UFC president Dana White rips NHL's marketing: 'They're old, dumb &^%$ing people'

[chon derry]

Back in the day this all we had. And we liked it……

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Dazzle said:

Your reasoning behind this is disturbing.

Is being less violent a bad thing? I agree that the reffing is dog shit, especially in the playoffs, but violence (bad hits) need to be curbed. Violent offenders need bigger punishment.

 

If you think you need big hits and fights to get excited in the game, you are living in the past. I prefer a little bit of everything. Skill, good reffing, decent fights. I don't want f**king boarding or blindshot hits. I want solid, clean hits, ideally without any injury.

 

I never said I want dirty hits, but physicality of hockey is one of the main selling points.  I've seen perfectly normal hits being called penalties this year. Pendulum has swung too far away from any physicality.  

 

The one good thing the league did at the end of the year is to tell officials to start calling only a singular penalty when a fight occurs after a clean hit.  

 

Cleaning up the game too much by getting rid of fighting and big hits will be bad for the marketing of the game. 

[Alflives]

3 minutes ago, VancouverHabitant said:

 

I never said I want dirty hits, but physicality of hockey is one of the main selling points.  I've seen perfectly normal hits being called penalties this year. Pendulum has swung too far away from any physicality.  

 

The one good thing the league did at the end of the year is to tell officials to start calling only a singular penalty when a fight occurs after a clean hit.  

 

Cleaning up the game too much by getting rid of fighting and big hits will be bad for the marketing of the game. 

Yup. The game at the highest level is inherently violent. The nhl allows bare knuckle fighting. The guys are skating at over 30 kph and there is a solid wall surrounding the ice. Full body collisions at top speed into another player or into the wall happen a lot every game. There’s no taking the violence out of nhl hockey. 

[Kevin Biestra]

6 hours ago, DrJockitch said:

Agree with everything you said but Jon Jones is greatest fighter of all time and I can’t stand the guy. 
Slap fighting is a quick cash grab.  Get a little buzz, book a few shows, pay the slappers very little. Move on quickly when the novelty wears off. 

 

Jon Jones wasn't really a factor when the Fedor Emelianenko stuff was relevant.  Guys like Anderson Silva, Georges St. Pierre and Jon Jones since entered the conversation as competition but at the time Dana White was doing this there was really no competition for Emelianenko as the best fighter of all time.

 

No argument here though...Jon Jones is an excellent fighter and a very unlikable person.

[bishopshodan]

29 minutes ago, Coconuts said:

The NHL's marketing is terrible but Dana's opinion ain't worth all that much, dude is a snake. 

I just hate him soo much.

For all he has done for MMA he is also the reason many great match ups never happened.

He got in the way of so many good fights and has done so much to keep fighters down. Doesn't care about their health and really doesn't care about their income. 

 

Even though it has its hiccups I hope the PFL keeps growing. Good format and an increasingly good roster. I thas an open judging system, fighters can compete in other disciplines ( such as boxing) and can supplement their income more via sponsorships. They just signed the baddest man on the planet Francis Ngannou.

[Guest]

35 minutes ago, bishopshodan said:

No.

He's driving the ufc south. Ratings are going down and he's losing top fighters left and right. He got UFC to a certain level but should have left it when the Ferttias were bought out. It should be 10x the size by now. Instead rival companies are popping up all over and doing well/

 

His latest business idea was Slapfighting.

 

Slap fighting has been a joke, it's disgusting and has no support. He lost his TV deal right out of the gate and now is exclusive on Rumble...F'ing Rumble.

He recently said 90mil tuned into view Slap fighting....Rumble has 39mil users.

 

Dana, is a Trump clone. Hates the media and lies to control as much as he can. 

UFC got over-saturated in my opinion.  

 

It used to be special when they would have one event per month at most.  I used to rent the old UFC VCR tapes back in the day and then got back into it after the Ultimate Fighter reality show.  It was really good entertainment and really fun to follow but eventually it got to the point where they almost had a weekly event and I lost interest in the end.  

