The NHL’s outdoor game had three winners: the Canes, hockey and the Triangle
In hockey, attacking teams want to create traffic around the goal.
The Carolina Hurricanes did that Saturday night for a NHL outdoor game against the Washington Capitals at N.C. State’s Carter-Finley Stadium. In a place where snow has been scarce and February temperatures have risen above 70 degrees, 57,000 people turned out to see a hockey game in a football stadium.
Of the 37 outdoor games so far in the NHL’s Stadium Series, league officials said the Raleigh event was the fastest sellout ever.
The turnout was extraordinary, but the gridlock around the stadium was a mess. Apparently the NHL wasn’t prepared for the intensity of interest for the unprecedented event in North Carolina. At least it wasn’t prepared for that kind of traffic around the goal.
Next time – after this turnout there has to be a next time – the NHL will be ready. Maybe mass transit in the Triangle will be, too.
If getting there wasn’t half the fun, being there was twice the spectacle. There was a flyover and fireworks, hours of tailgating, N.C. State’s band and dance team and live country music. The stadium event combined a southern sports religion with a northern sports obsession, Go Pack! sharing the spirit of Ole! Ole! Ole!
That the Hurricanes won easily, 4-1, was sweet, but almost beside the point. Saturday’s showcase was about hockey’s growth in a southern region where it once seemed unlikely to bloom.
Twenty-five years ago, the Hurricanes, newly relocated from Hartford, Conn., temporarily skated in a basketball shrine, the 21,100-seat Greensboro Coliseum, before crowds of 5,000 or less. The upper seats were curtained off for the 1998-99 season to concentrate fans into the lower seats. The Canes moved to their permanent home in Raleigh, now the PNC Arena, in the fall of 1999.
On Saturday, fans paid hundreds of dollars for tickets and filled a stadium almost three times the size of the Coliseum. The game itself was projected to have an economic impact of $12.4 million, according to Scott Dupree, executive director of the Greater Raleigh Sports Alliance. An estimate of the total economic impact for all of the weekend activities surrounding the game will be out in two weeks.
“I’ve being doing this job for about 25 years, and I can’t remember an event here in Raleigh that had so much anticipation and excitement in the weeks and months and even the year leading up to it,” Dupree said. “Yet somehow it lived up to and even surpassed the hype.”
NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman sounded awed by the turnout. “What a great, great story hockey has been here in the Triangle,” he said.
It is a great, great story and it has many authors. Former Hurricanes owner Peter Karmanos began it when he decided to move his Hartford Whalers franchise to Raleigh in 1997 and rename the team. Bettman and NHL owners had faith in the franchise’s move and the Hurricanes’ current owner, Tom Dundon, successfully lobbied to bring a NHL outdoor game to Raleigh.
But credit for Saturday’s grand and historic event also belongs to the Hurricanes, especially former players Ron Francis and now coach Rod Brind’Amour, who made the Canes contenders who fought for the Stanley Cup in the 2002 finals and brought it home in 2006. Now the Canes are among the NHL’s top teams again and hockey fever is rising anew.
Ultimately, perhaps the largest shout out should go to those early fans who traveled to Greensboro and those who loyally stayed with the team during a long playoff drought. They kept NHL hockey alive in the Triangle and gave a region divided into tribes of college fans a professional team they can all rally round.
Pointing to the Triangle’s rise in NHL, Dupree noted that since 2000, only Raleigh and Los Angeles have won a Stanley Cup and hosted the NHL Draft, the NHL All-Star Weekend and a NHL outdoor game.
Saturday’s event celebrated hockey’s growth here and served as a tribute to all who believed that a game on ice could flourish – inside and out – in the sunny South.
