zubazpirate

Clicked the link, and it looks like the spiritual heir to the Riders BFBS jerseys of the Y2K era

I might know a place where Utah could get a good deal on some Yeti-themed jerseys

The NHL leaves a lot of money on the table by having only one NHL team in all of southern/southwestern Ontario. (Well, Buffalo has a presence in the Niagara Peninsula and Detroit is Windsor's NHL team, but those barely move the needle relative to the GTHA and what a second NHL team would be able to pull off there.) In some respects it's amazing that the league hasn't been able to broker a deal with MLSE for a second GTHA team.

Salt Lake City seems like a weird landing pad for the NHL. It's a pretty small market (smaller than Calgary and Edmonton from a population standpoint, although I'm sure their GDP is a fair bit higher), and it already has a significant competitor in the form of an established NBA team. Usually the NHL only goes for smaller markets when it's clearly the biggest game in town (Columbus, Raleigh, most Canadian cities). Maybe they'll be able to make it work, but it seems odd to me that they'd choose a small, relatively crowded market as opposed to a huge city like Houston. Even a place like San Diego is significantly bigger and without direct competition (the NBA and NHL teams up the road in LA/OC don't really count).

I had a lot of jerseys for various teams in my teens and early 20s, but I only bought one in my 30s...a jersey for my favourite team that I'd wear to games and not really anywhere else. Then around the time I hit 40 my oldest kid really got into sports and I ended up buying a total of seven more jerseys, all for the various home teams. I wear them to games but not really anywhere else. They're hockey and football jerseys, so it would feel a bit odd at this point in my life to wear one around town randomly, although I used to do it all time when I was 17. I also don't want to get them messed up, I like keeping them more or less pristine. I'll probably just hand them down to the kid at some point, I'm sure he will appreciate them. I've built up a pretty good jersey collection for him, he's almost 11 and he has, I'd estimate, probably about 40 different jerseys.

Presenting Valour FC. The whites are inspired by the Winnipeg Fury of the CSL's looks of the late 80s, and the darks feature Indigenous designs. Kind of surprised they're still going with the OneSoccer jersey sponsor look given everything that's happened.

I'm not that familiar with the Chase Center... was it actually built with hockey in mind, or is it a basketball-first venue like Barclays Center where hockey would require massive compromises? I guess the same questions could be asked about the post renovation Oakland Arena, for that matter.

It's sad, but it is offset by the fact that the entire range of major league and college sports are just a short drive away. As a NHL fan I find it annoying that the Sharks play in San Jose instead of the "real" Bay Area. If only they could move to the Oakland Arena. Sigh. That would give Oakland a major league presence once again.

Not to get too off topic here, but ATL doesn't "feel" like a big airport, let alone the world's busiest. It just feels like a bunch of small/midsized airports mashed together and connected by PlaneTrain. It has nowhere near the gravitas of a place like Hong Kong, Dubai, Heathrow, etc.

It's not impossible to imagine a scenario where the WNBA leapfrogs ahead of MLS and becomes the first true major league focused on women's sports (leaving aside well established individual women's leagues like the LPGA, WTA, etc.) . If the WNBA got a critical mass of personalities it could take the "next step" the same way that the NBA did in the late 80s/early 90s. ...but we are nowhere near that point right now. MLS is a niche league but the WNBA is ultra-niche.

I'm not a soccer guy so I admit I'm not really tuned into the culture. But having to come up with a new look every year sure leads to a lot of contrived designs that just reek of a designer struggling to come up with something in the face of a looming deadline.

The only reasonable response to this silliness? Just don't buy them.

