Before long, Jaromir Jagr will set the NHL record for most goals by a player 43 or older.
He has a team-leading seven so far, and he needs nine more to establish the new mark.
Let us hope that this – and any other record the ageless wonder reaches this season – happens during a road game, because Jagr’s Florida Panthers play before embarrassingly small audiences.
This Panthers team have too few fans.
Their average attendance last year was a league-low 11,265. The figure so far this season is given as 12,830. That works out to 75.3 per cent of capacity.
But a lot of those paying customers are either invisible or not bothering to show up. Consider the scene when the Buffalo Sabres visited last week.
A bunch of rows, each about eight seats long, near the Buffalo net went: empty row, empty row, empty row, three people in a row, one person, two people. Near centre ice was a five-row rectangle that was empty. Not one fan.
At the Florida end of the rink, in a corner section of prime seats, the fans-per-row went like this: one, one, one, one, one, zero, one, one, one, zero. This is attendance so low it could be rendered as binary code.
Jagr and the Panthers deserve better, and before the NHL expands (front-runners: Las Vegas and Quebec City) the team ought to haul themselves out of Miami, a city with a spotty reputation for supporting its major teams. Baseball’s Marlins last season ranked 28th among 30 teams. The NFL Dolphins were among the bottom seven in seats-sold percentage.
Oh, and the owner of that record for most goals by a player who began the season age 43 or older? That would be the great Gordie Howe, who scored 15 goals at age 51, as a Hartford Whaler, in 1979/80.
rmckenzie@thenational.ae
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