 

I think the key to their marketing and biggest growth was the reality show where you got to know all the fighters.  Putting 15 fighters in the same house for a month was always gonna produce entertaining TV, and I'm not even into reality shows.  

 

Can't really argue that Dana did a great job overall, but I've had zero interest in other off-shoots like Slap Fighting.  We also gotta remember that UFC is huge not only in North America, but pretty much across the world. 

[bishopshodan]

5 minutes ago, Kevin Biestra said:

 

Jon Jones wasn't really a factor when the Fedor Emelianenko stuff was relevant.  Guys like Anderson Silva, Georges St. Pierre and Jon Jones since entered the conversation as competition but at the time Dana White was doing this there was really no competition for Emelianenko as the best fighter of all time.

 

No argument here though...Jon Jones is an excellent fighter and a very unlikable person.

Th goat convo is hard and kinda silly.

The better fighters are in smaller packages. I think Mighty Mouse might be a GOAT contender but he is small.

 

Jones is great but I dont know if I would give him GOAT just yet.

Has competed once in 4 years I believe, and has been busted for steriods and all the other stuff....I dunno/

[Kevin Biestra]

6 hours ago, I.Am.Ironman said:

This is Dana's MO. Create a controversy by sh*t talking which generates publicity. He is the poster boy for "any publicity is good publicity". Good point re CM punk but disagree on Fedor. The knock on Fedor was the level of competition he was facing after the Pride-UFC merger.

 

All in all, Dana White is a great marketer but I would never work for the guy.

 

Fedor's legacy was established before the Pride / UFC merger.  He never needed to fight again.  But that said, he still did fight and defeat the UFC's heavyweight champions like Arlovski and Tim Sylvia after the merger.  Just like most great fighters (Ali, Tyson, Roy Jones Jr.) he lost some at the end of his career but he was basically 30-0 in a sport where that kind of thing never happened...where it was normal for Hall of Fame type guys to go 15-7 or something.

[bishopshodan]

3 minutes ago, VancouverHabitant said:

We also gotta remember that UFC is huge not only in North America, but pretty much across the world. 

One championship is making big time waves in the last few years.

 

https://www.essentiallysports.com/one-championship-mma-news-one-championship-beats-the-ufc-and-multiple-other-sports-for-global-viewership-and-engagement-in-2021-with-staggering-numbers/

 

You're right about TUF show though. That Bonnar/Griffin fight put UFC on the normies map

[Guest]

Just now, bishopshodan said:

Th goat convo is hard and kinda silly.

The better fighters are in smaller packages. I think Mighty Mouse might be a GOAT contender but he is small.

 

Jones is great but I dont know if I would give him GOAT just yet.

Has competed once in 4 years I believe, and has been busted for steriods and all the other stuff....I dunno/

Yeah, Jon Jones is the best fighter if you ignore all the steroids, but those can't be ignored in my opinion.  

 

On the subject of Dana and UFC, I always despised him but if you look at it objectively, he actually fixed a lot of issues you brought up in your earlier post.  

 

Best fighters not fighting each other plagued boxing for decades.  UFC largely fixed with the exception of the early 2000s where Pride was still around.  I know that the other promotions popped up here 'n there like StrikeForce, Elite XC, and now Bellator, but UFC usually did a good job of making sure they signed the best fighters and making guys fight each other instead of all the ducking that happens in boxing.  

[Kevin Biestra]

18 minutes ago, bishopshodan said:

Th goat convo is hard and kinda silly.

The better fighters are in smaller packages. I think Mighty Mouse might be a GOAT contender but he is small.

 

Jones is great but I dont know if I would give him GOAT just yet.

Has competed once in 4 years I believe, and has been busted for steriods and all the other stuff....I dunno/

 

There are physical advantages to technique when you are as small as Mighty Mouse.  People like to just scale up flyweights to heavyweights and imagine that they retain all of their speed and agility and so on while gaining a heavyweight's strength.  Kids do the same things with ants...imagine an ant the size of an elephant, ants can carry however many times their body weight and so on...but an ant the size of an elephant wouldn't be able to walk and it would also explode.  Fedor Emelianenko was as fast as a heavyweight gets...he moved like a middleweight.  He just didn't have the UFC's marketing machine behind him because he fought in Pride...but at the time Pride was better than the UFC...it was the NHL and the UFC was the WHA.

