Stadium series game now in our rearview mirror and it brought people from all over the hockey community to Raleigh to experience hockey the way we do it here with tailgating culture and all of that. Not that they don't tailgate in other places, but it seems to be down to a science here in North Carolina. And prior to the game, and I think I saw this video on Friday, Pete Blackburn, who covers hockey for Bally Sports, wondered aloud on a video, two minute and seven second video, whether or not, this was not about Raleigh by the way, whether the stadium series had sort of run its course. I do see him see a lot of same football stadium, baseball stadium, mute, mostly baseball for winter classics, things like that.
And maybe there's another approach. And he cited the Lake Tahoe game, which frankly was awesome. They realized they had to play it at night because it was too sunny and was messing up. Couldn't see.
Not seeing the puck is bad. And he was talking about scenery and all that, but it was not disparaging towards Raleigh, but it did feel like somebody was like, maybe this is over. Let me come up with a reason why it's over. I don't know. I think Pete Blackburn was won back over at least by the city of Raleigh and Carter Finley stadium.
And he joins us on the Adam Gold show. Thank you for doing this. I appreciate it. I hope that by my retweeting this, and I don't mean to think that I have this kind of influence. I hope that my retweeting of this did not cause you or your timeline at Pete Blackburn any pain, but I think you had a good time.
Nope. I definitely had a good time. And I think you had a good setup there because my intention wasn't to disparage Raleigh or say that that game shouldn't have been happening.
It was the day before in my approach. And my intended message basically came from a marketing standpoint. You can look at it in two ways.
My job is to cover the league from a national standpoint. And from a national standpoint, for a few years now, it's felt like the stadium series has lost a little bit of steam. Where it's not being marketed as heavily across the United States.
And there's not much of a draw outside the markets that it actually involves. It wasn't meant to be a shot at Raleigh or Canes fans saying that they don't support the team or they don't deserve that event. Because they clearly do and they clearly a passionate fan base, and clearly has been deserved for that market for a while now and it's been waiting for a while. Basically what I was trying to say was like the cane should have got the winner classic, and we should be taking a different approach with the stadium series or doing something new outside of the stadium series that revolves around a scenic series. And I think whether it was my delivery of the message or like an eagerness to feel disrespected by fans, I think it kind of got twisted in a way.
Oh no, there's no question. I mean, we like to find slides. First of all, we're used to disrespect here.
And I'm not saying that you did that. So we're predisposed to find it, whether it's from ESPN. Look, I mean, I wonder how many times even in the last year, NC State has been called North Carolina by ESPN. That's a good point. Like that layer to it is not something that I would have ever considered being from not around that area. When I was down there, I talked to a bunch of people and somebody had said, like there is a predisposition to feeling disrespected, like as even as the NC State layer because of Duke in North Carolina.
And like that sort of like little brother type thing. And that's something that I never would have considered. And it did make more sense in that context. Want to hear some delicious irony? Pete Blackburn, North Carolina feels disrespected because that was more geared towards NC State than it was North Carolina.
It was a part of family status. So what did they expect? Well, what were your impressions of just the the the afternoon? Like, I know it rained through Fan Fest for most of the day on Friday, so we didn't get a chance.
I did not. We were supposed to the show from down there, so I didn't get a chance to experience what that was like. But it looked like an incredible scene Saturday all day. Saturday all day was as good as you could have expected. Like the weather was unbelievable. It was warm during the day, not a cloud in the sky, like perfect tailgating weather.
And then on top of that, you had the temperature drop pretty drastically at night once the sun went down, which is better for the game itself and the quality of play. But the thing that most impressed me throughout the course of the day was the way that the game was presented in sort of the atmosphere, not only from the local fans because they were great, but the presentation itself and the work done by the NHL to sort of give it a new spin made me eat my words about the stadium series feeling tired because the sort of collision of college football and the stadium series gave this sort of like a whole new life to me. And now I want to see the stadium series sort of become that where you're going around the country visiting some of these college stadiums and infusing that college culture with the stadium series and the NHL because that made the experience feel new to me. And like being a Boston guy, we've had three winter classics, two of them in the same place at Fenway Park. And like as cool as it is to see, you know, Fenway Park is the backdrop to a winter classic event. If you've seen it once, you've seen it twice. And it's the same thing.
