So Steve Yzerman is coming out of retirement? No, an SMS glitch

ha ha.. I had to take this, as we don't get to talk much about the NHL here at Communities Dominate Brands (and here in Hong Kong I get even less of NHL coverage on TV, as I did when based in London...)

So Stevie Y, the legendary captain of one of the NHL's "original six" teams, the Detroit Red Wings, retired a couple of years ago. He was a scoring machine and was a compatriot of the best known hockey player, Wayne Gretzky the most prolific scorer of NHL history, and also played in the same era as the greatest Finnish hockey star, Jari Kurri (who set a record for most goals scored by a right winger and is also in the Hockey Hall of Fame).

So yes, Steve Yzerman was Detroit's highest-scoring player and their long standing Captain and was the captain of three Stanley Cup winning team - that is the championship in NHL professional hockey and considered the toughest trophy to win of the major league sports, in that it takes about 80 games to just get into the playoffs and a typical winning playoff run adds another 20-25 or so games (and can add as many as 28), and in playoff NHL hockey, there is no limit to overtime in case of ties, so teams keep on playing and many playoff games have run the length of three regular games, etc..  Gruelling.

The final (and all semifinals) are series of best-of-seven, meaning at least four games in every round. And if you've seen an ice hockey game, especially an NHL hockey game, you appreciate the roughness. The solid rubber puck (which is kept frozen so it slides effortlessly on the ice surface) is shot at over 100 miles per hour - it will knock you out cold if you get your head in front of a slapshot - and worse - the guys zoom around the tiny rink with razor-sharp skate blades - get cut by one of those and the ice is red with blood instantly. The hockey players are armed with carbon fibre and aluminum hockey sticks - and hit each other with the sticks (deliberately). Ice hockey is one of the few professional team sports, where violence in the game is not just tolerated, there are standardized penalties for the infringements, usually resulting only in a 2 minute penalty, for potentially sending the other guy into the hospital. Its a brutal game (oh, and its so fast and so exciting....)

And our legendary Number 19, he won the Conn Smythe trophy as the Stanley Cup series most valuable player. And his peers voted him the best player. And most revealingly, for a top-scoring forward, Steve Yzerman won the Selke Trophy for being the best defensive forward. But yes, Stevie Y ended his career as the 6th highest point-scoring player of all time, and the 8th all time in goal-scoring. Although born a Canadian (as most NHL hockey players still are even though the majority of the NHL teams are in the USA), Yzerman was always associated with the Detroit Red Wings and he set the NHL record for the longest tenure of being Captain of one team. The Red Wings retired his jersey (a particular honour in the NHL) and added the letter C to his banner to celebrate him forever being Detroit's "The Captain". A true giant of a player, who was only a bit unfortunate to play at the same time as the all-time greatest player, Gretzky, and thus being a bit in his shadow over the years. Oh yeah, obvioiusly in my mind as a Finn, Jari Kurri was the better forward who actually was on five Stanley Cup winning teams, but whose counting)

Sorry, got sidetracked, NHL is obviously also one of my passions.. Whats with the silly hockey lecture and the Communities Dominate blog today? Well, Steve Yzerman is now retired, but he continues to serve as a Vice President with the Red Wings and they have been experimenting with some SMS interactivity with their fans.

So they had a campaign set up to invite fans to sign up for Red Wings news and the fans were supposed to send in a text of "Wings" to the team. But there was also a mock-up site for talking to partners, which was set up under "Redwings". If you sent a message with Redwings, you'd get a phoney news item, that Steve Yzerman was going to return to an active playing career.

Well, would you know it, hundreds of Redwings fans spelled the wrong word, not Wings, but Redwings, and received the stunning news of their long-time Captain, only a few years retired, supposedly to make a come-back. They forwarded this message to friends of course, and before you can say "icing!" there was an internet rumour being carried by news blogs etc about Yzerman's come-back. The story was covered by SMS Text News.

Now, first of all, there were only 250 faulty messages sent. That is the power of SMS, it can spread from tiny numbers to a giant firestorm.

Secondly, this is a great wake-up call to all US based professional sports. The Red Wings are experimenting in this space, you should be there too. In Europe all major sports do SMS interactivity with fans on a regular basis.

Thirdly, gotta love 'em Wings. I was an Edmonton Oilers fan when Kurri and Tikkanen played there, but then when I moved to Manhattan, I became of course a NY Rangers fan (Lets-Go Rangers..) But yes, especially those powerhouse years when Detroit racked up near flawless seasons and utterly dominated the NHL, that was style, a potent offense and a powerful defense (and some of my all-time fave players like the powerful Brendan Shanahan and phenomenal Sergei Fedorov).

