Professional sports suffer from an image problem. We have athletes:

• who let dogs fight
• who implicates himself in crimes
• who fight in casinos
• who cheats to win races
• who connects himself to possible steroid involvement thus tarnishing a record that many thought would never be broken.

In addition, we even have an official “working” games so that his gambling interests could be realized.

Even Rick Tocchet was smarter than that.

The only scandal the NHL had this summer, was a couple of kids get too rowdy at their bachelor party and get caught. I would assert that they were arrested because of who they were. I’d wager that there are many of us that were placed in a similar situation and were lucky enough to avoid spending the night in jail. It’s fortunate that in the Staal party, no one got hurt.

So, one could reasonably think up an angle whereby getting the NHL to improve its reach into the United States television market by promoting the fact that we have wholesome athletes within our sport.

Even though I think hockey athletes have better characters overall than their professional counterparts, I assert that promoting a wholesome image is a bad idea. In fact, I would rather have our current situation now of being seen as the “fourth” professional sport (a distant one at that), than to have marketers choose an image that is next to impossible to uphold.

Because the minute the NHL launches a “watch the NHL, we’re good people” campaign, two situations will occur. Either the enemies of the NHL (what, enemies? pshaw!), will dig up stuff that shows the NHL in a very negative light, or someone will do something so stupid because he couldn’t help himself and doing so would push the NHL further back than we are now.

Instead the NHL’s reach to U.S. households could improve by:

• educating the fan base of the game
• creating television commercials with a national advertising campaign that feature hockey players and show them during times other than hockey games
• Influence advertising executives to push their sports related products using hockey players (it worked for Michael Jordan, right?)
• highlighting the personalities of NHL players and their community outreach programs
• create a syndicated NHL highlight show (a la This Week in Baseball or HBO’s Inside the NFL)
• create a production arm that resembles NFL Films and create highlights of NHL games that tell an incredible story of competition or choose to follow a team on the road(like…ahem…ESPN’s The Season)
• standardize the production value of televised games
• be involved in the grassroots hockey development systems (especially U.S. born players so that the young learners of the game here in the U.S. can see that the NHL can be a possibility)

I’m sure there are more ideas out there.

The NHL should avoid the temptation of marketing the wholesome value of the sport and its athletes. Because while it has been virtually quiet around the NHL, and the scandals mitigated, Greg Wyshynski points out there are image problems with the NHL too.

Original post by PB

Join the discussion at The Fanster Forums. Arizona Sports 24/7.