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NHL Anti-Thread: Bad Business Decision Aggregator


The_Admiral

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We've come a long way from them snapping a picture of a fax with a flip phone.

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On 1/25/2013 at 1:53 PM, 'Atom said:

For all the bird de lis haters I think the bird de lis isnt supposed to be a pelican and a fleur de lis I think its just a fleur de lis with a pelicans head. Thats what it looks like to me. Also the flair around the tip of the beak is just flair that fleur de lis have sometimes source I am from NOLA.

PotD: 10/19/07, 08/25/08, 07/22/10, 08/13/10, 04/15/11, 05/19/11, 01/02/12, and 01/05/12.

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Phoenix proper has the Suns, the Diamondbacks and the Cardinals, plus ASU. Plus, absurdly, great golfing.

 

It's been 20 years. Would there ever be a pro team more instantly forgotten than Coyote hockey?

1 hour ago, ShutUpLutz! said:

and the drunken doodoobags jumping off the tops of SUV's/vans/RV's onto tables because, oh yeah, they are drunken drug abusing doodoobags

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4 hours ago, DG_Now said:

Phoenix proper has the Suns, the Diamondbacks and the Cardinals, plus ASU. Plus, absurdly, great golfing.

 

It's been 20 years. Would there ever be a pro team more instantly forgotten than Coyote hockey?

 

Charlotte Bobcats... and if you wanna go back a ways, the Kansas City Scouts/Colorado Rockies (NHL), Cleveland Barons, San Diego Rockets, and Seattle Pilots.

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2 minutes ago, AstroBull21 said:

Fold the Coyotes and keep Vegas....

 

#BackTo30

i say move them to Vegas and have them be the Golden Knights (think Seattle or Portland Oregon would be better but Vegas has an owner). 

 

so long and thanks for all the fish.

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4 minutes ago, goalieboy82 said:

i say move them to Vegas and have them be the Golden Knights (think Seattle or Portland Oregon would be better but Vegas has an owner). 

 

Well technically Vegas has been established as an expansion team already, so contracting the Coyotes is the only choice.

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2 hours ago, goalieboy82 said:

i say move them to Vegas and have them be the Golden Knights (think Seattle or Portland Oregon would be better but Vegas has an owner). 

 

 

Seattle doesn't have a sufficient arena and still doesn't have the wheels turning on a replacement yet. In Portland, Paul Allen deemed the previous bargain-basement price of $170MM to be too expensive for what he was getting. What would you be looking at now in Portland, another Dallas Stars "sale" where the team goes for assumption of debt? Are the IceArizona people that wrecked that they'll give the team away? I mean, they may very well be, but at that point that's going to very great lengths to keep Quebec City out.

♫ oh yeah, board goes on, long after the thrill of postin' is gone ♫

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So, per the hfboards megathread, guess who missed payroll for their AHL players a few years back?

On 8/1/2010 at 4:01 PM, winters in buffalo said:
You manage to balance agitation with just enough salient points to keep things interesting. Kind of a low-rent DG_Now.
On 1/2/2011 at 9:07 PM, Sodboy13 said:
Today, we are all otaku.

"The city of Peoria was once the site of the largest distillery in the world and later became the site for mass production of penicillin. So it is safe to assume that present-day Peorians are descended from syphilitic boozehounds."-Stephen Colbert

POTD: February 15, 2010, June 20, 2010

The Glorious Bloom State Penguins (NCFAF) 2014: 2-9, 2015: 7-5 (L Pineapple Bowl), 2016: 1-0 (NCFAB) 2014-15: 10-8, 2015-16: 14-5 (SMC Champs, L 1st Round February Frenzy)

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Well since Shannon broached the subject first I will let the cat out of the bag. When I was a beat writer in Portland (ME) covering the Coyotes' AHL affiliate. They missed minor league payroll once during the 2013-14 season. It was covered by local ownership, although I do not know if they were refunded for the two-week pay period they covered. We approached them about information when heard about what was going on and the local ownership begged us not to report it because they were having their own financial issues with trying to rebuild the franchise after the lease dispute. We agreed to hold off on the story... Looking back I regret doing that knowing what I know now.

 

Lovely.

