Red & Black Hockey
Canes, NHL remedy scheduling snafu
by David Lee on 07/17/09 at 05:54 PM ET
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On Friday, the NHL announced that it has rescheduled an early-season game with the Hurricanes hosting the Stanley Cup champion Penguins. The game, originally scheduled for Thursday October 15 at 7:00pm, has been moved to Wednesday October 14 at 7:00pm.
The change was to avoid a conflict with the North Carolina State Fair, which shares the parking lot and service roads with the Hurricanes. The Fair opens on the 15th. Last year, the fair brought a total of 765,067 visitors to the eleven day event, but the five year-average not including last year was 822,000 visitors per year.
This is only the second year that the fair has opened on a Thursday, and historically speaking, opening day is one of the most poorly attended days of the fair. Last year, only 35,215 people came out to the first day.
No matter, the fair needs every one of the parking spaces at the RBC Center, the adjacent Carter-Finley (NCSU football) Stadium and the surrounding satellite lots. It has been a tradition for the Canes to go on a two-week road trip while the fair is up and running. There was an absolute catastrophe in 2002 which has led the Canes to request the schedule makers to give them no home games between the second Thursday and the fourth Monday in October every season.
The catastrophe of 2002 was a Saturday home game against the Devils that coincided with the second day of the Fair and also with a home game for the North Carolina State Wolfpack football team against Duke. 86,553 people went to the fair that day. 15,518 went to the hockey game at 7:00. I can’t find the attendance for the NC State football game, which was at noon, but it was presumably about 55,000. Traffic around the fairgrounds was unspeakably horrible that day, and I think there’s still some people trying to get in or out of the parking lots.
I literally cringed when I heard that there was going to be a home game on opening night of the fair. The Hurricanes asked for a reschedule to avoid a repeat of the complete chaos that was October 19, 2002. Thankfully, the Penguins didn’t have a problem with it and the league obliged.
As a cruel joke, North Carolina native Kellie Pickler, who incidentally used to date Nashville Predators right wing Jordin Tootoo, will be one of the headlining performers at the Fair. I wonder if she’s aware of the fact that North Carolina is a state. Find out what I’m talking about here.
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Tags: Carolina+Hurricanes, schedule,
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About Red & Black Hockey
David Lee is a restaurant manager with an unused degree in political science. He can be found at Carolina Hurricanes games, Scrabble tournaments and indie-rock shows. Sometimes, all in the same day.
David has contributed to CBC.ca for their Stanley Cup playoff coverage in 2006 and to the New York Times Slapshot blog for theirs in 2008. Red and Black Hockey was founded in July of 2005.