I think you make a good case for soccer as the fourth (or frankly, higher) ranked US sport. But soccer interest is too fractured to rank MLS as a league over the NHL. So much soccer fandom in North America is directed at the big fish (Premier League, Bundesliga, etc.), the "old country" leagues and international teams that MLS struggles to capture attention on a national level.* Not to say that MLS couldn't get there, it is still a somewhat new league after all. But it's simply not there yet. * the NFL and MLB are the opposite situations where they capture virtually every football and baseball fan in the US. It's almost absurd to imagine a dedicated baseball fan who is totally unaware of what's happening in MLB, for example.

I wonder if in cases like that it may be a situation of a club team that gets turned into a varsity program? I know that, for instance, the University of Regina's sports teams are called the Cougars but the football team is called the Rams because it was a pre-existing standalone junior football program that was absorbed into the university's athletics program.

Interesting, thank you. Some of them make sense (Gentlemen doesn't really work for a women's team) and some identities are more closely related than others . But why Lady Techsters instead of just Bulldogs? The decision making behind some of these is curious.

I think Wikipedia gets it right: List of American and Canadian cities by number of major professional sports franchises - Wikipedia You have the traditional "Big Four", and then after that there is an expanded definition of "Big Six" which includes MLS, and in the Canadian context, the CFL. So for the US, MLS is realistically the fifth major league. That's pretty much it for leagues with a legitimate claim to being major league. I agree with the take that has NASCAR and other such events like golf, tennis (even boxing, UFC etc.) categorized separately as tours or what have you. There are other leagues that could one day reach major league status like the WNBA, NLL, etc. but I don't think they could be said to be there yet, and probably won't be anytime soon. I think NCAA is a totally different animal even though by viewership/attendance at its highest levels, you could definitely make an argument that it should be considered a major league.

I always thought it was a bit odd how the University of Alberta's varsity sports teams had different names for the men's teams and the women's. The men's teams are the Golden Bears, while the women's teams are the Pandas. I'm a bit hazy on the history but I understand it dates back to the 40s or 50s when the earliest women's varsity teams adopted the Pandas name as distinct from the Golden Bears. Which was an unusual choice for an identity given that, as I understand it, pandas are not typically found in Northern Alberta. However, it's interesting to see that the practice of gendered team names and logos has persisted over the years. Are there other collegiate teams that have also have identities split by gender?

On the whole I like these, they are distinctive without being over the top. But I think they'd be better without the clashing trim... blue and green is a God-tier colour combo but red and green just don't do it for me except as maybe a Christmas-specific theme.

Well yes, that was my point, there aren't really any potential WHL expansion sites in Canada because of the enormous capital costs associated with a team. Nanaimo and Winnipeg are two places that could easily a support a team on an operating basis, but once you factor in the $80 million-$120 million arena that each team would need, then the math falls apart. Places like Grande Prairie and Lloydminster could support WHL teams too if they could use the type of arena that was standard in WHL back in the 1980s, but they can't realistically pull off getting a large 5,000 seat venue built. BC is a bit of a different situation altogether because so many of the non-WHL markets are locked up by the BCHL.

In some ways junior hockey is boxing itself in - at least, in Canada - with its insistence on relatively large venues the same way that the CFL did in the 70s and 80s when NFL-calibre (for the time) stadiums briefly became the norm, and to this day the expectation is that a new CFL team will have a 25,000+ seat pro stadium from day one, when the league's economics don't make a strong case for that. That's why the CFL hasn't added a new Canadian market since 1954. And so it is with major junior hockey where the expectation is now a minimum 5,000 seat building with all the pro-style bells and whistles. That's really tough for a smaller locale to pull off, or even for a bigger locale in cases where the junior team is playing a secondary or tertiary role (as we saw with Winnipeg). Moose Jaw's rink is almost comically large given the town's size, and it cost them a fortune. I'm sure it would cost substantially more to build today. There are few if any places left in Western Canada that can pull this off, which is why the WHL's centre of gravity is shifting to the US. Far more larger towns that are willing and able to get those big arenas built. Brandon is an interesting case, the Keystone Centre is pushing 60 years old and although it has been upgraded, it's not hard to see the day coming when they will have to build a new rink. It will be a struggle to get it done, as a new WHL arena built according to the league's wishlist is likely a $100 million plus project nowadays.

