Blackhawks players know CHSN fiasco risks sending team back into 'oblivion'

SEATTLE Jason Dickinson has a vision of what sports broadcasting might look like in the not-too-distant future, maybe five or 10 years down the road.

Every game will be available to every fan on one all-encompassing service.

Therell be movies and news and live TV on there, too, and libraries full of endless hours of entertainment.

Itll be one-stop shopping for all your viewing needs.

Advertisement Dickinsons even got a catchy name for it.

You know, cable, he said.

Maybe thatll happen.

Maybe the inevitable end of this drifting television Pangaea is a happy (and surely comically expensive) television Voltron.

But for now, television and movie fans are asked to shell out $15.49 a month for Netflix, $16.99 a month for Max, $9.99 a month for Disney+, $9.99 a month for Hulu, $7.99 a month for Peacock, $7.99 a month for Paramount+, $9.99 for Apple TV+.

All on top of whatever your live service is, whether its Xfinity or YouTubeTV or Hulu Live or Fubo or GoJo or Goobi or Citgo or Shlomo or whatever theyre called these days.

On top of that, sports fans can spend $11.99 a month for ESPN+, $139.99 a year for MLB TV, $109.99 for NBA League Pass and $379 a year for NFL Sunday Ticket.

Oh, and Amazon has the NFL Thursday night games (and weekly NHL games in Canada).

And Peacock has some games now.

And Apple has some exclusive baseball games.

Yes, its true you can watch more sports than ever now.

But itll cost ya.

Youre making it so hard for people to get the game, Dickinson said.

Why cant we just find a way to make it where, I want to watch a sport tonight.

Dont care what it is.

And just flick on something? Im a casual fan for most other sports.

The die-hard fans are going to find the games.

But for casual fans, its kind of a s-y situation.

Which brings us to the Chicago Blackhawks .

If youre reading this column, if youre subscribing to The Athletic , if you stayed up late on a Thursday night to watch the Blackhawks lose 3-1 in Seattle, youre probably one of those weirdos willing to shell out $19.99 a month for CHSN, the new television home of the Blackhawks, Bulls and White Sox, which was slated to be released in app form on Friday, with Smart TV versions due in the coming weeks.

GO DEEPER CHSN announces app pricing as Blackhawks, Bulls offer free access to season-ticket holders But what if youre a casual fan? You like hockey, but not enough to stay up late on a school night.

You love the Blackhawks, but only really get into them when theyre good.

Maybe your cousin plays for the San Jose Sharks , so you only watch the Blackhawks when theres not a Sharks game on.

We had the NHL channel on Comcast, and (NBC Sports Chicago), said Alex Vlasic, the Wilmette, IL native and Sharks fan.

So we could watch all the games back then.

I definitely caught the Hawks when I could.

Advertisement Now you cant.

Not without a whole lot of extra effort and money, at least.

Here are your options if you live in the massive Chicago market, which stretches into Wisconsin and Indiana and in which ESPN+ blacks out Blackhawks games: You can buy an antenna good old-fashioned rabbit ears and get the games for free over the air.

Free! How great is that? But youd better have a room with a window that faces the city.

And a high place to put that antenna (I have mine perched precariously on a picture frame on the wall).

And youd better hope its not too rainy.

Or windy.

Or too ...

clear? Hard to explain sometimes why the signal is glitchier than scrambled late-night cable was in the 1980s.

Oh, and you cant pause or rewind.

Or watch in another room.

Or watch on your laptop or phone.

Or rewatch games later on demand.

You can switch television providers to one of the ones that carry CHSN, such as DirecTV, Fubo, U-Verse or something called Astound.

Xfinity subscribers might get it eventually, but itll likely be on the most expensive tier, so youll still be paying extra.

YouTubeTV and Hulu Live users are out of luck, because those companies have no interest in local sports whatsoever.

So the three most popular providers dont offer Blackhawks games.

Sorry.

