FiddySicks

The last name that was picked for a NHL expansion franchise was the Seattle Kraken. Whatever name the Utah team picks, I’m sure it will be terrible and reflect the unserious nature of the league they’re in.

The Sharks have one of the most wealthy owners in the league, but he’s pretty much absentee due to being based in Europe. It’s not so much a money issue as it is them expecting a Bay Area city to foot the bill on an arena for them. They’re basically playing the “That’s a nice hockey team you’ve got there. Would be are shame if they had to move” angle. Too bad that city has already publicly said they would probably be better off financially without the Sharks. It’s one of those things that’ll probably be solved relatively quickly as long as Sharks ownership isn’t dumb enough to try and pull a bunch of crap, and realize that if they want a new building, they’ll have to pay for it. If they don’t, I could legitimately see the city of San Jose deciding to not work with them at all. A lot of cities in the country, especially Bay Area cities, aren’t going to get exploited by these teams any longer. No matter of it costs them the team or not.

Yeah that Houston helmet sucks. The Texans got it correct the first time and really didn’t need any changes. This feels like forcing the issue just for change’s sake. We’ve seen a large group of teams already ditch their bad idea Nike changes and revert to classic looks. I guarantee we’ll be seeing the Texans do the same in 5-10 years.

I like these a lot, and think this is what they should’ve been wearing the whole time. And OF COURSE after all the work it took hiding these, the :censored:ing distributor is the one that ends up leaking them. Fanatics with a rusty sword all the way to hell. What a dog :censored: company.

I have a buddy from college who has a big job with them and he’s pretty devastated about all this. I kinda feel like he should’ve seen some of this coming, but I went through something similar a few years ago with Republic, so I get the frustration. He summed up the feeling as “:censored:ty and bizarre”, and that’s a pretty good way to put it. It’s like having a tree fall on your house. You can see that it looks pretty precarious, but you’ll probably be able to get it figured out before disaster strikes, right? The neighbors don’t think so, and you don’t have the money to get something that massive moved, hopefully the city will help! It’s technically their tree, right? Then boom, tree falls, house is destroyed, and it’s time to move and start fresh. What a stupid feeling.

They’re definitely one of those teams that have been coasting of the success of a single championship from more than 20 years ago, but they forgot the whole part about actually winning a championship.

We’re so much closer than people realize to having the San Diego Sharks or something equally dumb.

I kind of consider the Falcons to be the Diamondbacks of football from a design standpoint. Their first look was good but maybe a bit hokey. They updated it to something more refined, but it just doesn’t hit quite the same. That leaves them with a primary set that everyone is pretty ehh on, and a full throwback look that everyone loves, but you can see the reasons why they don’t want to just go back to that. So that leaves them trying to straddle the two eras and it leaves basically nobody really all that happy.

That’s a good point, and I hadn’t really considered that part of it. My area is going through a bit of that (on a much smaller scale, of course) with the Sharks and Knights. There are a disturbing amount of Knights fans where I live, and none of these fans seem to actually be from here. People who grew up here wouldn’t ever root for some :censored:ty Vegas team. That’s still essentially Los Angeles, Nevada as far as we’re concerned.

So not quite as big as I thought, but still very robust, and more so than SLC. I get why the league wants it. If. Done right, it could be a moderate success. I’m not sure it’s worth all the work, though. But looking at that list, SLC slots in right between Nashville and Pittsburgh. It’s definitely not as out of the question for the league as I originally thought. If they aren’t a total dumpster fire like they’ve been in Phoenix, they may end up being a decent little success. But, just like Phoenix, is it going to be worth all the extra work?

Phoenix is (I think) the 4th biggest media market in the country. Even if it’s a bit of a small flop, it’s still probably more successful than an enthusiastic Salt Lake City. Problem is, it was never just a little flop with the Coyotes, but an ENORMOUS wet turd slapping repeatedly against the pavement. I don’t think Phoenix ever has the chance to be a huge hockey hotbed, because it contradicts the whole vibe of the area. It’s already a literal hotbed. A sheet of ice and a wool hockey jersey you’ll have to wear into June just doesn’t make any sense. But even still, you’ve got like 8 million people to work with. Like, half of which are people who fled from actual hockey country. It’s like putting an Einstein Bros in Sky Harbor airport. Nobody really wants Einstein Bros, but it’s just there on the way to the gate and they charge for drinks on the plane now. Might as well Now repeat that a few million times. The Coyotes were exactly that, but their Einstein Bros was in the Mesa-Gateway airport. Nobody’s going out of their way for that garbage.

Man, every league just abandoning a centuries worth of moral ideology to link up with the gaming industry sure is going great, isn’t it? Lifetime ban for Jontay Porter

Welp. That was a pretty fun decade.

Yup. It was almost that exactly. There’s just something about St. Louis Cardinals fans and this forum. We’ve gotten SO much good content from them over the years. Then we had The Admiral pull a Hannibal Burress on Cosby to that fanbase and I haven’t been able to see them in the same light since.

It’s also really so hard to explain to someone how difficult it is to find the motivation to go to a hockey game when you’re just constantly soaked in sweat. Theres a vibe to Phoenix, and hockey kind of runs counterintuitive to that.