 

Jon Jones...what do you do with guys like him and Anderson Silva with steroid busts.  I guess it's the Barry Bonds / Roger Clemens treatment.  Up there on the best of all time list somewhere but with an asterisk.  Anyway he has fought a murderers row and never actually lost.  There's really not much left for him to do.

 

Edited June 18, 2023 by Kevin Biestra

[Coconuts]

8 minutes ago, bishopshodan said:

I just hate him soo much.

For all he has done for MMA he is also the reason many great match ups never happened.

He got in the way of so many good fights and has done so much to keep fighters down. Doesn't care about their health and really doesn't care about their income. 

 

Even though it has its hiccups I hope the PFL keeps growing. Good format and an increasingly good roster. I thas an open judging system, fighters can compete in other disciplines ( such as boxing) and can supplement their income more via sponsorships. They just signed the baddest man on the planet Francis Ngannou.

I'm not gonna pretend to be a fight guy, I'm not, but I've heard and read enough to assess that he's full of hot air and that his inflated ego has gotten in the way of business and at times come before the sport 

 

Dude will lie, mouth off, or do whatever it takes if it serves his self-interest

 

Actual hockey fans have been criticizing the NHL's marketing for years

 

 

[Gurn]

the strangest thing is while watching a hockey game I get to see a few adds-telling me how great hockey is.

 

"Hello, guys, I'm already watching, what you need to target are potential new viewers."

 

rare, extremely rare are the  hockey commercials that come on at other times.

Seems the NHL is content to live parasitically off those 'canadiana' Tim Horton commercials.

[Ghostsof1915]

Has anyone done any market research on the effectiveness of the animated board ads? Or the ad's on jerseys? Or the crazy amount of online gambling ads?

 

Because most hockey fans it seems can't stand those ads. The NHL should not be short sighted and look at the revenue if it means you are turning off your fan base.

 

My hope is sponsors are going to find it's not worth the money they are spending on it. And will stop buying that ad space. If the revenue dries up. Hopefully that will help kill it.

[I.Am.Ironman]

35 minutes ago, Kevin Biestra said:

 

Fedor's legacy was established before the Pride / UFC merger.  He never needed to fight again.  But that said, he still did fight and defeat the UFC's heavyweight champions like Arlovski and Tim Sylvia after the merger.  Just like most great fighters (Ali, Tyson, Roy Jones Jr.) he lost some at the end of his career but he was basically 30-0 in a sport where that kind of thing never happened...where it was normal for Hall of Fame type guys to go 15-7 or something.

I agree his legacy was cemented before the merger but a lot of the Pride guys struggled to make the transition to the tougher competition of UFC. Speculation is that PEDs were heavily used in Pride which played into his decision. It is not that far fetched of a theory. It could have also been the UFC contract, or a combination of both. Sure he beat Arlovski and Time Sylvia but they were some of the weakest heavyweight champs. This was a time where the lower weight divisions were the strongest of the UFC (particularly light heavyweight). Prime Cro Cop vs prime Fedor was a fairly even fight. Cro Cop didn't sniff the same level of success in the UFC compared to Pride. Same goes for Wanderlei. Fedor is one of the greats for sure, I give him top 10, but I don't think he is close to the greatest. Now, if he made the switch and won the UFC championship he would be top 3 with GSP and JJ. Just my opinion.

[Kevin Biestra]

48 minutes ago, I.Am.Ironman said:

I agree his legacy was cemented before the merger but a lot of the Pride guys struggled to make the transition to the tougher competition of UFC. Speculation is that PEDs were heavily used in Pride which played into his decision. It is not that far fetched of a theory. It could have also been the UFC contract, or a combination of both. Sure he beat Arlovski and Time Sylvia but they were some of the weakest heavyweight champs. This was a time where the lower weight divisions were the strongest of the UFC (particularly light heavyweight). Prime Cro Cop vs prime Fedor was a fairly even fight. Cro Cop didn't sniff the same level of success in the UFC compared to Pride. Same goes for Wanderlei. Fedor is one of the greats for sure, I give him top 10, but I don't think he is close to the greatest. Now, if he made the switch and won the UFC championship he would be top 3 with GSP and JJ. Just my opinion.