And I just think this felt like it was a brand new thing that is very exciting and made for an incredible experience. This is my favorite outdoor game. I've been to four of them.
This is my favorite one. You don't have to butter us up here, Pete. I'm not. I mean, I got absolutely blasted for a couple days based off of the initial video.
And I'm telling you, none of it was a ways to get back in the good graces. I generally had like an unbelievable time. Pete Blackburn from Valley Sports is joining us here on the Adam Gold Tour.
You can follow him on Twitter at Pete Blackburn. The band, using NC State's marching band, I thought was a brilliant touch. And during media timeouts, they were doing a lot of the same stuff they do during basketball and football games.
And it just fit. And maybe it was the venue and all of that. And look, Carter Finley is not it's not the most aesthetically pleasing stadium.
And you were taught in that video. You were talking about wanting a scenic backdrop. And it's not a scenic backdrop. It's an old stadium that still needs updating.
The video board needs updating. But it did, man. That college flair was was tremendous. Straight down to David Thompson and Derek Wittenberg announcing stuff. So that was kind of part of it, right? Because I arrived there a day or two before the actual event. And you get to the stadium and there's there's not much to it like that. They have the rink set up and stuff, but you don't get exactly what you're going to get during the game. And like I said, no disrespect, Carter Finley Stadium. But like, I don't know how much of a hook that has from a national standpoint, like it's not like a major prestigious college football venue, at least in my mind as an outsider. And you don't get to see like all the fixings that they're going to include in the game. And, you know, from an aesthetic standpoint, like you mentioned, there's not a whole lot there. But once you put it all together and you've got the atmosphere and some of the fixings, it was awesome. Yeah. Well, there's a water tower on the state fairgrounds. That's that's always good.
People. Can I ask you a hockey question? Did you cover the league? Or did the Hurricanes need to add at the deadline?
Especially if somebody is based in Boston, knowing that Boston probably will stack those two teams up for me. So the thing that most concerns me when it comes to the Hurricanes is the center depth, right? Because as good as you're very cocky, the Emmy has been recently and I know that the Hurricanes like the front office is gaining a lot of confidence in him being in that spot. The larger sample size says, I don't know how much you want to trust that, especially over the course of a deep playoff run. So the big bang, the big drum that I was banging was, hey, Ryan O'Reilly should go to Carolina because he could be a strong to see gives him a little bit of snarl. He's a, you know, con smite winner. He's got that veteran presence. He makes you much tougher to play against and gives you a little bit of depth down the middle.
Obviously that didn't happen. But now I think like I would like to see them at a center guy that I discussed over the weekend was Nick schmaltz is a guy that I really like. And he might be trying to get out of Arizona. Like that's a, that's a name that's kind of under the radar.
That would be an awesome fit there. But like Timo Meyer obviously would move the needle a ton for that team. And we're starting to see Carolina, how good they can be when they're putting the puck in the back of the net. Like they're a team that generates a ton, but before like a month ago, the finish really wasn't there. They ranked at the bottom of the league in terms of finishing ability. So you get it, you get a scoring, a scoring touch in that top six.
Max Patrick already was supposed to be that guy, but now you've got his money. You can add and add a little bit of scoring touch. And I think they need that. I think they need that too. I wonder if they're, if Andre Spechnikoff, who has not scored in 2023, if he is just waiting to score all of the rest of his goals in the postseason. That would be a great, that would be a great boost that that team. But honestly, over the past month, month and a half, it doesn't seem like they even need it because they are starting to score a ton. They are. Ajo has been great.
They're getting scoring from all sorts of places, but they need 37. Pete Blackburn, at Pete Blackburn on Twitter. I thank you very much for doing this, man. Hopefully we can talk again. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me. You got it. Pete Blackburn.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-02-20 17:31:18 / 2023-02-20 17:35:56 / 5