Admirals Castoff On Voyage To Calder Cup » Brats & Beer

June 3, 2006
posted under: Admirals, Calder Cup

The Milwaukee Admirals got off to a good start last night in their bid to win a second Calder Cup in three years, outlasting the Hershey Bears 2-1 at the Bradley Center. Scottie Upshall and Darren Haydar scored for Milwaukee in the first and the defense, anchored by goalie Pekka Rinne, hung on to take a 1-0 lead in the series. According to the Journal Sentinel, it sounds like the Bears are a bigger team than the Admirals, so Milwaukee will need to rely on speed and good skating to get through this championship series.

I’ve actually been getting back into pro hockey this season now that the lockout is over. It’s good to see at least one Canadian team made it to the Stanley Cup finals; it is their Cup after all and they only have six teams left, so bully for them. Plus, the Edmonton Oilers were the bottom seed in the Western Conference and are coming on strong at the right time. How can you not root for them? Not to mention some of the Oilers fan blogs are pretty great, like Covered in Oil.

There does seem to be some blacklash out there against pro hockey, though, and I don’t quite understand why. I’ve seen more than a few reports in the mainstream sports media pointing to the NHL’s low TV ratings and saying that it’s high time we stopped treating hockey like a major sport. What they fail to take into account, though, is that most of the games have been shown nationally on OLN, which not everyone gets on their cable system, and even the people that do have access probably don’t know where it is on the dial since there’s nothing else to watch on that network (unless you’re really into bull riding and hunting shows). Attendance at the games has actually been better than before last year’s strike and ratings in the markets that have hockey has been pretty good. Let’s wait and see how NBC does with the finals before we write off an entire sport.