neither team was really trying to win. And in other news the sun rose in the east and set in the west today.