What does the Public Want?
Orlando Sentinel’s writer Tim Povtak has written an article that starts with empty seats in TDW in Magic’s game with Wizards, and ends with optimistic stats on how the bleeding has stopped. The problem is the first and second part of the article don’t connect, as though they have been written by two writers. Here is the link to see it for yourself:
Tim Potvak
The public wants a winning team, plain and simple. The public does not care much about how you do it, but when you have a winning team on the court they will pay for the ticket. They don’t care about the puny minds and large egos, and how they go about running their daily affairs. Have a winning team on the court, and run your affairs any way you want. They don’t care whether or not Bob Vander Weide lives in Orlando or coach Hill is on top of his profession or Steve Francis is right or wrong or how much the ownership is under so far. Give them a winning team and you can live in Mars, have my grandfather on crutches for the coach and send Francis to exile in planet Pluto.
That is why the mass e-mail could not fill the empty seats, and why Bob Vander Weide's interview drew more resentment than sypmathy, if Sentinel's blog is any indication of what average fan thinks. Give them a winning team, and they will come. Only if all other elements in play were so easy to fix.
Tim Potvak
The public wants a winning team, plain and simple. The public does not care much about how you do it, but when you have a winning team on the court they will pay for the ticket. They don’t care about the puny minds and large egos, and how they go about running their daily affairs. Have a winning team on the court, and run your affairs any way you want. They don’t care whether or not Bob Vander Weide lives in Orlando or coach Hill is on top of his profession or Steve Francis is right or wrong or how much the ownership is under so far. Give them a winning team and you can live in Mars, have my grandfather on crutches for the coach and send Francis to exile in planet Pluto.
That is why the mass e-mail could not fill the empty seats, and why Bob Vander Weide's interview drew more resentment than sypmathy, if Sentinel's blog is any indication of what average fan thinks. Give them a winning team, and they will come. Only if all other elements in play were so easy to fix.
posted by Matt @ 10:59 AM
3 Comments:
At 11:46 AM,
Anonymous said…
I just read that article and wanted to ask something about it here.
Man, 7000 empty seats...that's nasty.
Of course the magic isn't winning, and of course that has a big part to do with the decline. But still, there hardly seems to be a loyal fan base. I've seen around 5.000 people make noise is if there were 20.000 screaming fans. That kind of atmosphere seems to have disappeared in Orlando, and it's as sad as it is frightening.
I'm an outsider, I haven't got a clue what the common feeling about the magic is in Orlando, but what I understand from online media is that people seem to stop caring about this team.
Also, the Magic's marketing ploys to bring people back are so transparant it's ugly. The whole Commitment theme, that lame commercial on the magic's official website (BH: "I don't know if he's good, but I know he's committed!" *insert colgate smile here*), Vanderweide's letter to the fans...yet still they can't shake of the rumours about the team moving, they can't find solutions for a new arena. Drastic, structural changes I've yet to see.
I also found the piece about DeVos and his way of managing the magic very interesting. here in Belgium, lots of football teams have that very same problem. A rich chairman that spends all his money on the football toy, making decisions with the heart, instead of the mind. And even if they would, they don't understand the game and the business mechanics behind it. I always hold my breathe when I hear some rich new chairman say "I'm gonna manage this team like a modern company". Sports is a completely different world, with different laws and different structures, in no way is a sports team the same as a normal, succesful company.
At 2:15 PM,
Big Figure said…
Yeah,the problem is the magic dont win on the road,so until the magic can get to a healthy/suspension free state,this team is gonna stay about 9 or 10 games back! If we could keep it going at the house and at least go 500% on some of these road trips we'd be ok,and poeple would start coming back,especially if we make the playoffs!
At 7:16 PM,
Matt said…
The basic principles of running a sports franchise is similar to running any other business. In a typical business, the owner or the investor hires somebody who is familiar with that type of business to run it as a CEO. Then the CEO brings in his own trusted people, who are also experienced in that line of business, to assist him. Businesses fail when an owner picks a CEO who is not experienced in that line of business (as is the case with the Magic) or exerts too much influence undermining the CEO's performance. There are cases that CEOs who are not realy experienced hire VPs or managers who are experienced and give them the authority and the freedom to run the business.
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