Banking on success with Hlinka Gretzky Cup

TSN aims on building summer tournament into prominent event on hockey calendar

Some may see it as a bust. A flop. A failure.

In the first two full days of the Hlinka Gretzky Cup during an August Alberta heat wave, the crowd counts in Red Deer were 732, 819, 734 and 853, and in Edmonton 713, 5,922, 428 and 2,142.

That’s 12,343 combined — not even an average Edmonton Oil Kings Teddy Bear Toss crowd involving the same ticket price structure.

But it’s all in the eye of the beholder, and there’s a twinkle in the eye of Paul Graham because he’s the beholder of the set of eyes belonging to TSN’s vicepresident and executive producer, live events.

The Edmonton-born, raised and television-trained Graham, who goes back to partnering with Bob Nicholson, then head of Hockey Canada, in creating the world junior tournament for the network in the early 1990s, sees it as a baby that’s just starting to crawl much less take its first steps.

Graham was comfortable with the three-digit crowds expected and projected for the afternoon games. And if there was a surprise, it was in the 5,922 for the opening Canadian game. That’s close to a Hlinka record in Europe.

“I think the people involved were prepared for crowds of 2,000 or 3,000 for all the Canadian games,” he ventured.

Graham himself told your correspondent at Thursday’s Edmonton Eskimos football game that he was prepared for TV numbers of “maybe 30,000 for the afternoon games and 80,000 for the Team Canada games. If it hits 100,000, I’ll be over the moon.”

He was over the moon. Monday’s afternoon game attracted an average audience of 70,000 and the evening Canada game came in at 137,000. Tuesday’s games came in at 42,000 and 102,000.

Now, that’s not 780,200 for Johnny Manziel or the Canadian Football League season high 907,800 for the Eskimos-Saskatchewan Roughriders matchup, but 137,000 here is a good number. It is roughly what a Major League Soccer game draws on the network.

Graham has a pretty good idea where Oilers Entertainment Group boss Nicholson and executive director Al Coates plan to go with this. And he knows where TSN intends to take it.

TSN had never televised a single Hlinka tournament game before Monday. But the network, according to Graham, is now all in when it comes to growing this thing into a nice little property and has decided to televise it back from Europe next year.

He can’t say how many tournament games they’ll show next year other than to say if Canada ends up in the same pool as where the medal round games are held, it will be the same number as this year. In meetings here Wednesday, it was finalized that Bratislava, Slovakia, and Breclav, Czech Republic, would be the two host sites.

“We’ve been looking at the Hlinka for a while. We’ve had our eyes on this tournament for a number of years to see how we

could expand our international hockey footprint," said Graham.

“The first part is bringing it to Edmonton, and the second part, we realized, is we can’t just build the Canadian part and then forget about it when it goes back to Europe.

“We decided we had to try to grow the event in Europe and try put together a decent television production in Europe as well.”

Graham said nobody involved here expected fans to parade into Servus Arena in Red Deer or Rogers Place in Edmonton like trained pigs or spend hours of summer holiday time with their TV sets switched to the untilnow more or less secret Hlinka Gretzky Cup.

“For Canadians, this is an education thing. In the NHL world, everybody is aware of what this tournament is,” he said of the first event of the draft year for the 17-year-old hockey players, with 285 NHL scouts on hand.

“We’ve been happy because there’s been an energy in the building, and our TV pictures have been pretty good.”