♫ oh yeah, board goes on, long after the thrill of postin' is gone ♫

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I'm glad admiral block-quoted, because I wasn't going to HFBoards and was just assuming the answer was "The Blues."

 

Also, good on you, local knob-polishing journalist. Your dereliction of duty saved the Portland Pirates!

 

...oh.

  • Like 2
On 1/25/2013 at 1:53 PM, 'Atom said:

For all the bird de lis haters I think the bird de lis isnt supposed to be a pelican and a fleur de lis I think its just a fleur de lis with a pelicans head. Thats what it looks like to me. Also the flair around the tip of the beak is just flair that fleur de lis have sometimes source I am from NOLA.

PotD: 10/19/07, 08/25/08, 07/22/10, 08/13/10, 04/15/11, 05/19/11, 01/02/12, and 01/05/12.

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Dear President Yarbrough and Speaker Mesnard:



Strong emotions rushed through me as I read the recent haughty comments from NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman and Coyotes Owner Andrew Barroway regarding their personally motivated announcement of the absolute impossibility of hockey succeeding in Glendale.

As the former Mayor of Glendale who had a front row seat for many of the City’s dealings with the NHL and the Coyotes, I cannot sit silently as they mislead the Arizona Legislature and unabashedly insult the community I love.

Mr. Bettman saw a tremendous future for Coyotes hockey in Glendale BEFORE the City of Glendale and its taxpayers committed $200 million to absorb the initial cost of arena construction and full cost of infrastructure construction in 2002. At that time, Bettman said of the arena “This is a great place for hockey, and we’re thrilled to be here.” At that same time he praised then-owner Steve Ellman and Wayne Gretzky, the Coyotes’ managing general partner, for providing stable ownership and building a playoff contender. “Everything you touch turns to gold,” he told Gretzky. Upon the venue’s opening in 2003, Bettman said “This building is a major step forward for this franchise and this franchise wouldn’t survive without it.”

If he indeed believed Glendale was unsuitable for the NHL, he did not express that opinion in 2010 as he was asking the City to partner with the league in shepherding the owner-less Coyotes through bankruptcy. That “partnership” required an annual $25 million subsidy from the City while the NHL searched for a new owner.

During the NHL’s search we endured one potential ownership group after another and heard why each new one was going to be the answer. It’s hard to remember all the names: Reinsdorf, Ice Edge Holdings, Hulsizer, Jamison. They all kind of run together, don’t they?

In late 2010 as a deal seemed to be reaching completion which would result in Matthew Hulsizer becoming owner of the Coyotes, Bettman said: “We believe that that Coyotes and NHL hockey can be successful in Glendale. The (bankruptcy) circumstances we went through a year and a half ago…we weren’t in a position to see things done right.” Alas, the Hulsizer deal never reached the back of the net.

After I retired as Mayor in January of 2013, Anthony LeBlanc emerged with yet another NHL-endorsed ownership group, Ice Arizona. At that time, Bettman said, “With ownership committed to making the franchise a success, with an opportunity for businesses and fans to know that there is no uncertainty, we think this franchise can do very, very well.”


Little did anyone know that the annual “management fee” Glendale gave this ownership group to operate the arena was instead transferred directly to the lenders from whom LeBlanc and partners had borrowed the money to buy the franchise. It was later discovered that the Coyotes had violated state law in hiring Craig Tindall, the former Glendale City Attorney who had been involved in lease negotiations on Glendale’s behalf. As a result, Glendale terminated its lease with the Coyotes in the summer of 2015. Even then, Bettman was still bullish about Glendale as a hockey market saying, “We’re committed to the market; we believe everything will be worked out and the team will play this season in Glendale and for years to come.”

So now we find ourselves in 2017 and from his midtown Manhattan offices, Bettman has a new bill of goods to sell. Forget everything he said previously. Now he wants you to believe him when he says hockey absolutely cannot work in Glendale. And you may remember - because it was in bold type - “the Arizona Coyotes must have a new arena location to succeed.”

A great deal of fast-talking and fuzzy math has come from Bettman, Barroway and LeBlanc but their message cannot be more clear: in their minds the Coyotes’ lack of success is Glendale’s fault. Disregard the fact that the team ranks last in the NHL in hockey spending, continually trades away top talent while it annually “builds for the future,” and spends next to nothing to market the team. I will say what they will not: the Coyotes position at the bottom of the standings is a leadership problem, not a location problem.

