A joke thread was started over at Calgary Puck over the summer. I’m partly to blame for it but not as much as the ticket rep with the Lightning who sent out the mailer in question that was reposted over on those boards:

Don’t miss out on the hottest tickets in town, since the Lightning have welcomed their new owners, there has been nothing but excitement over here at the Forum. In just one week we have added Power forwards Ryan Malone, Radim Vrbata and Gary Roberts. We have also drafted rookie phenom Steve Stamkos and signed Goalie Olaf Kolzig. This team has gone from being in the basement of the NHL to one the best teams in the league, and maybe one of the best teams in NHL history!! Now is the time to come on board in our luxury seating areas.

…

Emphasis added by me and the remainder of the ticket offerings snipped.

Now, we’re 2 games into the 2008-09 season but is a 19 shot effort at all living up to the hype that this ticket rep put out? How about the 21 shot effort the day before, where Vincent Lecavalier was the only player able to put up more than a pair of shots on goal?

Right now, that ticket rep email looks even more like a joke to me. Maybe that’ll change after Saturday’s game versus the Hurricanes back in North America? Or perhaps we’ve been introduced to what will be one of the longest seasons for TB fans since the late 1990’s?

Opening day for the Tampa Bay Lightning and you know what?

I had no clue it was today.

I had no clue start time was before noon here in the Tampa Bay television market. I had no clue what station it was goign to be broadcast on — nationally!…right?! This is an international game after all and… what? Sun Sports? Oh…

It’s the perfect storm for the Tampa Bay Lightning in the Tampa Bay sports market. An offseason of upheaval, a roster converted, a new coach whose claim to fame is television and the mullet he sports. Huge contracts, huge egos, new front office personnel and of course an entirely new roster. That was the events of this summer — it’s a long way away from the hype of “Seen Stamkos?”.

And even with all the changes, it got lost in the mix of the news. Presidential election politics (yeah, that’s a sport too — just look at any partisan supporter online and you’ll see someone not objective but a homer of one political bend or another), the Farve fiasco and continuing stupidity at One Buccaneer Place; and that little baseball team in St. Petersburg… I heard they are doing quite well too.

And where do the Lightning fit into all this? How much do you know about the enw members of the roster? How much extra exposure have you seen to new cogs on this team? Odds are, you haven’t seen shit besides billboards touting Vincent Lecavalier around the Tampa Bay area. That’s a far cry to a team competing for fans in a marketplace.

All these distractions in the news, and O.K. Hockey not doing much in the way of marketing to get their name out… And what else has happened? The Bolts have to open the season in Europe. So while the coverage has been muted in the sports section of each local rag (with thanks to the Rays, the Buccaneers and college footbal), there is a further lack of exposure to roster moves, camp hype, position battles and all that jazz.

The puck dropped, the season has started. Now who in this marketplace is aware? Surely the die hards, but beyond that?

There is a lot of noise in local sports right now and everything that has led up to this moment from the summer past has been drowned out, passed over or flat out forgotten. And that’s a failing that will reverberate at one degree or another as the season goes on.