Welcome to the first annual Canes and Coffee summer event!
With the perfect storm of launching our new site, the annual NHL downtime in August and the hope to build some Canes hockey positivity heading into the 2015-16 despite last season’s playoff miss, we wanted to do something fun to help count down the days until training camp.
Here is the simple version:
3) ENJOY (Canes history). The hope is to bring up some great memories for long-time Canes fans and share some history with newer fans not to get too bogged down in who wins or analytical stat debates.
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What we came up with is an NCAA bracket style tourney that pits Canes greats and favorites against each other with fan votes deciding who advances to the next round of the tourney. The event will include four regions – Founding Fathers, Unsung Heroes, Cup Core and Current Generation. The regions will launch one at a time and games will be voted on/decided in batches. We decided to leave the schedule a little bit loose while we get started, but the basic idea is to run a batch of ‘games’ (i.e. first round of the Founding Fathers region) together for 3-5 days at which point winners will be declared. Rough math says that the event will then run for about a month nearly perfectly leading us up to the start of training camp and real hockey. Yay!
The risk of launching an event like this in August especially for a new site is whether we can garner participation. We would greatly appreciate people chiming in with comments on the site itself and/or on social media and also helping spreading the word to other Caniacs in summer hockey hibernation. I think a little bit of feel-good nostalgia can be good for the entire Hurricanes community heading into the 2015-16 season.
How the event works is pretty simple:
1) Canes and Coffee will open up voting for a batch of games and schedule it to run for 3-5 days. During that time, fans can vote on the set of polls which will be inside a blog post at the top of the bracket event landing page.
2) At the end of the voting period for a batch of games, winners will be declared and moved forward in the tourney and the next set of games will be launched for voting.
3) In addition to the bios for each player (and a couple wild cards) in the event, we will post some articles on the matchups and players.
A couple comments and disclaimers:
–This is more about FUN and FAVORITES than best. Please do not hesitate to vote even if you are not familiar with all of the players and do not hesitate to vote for who you like. I am pretty sure this will not ever be officially sanctioned by the team or the NHL to determine an official ranking of Canes greats, so let’s just have fun with it.
–The selection of players and seeding is not intended to be a pure ranking order like the NCAA tourney. We took some liberties to include some fun things – having an enforcer, a broadcaster and a coach matchup, for example.
–The seedings are similarly not exactly in order. If you look through it, you will see that the bracket is primarily designed by era, so they are not necessarily equally waited by objective player ranks. And we went out of our way to design in some really cool first and second round matchups that can maybe spark some memories and discussion. The result was having to force fit seedings to get those matchups instead of doing fair rankings.
The goal of this event is to provide a trip down memory lane and some feel-good nostalgia for the Canes hockey community during the slow days of summer. We would greatly appreciate your participation and help spreading the word!
Thanks and Go Canes!