The facts are easy to verify. Before the Coyotes moved out of downtown Phoenix they ranked 29th in attendance out of the league of 30 teams. Their first year in the Glendale Arena they ranked 19th in attendance. Attendance stayed in that tier until the floundering team started losing their disappointed fans’ support.

Now the NHL and the Coyotes’ ownership group have hitched their wagons to a new scheme: Senate Bill 1149. After receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from Glendale, the NHL and Coyotes ownership are asking a much larger group of Arizona taxpayers for $225 million in public funding for another new arena. It’s the only way to make hockey work in Arizona, they tell us (again). This is the only solution, they say; this is what will make hockey thrive.

They say a lot of things.

The truth is that the Coyotes have a world-class, taxpayer-funded arena that is designed for hockey and is only 12 years old. They have a City Council and City Manager ready to work with them to achieve an equitable long-term lease.

This will be the fifth consecutive year that the Arizona Coyotes will have missed the playoffs and have been at the bottom of the league in attendance. Bettman, Barroway and LeBlanc would have you believe that arena location is to blame while ignoring that the team continually fails to invest in its on-ice product and properly market itself.

Rejecting SB1149 means rejecting twisted logic and excuses devoid of reason, and letting Bettman, Barroway and LeBlanc know that Arizonans are smarter than they think we are.

 

Very truly yours,
Hon. Elaine M. Scruggs

 

We may not know who will own the Coyotes, but we know who owned Gary Bettman.

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♫ oh yeah, board goes on, long after the thrill of postin' is gone ♫

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No, because he is still legitimately the smartest person in that league office since John Collins left, and yes, that is far more an indictment of the league than a compliment of Gary.

On 1/25/2013 at 1:53 PM, 'Atom said:

For all the bird de lis haters I think the bird de lis isnt supposed to be a pelican and a fleur de lis I think its just a fleur de lis with a pelicans head. Thats what it looks like to me. Also the flair around the tip of the beak is just flair that fleur de lis have sometimes source I am from NOLA.

PotD: 10/19/07, 08/25/08, 07/22/10, 08/13/10, 04/15/11, 05/19/11, 01/02/12, and 01/05/12.

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On 3/8/2017 at 1:02 PM, Sodboy13 said:

I'm glad admiral block-quoted, because I wasn't going to HFBoards and was just assuming the answer was "The Blues."

 

Also, good on you, local knob-polishing journalist. Your dereliction of duty saved the Portland Pirates!

 

...oh.

 

Nah, the Peoria Journal Star's hack of a beat writer would have run with the Rivermen missing payroll immediately since he knows no discretion.

On 8/1/2010 at 4:01 PM, winters in buffalo said:
You manage to balance agitation with just enough salient points to keep things interesting. Kind of a low-rent DG_Now.
On 1/2/2011 at 9:07 PM, Sodboy13 said:
Today, we are all otaku.

"The city of Peoria was once the site of the largest distillery in the world and later became the site for mass production of penicillin. So it is safe to assume that present-day Peorians are descended from syphilitic boozehounds."-Stephen Colbert

POTD: February 15, 2010, June 20, 2010

The Glorious Bloom State Penguins (NCFAF) 2014: 2-9, 2015: 7-5 (L Pineapple Bowl), 2016: 1-0 (NCFAB) 2014-15: 10-8, 2015-16: 14-5 (SMC Champs, L 1st Round February Frenzy)

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The Arizona Republic has generally been a booster of the Coyotes, but apparently asking for a new taxpayer-funded arena to replace their current taxpayer-funded arena was a bridge too far, because here's their Lazy Man's Editorial, a bunch of tweets and facebook posts buh-byeing the Coyotes

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♫ oh yeah, board goes on, long after the thrill of postin' is gone ♫

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4 hours ago, KittSmith_95 said:

Can we all agree Bettman should be canned? 

No, because firing Bettman changes nothing. He is the face of the league's owners. If he goes, he'll be replaced by another stooge.

 

If you want to change things, get rid of Jeremy Jacobs, for starters. He's one of the worst.

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