Chicago Blackhawks Fans Complaining About Start Times Deserve Zero Sympathy
By Kyle Koster
The defending Stanley Cup champion Chicago Blackhawks have staved off elimination in two straight games to create a winner-take-all scenario against St. Louis tonight. Despite fighting for a fourth title in seven years, fans and team media have found time to complain about staying up late to watch games on television.
It all started when Blackahwks television announcer Pat Foley decided to offer an Andy Rooney-like editorial comment about the 8:42 p.m. local start times.
NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman responded by alleging Foley did not have his facts straight and said Blackhawks President John McDonough called him to apologize. But the outrage over having a playoff hockey game starting too late has grown throughout the fanbase and local media.
Predictably, this is being trotted out as evidence that big, bad sports doesn’t care about you, the fan, as if it’s some sort of revelation. Things hit a tipping point after Game 5, which the Blackhawks won in double overtime. Some joyful fans would have been even more joyful had the season-saving goal from Patrick Kane come a little earlier so they could get their sleep.
As someone who lives in the Eastern Time Zone, I understand their pain.
More importantly: as someone who lives in the Eastern Time Zone, I wish they would shut up.
Complaining about missing out on a few hours of sack time to watch your favorite team compete in the playoffs is a first-world complaint of the highest order. Complaining about it after winning three Stanley Cups in six years reeks of some sort of bizarre entitlement.
Television networks were tasked with juggling eight different playoff series to get optimal ratings. Four of those involved Eastern Conference teams on Eastern standard time. It wouldn’t make much sense to push those games back into slots and let the Hawks-Blues have the early ones.
It’s hard to believe that people in the Central Time Zone could cry over this with a straight face. Do they not realize that night games end an hour sooner for them than those on the East Coast year round? Do they think they’ve stumbled upon some new form of tribulation?
Starting a game at 8:42 p.m. means regulation will be over, at the latest, by 11:30 p.m. This is a perfectly reasonable time for a sporting event to end. Hell, it’s early by East Coast standards. The problem, if you insist on calling it that, is that playoff hockey games can go on for extra hours until one team finds the back of the net.
This shouldn’t come to any surprise to fans in Chicago, who have enjoyed more postseason success this decade than some franchises have seen in their entire existence.
Allow me to be perfectly clear. I am not levying my own complaints about sporting events beginning at too late an hour. As an adult I realize that I make a choice between staying up to finish a game or getting a good night’s sleep. Learning to pick and choose which events are worth sacrificing for is an essential skill. Perhaps those afforded the hour buffer in the Midwest haven’t come to terms with that yet.
We live in a country with major markets located thousands of miles and three time zones apart. Not every single thing will be convenient for every single fanbase. Fans in San Francisco don’t love their Giants playing baseball at 9:35 a.m. local time on a getaway day in Cincinnati. Basketball fans in Boston would prefer if most Golden State Warriors home games didn’t start at 10:45 p.m.
Blackhawks fans are not being asked to endure anything extreme here. It’s disappointing to see media lend a sympathetic voice to the fray when they know full well the ridiculous hours sports keep.
This may be a low blow but it’s the truth: a staggeringly small fraction of Chicagoans were staying up until 9 p.m. to watch their team until the Stanley Cup run of 2010 happened. You’d think seven years on that bandwagon would have allowed them to pick off some of the players’ toughness.
But, hey, the whole start time situation might not be a problem after tonight. Perhaps the Blues will take care of business at home and send the Hawks packing–allowing bleary-eyed fans to get the beauty sleep they so openly crave.
Be careful what you wish for.
Images via USA Today Sports