And Stevie Y, here's a long-distance tip of the hat to you, it was a fantastic career and you made many fans around the world for your Wings. Now as a VP of the organization, please do help them get to grips with mobile as the 7th of the mass media, it will bring younger viewers to the rink to fall in love with that fast and furious game we call Ice Hockey..

Comments

[Geoff Northcott]

Wow Tomi, I think that's the first NHL post I've seen on a marketing blog!

Stevie Y surely was one of the best, and epitomized the selfless style of leadership that to my own admittedly biased eyes seems to exist in hockey moreso than any other sport. When his offense skills started to go in the later years he voluntarily shifted to 4th line and played a crucial role as a checking forward who could still turn the light red. Amazing for a guy who once put up 155 points in a season.

I'm looking for a business analogy there and could surely make one up, but I think that's just cool in it's own right.

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi Geoff

Thanks!

Well, you know you're talking with the father of the "Hockey Sticks" theory of how mobile revenues and mobile costs relate over time. One of the popular theories from my second book M-Profits.

Coming from Finland, of course I gotta be a hockey fan ha-ha, its the law :-)

I take it you're from Motown? or otherwise ended up a Wings fan..

A funny side story. I have few regrets in my life. But I agree with whoever it was who said you never regret trying and perhaps failing, you regret the times you decided not to make the attempt.

I developed a really cool, complex, and realistic fantasy league NHL game back when I was employed by OCSNY in New York City (we were a bunch of Rangers fans with one outcast Islanders supporter and another misguided Devils fan ha-ha). This was in 1993, so there were only a few mail-in or fax-in fantasy leagues, and this was a year before The Hockey News started its own fantasy league. Mine was FAR better, far more realistic, requiring weekly game play and just about all aspects of NHL hockey from the manager's trades to the coach's decisions of who to lace up to the game, to things like realistic playoffs, etc.

I ran it off a PC. We played the game within the company and it soon became so popular that we had many outsiders joining our little "Optimized Hockey League (OHL)" We even had a little Stanley Cup for the season winner and a banner for the winning team etc. We had a weekly newsletter and all.

It was awesome. And compared to any other hockey-based fantasy leagues that we found - we actually did do a market research of hockey related games - it was the best at the time.

So my boss offered me the chance to turn it into a commercial product. He (of course a die-hard Rangers fan too) was willing to invest in it, and do the marketing and take the risk.

And I thought with my best intentions, and felt, it was not efficient use of our company resources - while we were an internet company - we were not going to make big bucks out of an obscure NHL hockey game (which we felt at the time would need to be run via fax, email was so rare at the time) and turned the offer down.

Its one of my few regrets in my life. Why didn't I just accept the offer and go with it. I wouldn't care one bit (today) how badly it may have done in the real market, it would have been so cool to have been the author of an NHL-related game, even if it only sold a dozen copies, I'd proudly list it on my CV still today.. Such a shame..

Of course in 1994 we got the ultimate New Yorker hockey gift, when Messier broke the 54 year curse and brought us the Cup (similar to what Stevie Y did for Detroit). That made all NY area hockey fans happy for at least - well being New Yorkers - five minutes?

Hey, funny story - in my first fantasy league, I owned Fedorov and Shanahan (and my boss owned Yzerman and Lemieux, but I had Selanne in his rookie year ha-ha 76 goals........ oh, the memories)

Anyway, yeah, the moment I was reading that story at Textually or SMS news or wherever, and saw "Steve Yzerman" related to a news item about text messaging, I just KNEW that is the hockey guy, there cannot be another number 19. Not with that name.

One more tidbit. I met up with a Paul Coffey at some telecoms event, totally not related to the high scoring defenseman from EDM and PIT but the British telecoms exec did know that there was a famed hockey player sharing his name. It was a cool business card to have (for an NHL nut like me)..

Yeah.. Thanks for stopping by Geoff, and I thought that silly NHL story masquerading as a legitimate blog posting on this site, might touch some other fellow NHL fan..

Tomi :-)

[Geoff Northcott]

Hi Tomi,

Definitely should of gone for it! But that's the benefit of hindsight. Agree 100% with the idea that you only ultimately regret the chances and opportunities you don't take. Even if it doesn't work out you learn something, whereas if you don't do it you can only wonder. Trying to stretch this back to business for a second, I think this is one of the key things companies struggle with when creating innovation budgets, it's hard to put a value on the experience you gain and the opportunities it might create down the line when you invest in simply trying something promising and see where it goes.

I'm actually from Stevie Y's home province of British Columbia in Canada, so I remember the Rangers beating my Canucks in seven games in '94 with distinct heartache! Was a great series though.

Thanks for the stories and will look out for more thinly-veiled NHL references in the future!

Geoff