I’m with Clark here (and some random post-Stadium Series of my own)

DetroitHockey.net’s Clark Rasmussen wrote a thoughtful set of opinions and observations regarding yesterday’s Stadium Series game, and his first thought kept bouncing around my head throughout last night–until the end of the game, anyway:

One of the things that I kept thinking is that I really wish the Red Wings could host an outdoor game that actually celebrates their team and their city.

The Winter Classic in 2014 was incredible and I’m pretty sure that experience will never be matched but my gripe then was that it felt like a neutral site game. Chicago in 2009 felt like a Blackhawks’ home game. Denver in 2016 and Toronto in 2017 felt like home games for the Avs and Leafs and this game felt like a home game for the Blue Jackets.

I want the Red Wings to get an outdoor home game. I want it at Comerica Park, which was a fantastic venue for the Hockeytown Winter Festival in the lead up to that Winter Classic at Michigan Stadium. The team’s 100th season would have been a great opportunity for that but the NHL is going to Florida instead. I’ll have to keep waiting.

Continued; as Clark says, the fact that the NHL keeps on using NHL teams as proxies for college football teams, baseball teams, etc. etc. is pretty boring at this point…

And Gary Bettman’s interview with WXYZ’s Brad Galli was like watching a worm try to squirm out of a crevice in the sidewalk when he was asked about another outdoor game or major event in the unfinished District Detroit (unless you consider parking lots delivering on the promise of distinct neighborhoods), so we get the feeling that we’re not going to have an outdoor game or any sort of special event in Detroit for a while, not when Florida and Utah beckon…

But, yes. The Stadium Series was a celebration of the hockey traditions of Southeastern Michigan, where most of us live in the Detroit Metropolitan Area and not Detroit itself, but for f***’s sake, our Red Wings have been in FIVE outdoor games already, and only ONE of them was at the host.

No, a Comerica Park game wouldn’t set any attendance records, nor a Ford Field indoor-outdoor spectacle, but we haven’t had a real celebration of Detroit hockey yet, the black kids who skate at Clark Park under Jason McCrimmon’s supervision, the gritty history of my birthplace as an underdog city or its resilience…

And that’s not really fair to the Red Wings. If our team is a marquee franchise, and the NHL can go to Wrigley Field twice, then they should be able to give a franchise in the middle of its rebuild/renaissance its own spotlight instead of simply referring to the Wings as a complimentary part.

While we’re at it, ESPN’s coverage was terrible. I’m not gonna bag on the broadcasters themselves–I know that the Ray Ferraros and Emily Kaplans and Greg Wyshynskis and Steve Levys of the world are doing their best to maximize what they’ve got…

But the sound was glitchy as per usual, worse, the start of the game was preempted for regular-season basketball, the ending went right to more basketball instead of any sort of post-game show (Wyshynski and Arda Ocal did do “The Drop” on YouTube at least, but the NHL Network kind of half-assed its post-game coverage, too), and at every chance they could get, the screen was split so that they could talk to Kirk Herbstreit’s dog or the Ohio State football players or anybody who was more famous than those nameless hockey players.

That really felt petty and as if ESPN wasn’t taking the hockey spectacle on the ice seriously–instead, it felt like the game was something they had to cover despite Ohio State’s national championship and despite better alternatives being on the broadcast schedule before and after the outdoor spectacle.

All in all, that’s a lot of complaining, and you guys know that I’m not one just to complain for no reason–and, frankly, I try to keep a level head, so my blow-up about the game was unusual…

But I still feel that I had every right to feel the way that I did, and as hockey is a subjectively-viewed sport that is a very emotional game:

1. I’m always going to tell you what I think and how I feel, honestly, about what I see;
2. But I’m never going to tell you how you’re “allowed” to feel, think or believe.

I read a couple of columns from the Detroit media that have suggested that it’s just not appropriate for fans to dare to be upset about Justin Danforth’s high stick/MMA takedown of Simon Edvinsson being a legal play, and I’ve read a couple of comments on Twitter from people who are pissed off at me for daring to “whine” about it…

But it’s an emotional game, and I’m a passionate partisan, and nobody is going to tell you “how to fan” on this blog, so I don’t expect anything less than a two-way street.

Yeah, the Wings had all sorts of reasons why they should have won the game, from their 84 shot attempts on Elvis Merzlikins to that glitchy PK to Simon Edvinsson and Albert Johansson’s surprisingly difficult night on the blueline–and they were really victimized for their youth and lack of experience by the hard-hitting Blue Jackets…

But the game hinged upon a penalty that wasn’t called with the referees staring at it, and everybody has the right to feel how they feel about that.