For anyone planning on taking the Schuylkill expressway at 10 p.m. on September 25th, you might want to rethink that. The major road will be shut down for close to an hour, which really is going to make things harrowing for those attempting to travel around Philadelphia. The reasoning behind the closure is that Pope Francis will be visiting the city that weekend as he tours around America. This isn’t the first or last time a pope coming to town has closed down major highways and caused crazy amounts of traffic, so it’s safe to say that the event will almost certainly occur.
Why this is important to sports fans is that there just happens to be a NHL pre season game between the New York Islanders happening on the same night. The game will begin at 7 PM, which means the game will probably end right around 9:30ish, assuming overtime does not happen. By the way, how ridiculous is it to have overtime in a preseason game nobody is going to care about in around two weeks?
Back on topic, those fans are going to be trying to get out of the parking lot at around 9:45 PM. That gives the fans roughly 15 minutes to get off the Schuylkill before the Pope has ownership of it for close to an hour. Anybody who has ever tried to get out of the South Philadelphia Sports Complex knows how vile a contraption it is; people trying to cut you off, lines of cars not moving and everyone getting mad at each other. It’s an all-together miserable experience.
Toss in alcohol and you get one of the worst traffic situations imaginable. To make things even worse, the pope may have to see cops forcing drunken Flyers fans off the road. Not the best impression to make on god’s guy.
The biggest point out of all of this is that the NHL had to of known the pope was coming to town, and still made the game in Philadelphia. Is it really that important that each team gets a certain amount of home games in preseason? If you must play the game that weekend, why not just put it in New York? It’s not like the game means anything, so why create a bad situation if you do not need to.
Manchester United and Barcelona did their version of pre season games, called friendlies, in America even though both teams are from Europe. They are smart enough to realize there is no point in home field advantage in a preseason game that has no effect on either teams seasons. Instead, they decided to do something productive with the games and tried to build interest for their clubs in America by playing friendlies over here. What the NHL is doing is counter productive to the city of Philadelphia, and does nothing to build its brand.
Why not play the game over in Sweden or Finland, where the game is growing and producing plenty of good NHL players. Maybe the Flyers and Islanders can pick up a few new fans over there.
The point is that the NHL has more than enough time to think out a reasonable solution to the problem. We will have to see how they solve this problem.
On a side note, Philadelphia Eagles fans have asked the pope to bless new Quarterback Sam Bradford’s knees for the upcoming season. Bradford is of course known as one of the more injury prone QBs in the NFL, and an injury to him could derail the Eagles playoffs hopes. However, one would assume blessing the Eagles is pretty far down the list of things to do for the pope, at least in terms of significance.