[ Respond | The Valley's Bored ]
Posted by George on 2/14/2007, 11:40 pm, in reply to "Re: Sens, Emery, blah blah blah" Personally, I think this is due to a bunch of inevitable factors, mainly the age of the franchise and pure geography. You drop a new team onto the Ontario/Quebec border, where people have been listening to HNIC play-by-play since they were in the womb, abd the new team now has to carve a fanbase out of the most saturated hockey market in the world. Furthermore, the team is in Ottawa, seat of the federal government. Does anybody who doesn't live in a national capital like their national capital? It never happens. People don't just hate the Senators, they hate Ottawa. If you took the entire Sens franchise, top to bottom, and dropped it in Winnipeg or Halifax or Saskatoon (never happen economically, but still) people would have a much more favorable view of the team. People love an underdog, and an upper-middle-class government town can't be the underdog. Instead, the players get a rap for being "spoiled" "lazy" and "having no heart" which, when you think about it is basically how workin' men view the federal employeed who exclusively populate Ottawa in the Canadian imagination.
It might be fair to say that hockey fans outside the US don't care about the Sens (or even know for sure where Ottawa is) but it's a reality that all serious Canadian hockey fans basically follow all six teams to some degree all year. That being the case, they are bound to have some sort of opinion on every Canadian team, and in the case of the Sens it does tend to be a negative opinion.
Basically, it comes down to this: if you're not from Ottawa, what's to like about the Sens?
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