Dallas Stars Should Be Free of All Bandwagon Fans

Fans make the hockey world go round, but the Dallas Stars should have more sincere and devoted ones after this season.

Over the last few seasons, with the Dallas Stars’ sudden ascent into greatness, many fans lamented that they’d picked up a few bandwagoners along the way.

First things first: bandwagoners are not simply new and Stars-inexperienced fans. They are the ones who pretend that they’ve loved the team from the start but really have no true investment in them. They can’t tell you anything important about the team, but they want to make it up in order to fit in with liking a team that’s currently “in.”

These would be folks that traipsed into the AAC wearing a jersey bearing the last name of a player whose first name they couldn’t guess to save their lives. Fans who had no bearing or impression of the Stars as a team that scraped the bottom of the barrel.

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However, the Stars might not have as many of these pseudo-fans as they used to. The collection of bandwagon fans is common for teams like Dallas that abruptly rise to some level of greatness. What’s also common is that those teams can effortless “weed out”, so to speak, those bandwagoners with just a little bit of failure.

Or in this case, more than a little bit. The Dallas Stars’ management has said in the past that it was aware of team picking up some fans who were just along for a good time, and didn’t see it as a problem. The Stars, as a Texas hockey team, would enjoy any publicity and popularity it could.

But bandwagon fans don’t serve you very well when you’re down. Coincidentally, if a fan is concerned with a team winning, all it’ll take is some loss to scare them off. So if the Dallas Stars had accumulated any bandwagon fans in the season before this last one, I think it’s safe to say that you can come out- they’re gone now.

Here are just a few reasons why the Dallas Stars no longer have both feet firmly planted in bandwagon territory.

This entire season, are you kidding me? Really, the whole thing was a bandwagon-destroyer if I’ve ever seen one. When the Stars were putting together long and hopeless strings of losses and hadn’t achieved multiple consecutive wins for months, that’s probably when some less devoted fans started to wise up. But granted, there were specific components of the season that acted more as bandwagoner-repellent than others.

There was severe roster whiplash involved. Because the Stars battled injuries all season long, on any given night, there were multiple new names attached to new jerseys skating around- mostly call ups, but also from trades.

For bandwagon fans, this much jostling around of players is certain death. When even devoted fans can’t predict accurately what the lines will hold, it’s bound to frustrate a fan not there for the long haul.

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The Stars never had their cathartic “comeback” moment. Even though we’d been hoping for one and predicting them out of our need for their existence, Dallas never really had a moment where we sighed and got all of our frustrations and disappointments out and felt ready to move forward.

The whole season was more of a sludge, and although the Stars did experience some good wins here and there, it was never enough at one time to satisfy a fan that’s just there to enjoy wins and feel good.

With a new coach and many more changes likely to come, nothing is certain. The Stars organization may be up for some serious change in the next few seasons. With Ken Hitchcock at the helm and some inevitable trade and player shifting bound to occur, there’s really a negative chance that things will stay the same as they are now.

Hitchcock has said that he wants to take the Stars back to their 15-16 glory, which is what bandwagoners came along for in the first place. But the Stars will never really, completely look like that past self again, either. Pieces of that successful team are gone, and the coaching approach will obviously still be different.

If any bandwagoners have made it through this Stars season unscathed, the likely changes through the summer and heading into the new season might be enough to steal the appeal of being a Stars bandwagoner.

In the end, it is good for the Dallas Stars to enjoy a broad fan base with a great reach. I mean, heck, I’m an East Coast fan who has never seen the Stars play in the AAC. But during bad times, that’s when families- and fan bases- pull together and help each other through. The nature of bandwagon fans always keeps them from holding on when the chips are down.

Next: Dallas Stars Sign Mattias Janmark To One Year Extension

So that’s not to say that the Stars won’t pick up more in the future. We almost hope they do, since it’s something that inevitably happens when a team achieves success. But until then, we the few and the proud get to endure whatever changes are ahead alone, but together.