 

The dominant UFC champions when Pride existed - Liddell and Franklin for example, and also the less dominant ones like Sylvia and Arlovski - all got wrecked by Pride fighters when they came over (or when the UFC fighter went to Japan for a one off).  Liddell got ruined by Rampage who was dominant in the UFC, Franklin got ruined twice by Anderson Silva (a middling fighter in Pride) who dominated the UFC like nobody before him.  Shogun came over and became a UFC champion even riddled by injury and his main competition was Machida, also from Pride.  Nogueira also became a UFC champion.

 

Cro Cop and Wanderlei are for sure two that didn't have smashing success when they came over to the UFC...and Wanderlei looked and acted like the personification of a roid rage...but all in all, the record of Pride vs UFC top fighters was decisively in favor of the Pride fighters.

 

That's setting aside that Pride had signed most of the already established UFC greats of the time - Mark Coleman, Gracie, Mark Kerr, Don Frye, etc.

 

Occasionally things just don't transfer completely in a new environment (e.g. Krutov as a Canuck).  But there was also the difference between fighting in a ring and a cage when it came to Pride vs. UFC and some rule differences.

 

Edited June 18, 2023 by Kevin Biestra

[Brock BOeser]

Gary Bettman should retire, we need a younger commissioner in the nhl.

[rekker]

This guy is a tool. But it is nice seeing someone take a shot at a Bettman run league. Bettman never sees an issue with anything. Always rosie in Bettman land. 

[bishopshodan]

3 hours ago, Kevin Biestra said:

 

There are physical advantages to technique when you are as small as Mighty Mouse.  People like to just scale up flyweights to heavyweights and imagine that they retain all of their speed and agility and so on while gaining a heavyweight's strength.  Kids do the same things with ants...imagine an ant the size of an elephant, ants can carry however many times their body weight and so on...but an ant the size of an elephant wouldn't be able to walk and it would also explode.  Fedor Emelianenko was as fast as a heavyweight gets...he moved like a middleweight.  He just didn't have the UFC's marketing machine behind him because he fought in Pride...but at the time Pride was better than the UFC...it was the NHL and the UFC was the WHA.

 

Jon Jones...what do you do with guys like him and Anderson Silva with steroid busts.  I guess it's the Barry Bonds / Roger Clemens treatment.  Up there on the best of all time list somewhere but with an asterisk.  Anyway he has fought a murderers row and never actually lost.  There's really not much left for him to do.

 

He's only fought once at heavyweight ( and looks porky imo). A submission against a striker that looked overwhelmed by the moment. 

So I'm not as high on him as others besides the garbage out of the ring stuff...crime, steriods etc.

 

Agree somewhat about your opinion on size. Fedor was the sh*t. 

We used to have a saying when I trained. " size and strength doesn't matter.....unless your opponent is bigger and stronger than you"

[bishopshodan]

3 hours ago, VancouverHabitant said:

Yeah, Jon Jones is the best fighter if you ignore all the steroids, but those can't be ignored in my opinion.  

 

On the subject of Dana and UFC, I always despised him but if you look at it objectively, he actually fixed a lot of issues you brought up in your earlier post.  

 

Best fighters not fighting each other plagued boxing for decades.  UFC largely fixed with the exception of the early 2000s where Pride was still around.  I know that the other promotions popped up here 'n there like StrikeForce, Elite XC, and now Bellator, but UFC usually did a good job of making sure they signed the best fighters and making guys fight each other instead of all the ducking that happens in boxing.  

Thats why I mentioned that he should have been removed when the Ferttias sold.

He did good things early on but not everything...such as early Fedor. Now, no longer does the UFC have all the best fighters and have done so much to reduce most of the ones they have, sponsorship dollars, rankings meaning nothing, healthcare etc...

 

If it wasn't Dana, I am possitive that MMA would have risen anyway. He didn't invent it.