Fact Checking Can Be Your Friend

There's this blog called The Victory Formation. I don't really know much about it. I've never even heard of it until today. But today they decided to write about Houston, the Aeros, and why it's an awful idea to move a NHL team to Houston.

I should probably just leave it alone, but they got a few facts wrong. A few facts that are easy to check wrong, so I just can't let it go. So...

The Aeros play in the AHL, not the IHL. That's a pretty easy thing to check. It's called Google. Then they state the Aeros average around 5300 a game. Once again, that figure is wrong. The Aeros actually average 6131 a game, one of the best average attendance figures in the league. And once again, this is a pretty easy number to check. Go to ahl.com, go to the stats page, and check the attendance box for 2010-2011. Then again, to do that, one actually has to know what league the team you're talking about is playing in.

Then the guy mentions that the Aeros record attendance number is just a little over 13,000 people. Once again, as you probably guessed, this is wrong. The team's record attendance number is, the best I can find, 15,552 at Dr. Joel's House of Love, a.k.a. The Summit/Compaq Center.

So if you're going to blog about something and act like an expert while doing it, try to get the basic facts, the ones that can be easily checked at least, right. Because the guy's basic premise may be right and the NHL could fail in Houston. I think he's wrong, and I think this based on the fact that the team draws as well as it does playing in a minor league and with a minimal advertising budget. But while his premise might be right, I just can't believe in it since he got the facts supporting his premise wrong.

But there's also this: if the guy got all of this little, easy, stuff wrong about the Aeros and Houston, then what all did he get wrong about every other team and location he discussed. So excuse the rant, I just hate it when people get easy, verifiable facts wrong.