You can go full pirate and find sketchy live streams that bombard you with pop-up ads of dubious intent and the most vile comments section youve ever seen.

I definitely do not recommend this route, but it sounds like an awful lot of you are doing it this way.

You can pay for a quality VPN that fools ESPN+ into thinking you live in Burbank or something, and then cast it to your television through your laptop.

Something tells me older fans whove been watching since the HawkVision days arent likely to jump through all those hoops.

Advertisement You can pay $19.99 a month to watch the last-place Blackhawks play hockey on your laptop or phone.

Or $29.99 if youre a real glutton for punishment and like watching the directionless Bulls and the hapless White Sox, coming off the worst season in baseball history.

But hey, full season-ticket holders the fans most likely to have disposable income get the app for free.

This is bleak, folks.

And it could mean the death of the casual Blackhawks fan.

Its a far cry from the heady days of the early 2010s, when the Blackhawks ran this town, when suddenly everyone was a hockey fan.

Yes, there are 18,000-plus fans coming to the United Center every night.

But are there even 18,000 fans watching at home? Are there 18,000 fans who can watch at home? Rocky Wirtz put the Blackhawks back on TV when his father, Bill, died, because he knew one fundamental thing: If youre out of sight, youre out of mind.

Now Danny Wirtz has to figure out a way to keep the Blackhawks in the public eye, or risk fading into irrelevance.

Its never a good thing for any business to just slip into oblivion, Dickinson said.

You need to make new fans.

Its the only way for the game to grow.

We dont need to find more ways to keep the die-hard fans.

We want to keep them happy, we want to keep making it better for them.

But we also need new fans.

We need to get it to people.

And if you have to subscribe to watch us, youre never going to become a new fan.

Youre not going to pay the $19.99 a month.

Youre not going to just try it out for a month.

Thats just not realistic.

People who have $20 a month to spare for a maybe hobby are few and far between.

The players are aware of all of this.

And it adds an extra layer of pressure.

Not only do they have to go win a hockey game, they have to make it entertaining.

They have to sell you on Blackhawks hockey.

Weve got to figure it out at home, especially when were not on TV, Nick Foligno said after a loss to Detroit last week.

Weve got to find a way to get our fans excited about us playing here.

As a franchise, the Blackhawks arent totally to blame here.

The shuttering of NBC Sports Chicago put them in an impossible situation.

And theyre hardly the only NHL team going through the growing pains of starting a new direct-to-consumer network.

But Jerry Reinsdorf and Danny Wirtz cant sit idly by while this drags on.

Fighting for advertising dollars rather than fighting for your fans is a losing strategy in the short- and long-term.

If nobodys watching the games, nobodys buying tickets.

Nobodys buying jerseys.

Nobodys even remembering youre there.

The Blackhawks have been here before, just 20 years ago, and it wasnt pretty and it wasnt profitable.

Hockey is already a niche sport.

Unless the Blackhawks find a way to put their games in front of as many people as possible, that niche will only get smaller and smaller.

Vlasic said he firmly believes Chicago fans are devoted enough to stick by the Blackhawks through thick and thin.

And hes certainly right about the die-hards.

Theyre not going anywhere, even if theyre the most frustrated of all.

But the timing of the CHSN launch is brutal.

The Blackhawks are years removed from their glory days, theyre years away from contending, and the novelty of Connor Bedard already has worn off a bit.

Advertisement This is the worst possible time to be asking fans to shell out more money.

If you look at sports fans in cities where the teams just been struggling for five-plus years, not making the playoffs and not having any success not just in hockey the fans start to get a little irritated, Vlasic said.

And then they start yelling.

You dont want it to be like that.

You want to be loved by your fans and your community.

You dont want to be getting ridiculed.

Being ridiculed by your own city is rough.

But being forgotten is even worse.

(Top photo of Jason Dickinson: Chase Agnello-Dean / NHLI via Getty Images).

This article has been shared from the original article on theathleticuk, here is the link to the original article.