It feels like the CHL - the OHL and WHL in particular - has more or less reached its limits in Canada. The cost of entering is so steep, you basically need a 1/3 scale NHL arena at 1/3 the cost of a NHL building, and not many small towns with big dreams can pull that off. You could bake sale your way into the kind of Centennial Arena barns that our grandfathers played in, but you can't build a 6,000 seat palace with luxury amenities that way. I get the impression that the US has an exponentially higher number of people who can easily write seven or eight figure cheques to get the ball rolling on big arena projects. At least that's my impression from the local arenas I've been to in the US. So it's not shocking at all that the OHL and WHL are looking south of the border for growth. Maybe this BCHL-style elevated junior A type of league is where the growth opportunities are for junior hockey in Canada.

TBH I haven't thought of what the future would look like if the CanPL implodes, but I think that suggestion is as good as any assuming the USL is willing to take some Canadian teams on board. Some of the clubs are strong entities, Wanderers, Forge, Cavalry and Atletico all come to mind in that regard. Valour and Pacific are a coin toss. I would not expect Vancouver and York to make the jump... without a domestic league that needs to have a footprint in the largest Canadian cities, there really is no need to continue those money-pit teams that have an impossible task of drawing fan attention away from not only MLS, but also the national teams which play a lot of their matches in both of those cities. It's possible that the world just wasn't ready for CanPL, but some of the individual clubs are definitely viable. I think the fans would follow, I don't think they are especially invested in the CanPL brand specifically. The fans in Ottawa certainly have a past when it comes to the USL.

The analyses I've read suggest that while the Canadian national team will likely come out of this just fine, it's the CanPL which is in serious trouble. Demand for Canadian national teams is soft but sustainable, but CanPL demand is very weak. TSN and Sportsnet aren't interested, and CBC doesn't have the time/money/resources. Other than Mediapro, the only production company with the ability to step in and produce CanPL matches is Dome Productions (Rogers/Bell), and they are unlikely to be interested in stretching their resources to cover the CanPL when they have so many more lucrative things on their plate. I think it's fair to say that without Mediapro's money and technical know-how when it comes to production, a cloud of uncertainty is going to start hovering over the CanPL. Unless CSB gets this figured out quickly, the continued existence of the CanPL is going to be increasingly in question.

I think if I was a fan I'd be more annoyed that my Mississauga-branded merch was now out of date as opposed to having to drive a few extra kilometres to attend games.

I'm in Winnipeg and we recently went through a brief spell of having the WHL in town. Despite being an extremely successful team with several elite prospects, it struggled to gain any kind of a following. There were many nights where the Ice played to crowds of under 1,000 people. They just could not find any real traction. With the NHL and AHL already well established in a smaller city, there just wasn't much of a market for a relatively unknown junior product despite the fact that they had an excellent product at a great price. What this tells me is that in most cities, you will find maybe one or two flagship teams with large, passionate fanbases that kind of carry the flag for the entire city, they are the focal point for civic pride when it comes to sport. So the Oilers in Edmonton, the Tiger-Cats in Hamilton, the Wanderers in Halifax, the Knights in London, etc. Then you have maybe a second tier of a couple teams that have smaller but still passionate fanbases. Examples of "mid" teams might be, say, the Hitmen in Calgary, the Sea Bears in Winnipeg, the Argos in Toronto, the U of S Huskies in Saskatoon. Once you get below that you are down to the teams that are kind of floundering without much of a devoted fanbase at all. I'm thinking like Valour in Winnipeg, the Steelheads, the Scarborough Shooting Stars, the U of C Dinos, etc. The bottom line is that the seventh or eighth most popular sports team in any city, whether it's Winnipeg or Toronto, is going to look pretty lame in terms of fan support.