Sodboy13

But they were going to build such a beautiful facility in Dixmoor...

I don't think he understands how the internet works, to be honest.

They've been de facto home games the past few years. I think there are also lots of transplants in the area; Bears-Cardinals games in Tempe tended to be awash in navy and orange.

The licensed product if I had the available funds. If not maybe I'd get a t-shirt/sweat shirt or two of my favorite team. Right. I think the problem lies in the fact that the vast majority of the sports-apparel-purchasing population is ignorant to the devil in the details. They just go "Oh, it's so cheap because it comes right from the overseas supplier," or "it's a great deal on eBay," and they don't notice the difference in details or quality, no matter how glaring we jersey nerds may find it. I have a friend who bought several baseball jerseys from a bootleg site, and he had me take a look at them. I pointed out the inaccuracies in design and construction I saw, but they were things he - and probably 99% of the non-obsessive public outside of this board - wouldn't notice. The problem here is on several fronts. Jersey prices keep spiraling upward at a time when most people's paychecks are not, the jersey is now seen as an "essential" accessory of sports fandom in a way it wasn't 10 or 20 years ago, and teams and leagues (except for the Canadiens) haven't gotten out in front of this. They haven't marketed directly to fans to explain why that $50 jersey on eBay isn't "worth it", and seem to be ignoring the revenue problem that's filling their arenas nightly. I don't think the average consumer is like loogodude, who is just Hard Trollin' at this point. But many are ignorant to the problem, and I think teams and leagues need to do a far better job addressing it.

Kill. It. With. Fire.

They've got just enough money to buy the team another year of league ownership in the desert.

Jamison, Jamieson, let's call the whole thing off.

Wait a minute. Hasn't it already come to light that Greg Jamison was never interested, but that the potential ownership group was being led by Kelowna businessman Gary Jamieson? Is Roenick bull ing that hardcore?

And now, for my next impression: Don Cornelius.

Nets games until April.

Gary Bettman wants to own it, and he gets to without having to front any of his own money.

Hockey, why ya gotta treat me so bad?

I think it's a combination of factors at work here. 1) Not enough people in the accepted national sports conversation care about who might own the Phoenix Coyotes, or any NHL franchise, for that matter; 2) Those who do care long ago realized that "potential Coyotes owner" carries roughly the same amount of likelihood as an HFBoards trade proposal; 3) So many names and groups have been tossed around so haphazardly in this prolonged mess, Elaine Scruggs & Gary Bettman could hold a joint presser tomorrow announcing the Coyotes had been tentatively sold to a group of leprechauns for 17 pots of gold on the condition that an O'Charley's gets built at Westgate, and you'd find very few eyebrows raised. In other words, for anyone who cares, there's probably a fair bit of fatigue and resignation. Why bother looking into who might buy the Coyotes? They're not going to buy them anyway.

That quote just seems incomplete somehow without "Ron Paul 2012" thrown in there somewhere.

Attention concept creators: Make a concept you're really proud of, sucker Icethetics into featuring it, and you'll be able to get a hard copy for $50 in a couple months' time. This one is fantastic because the counterfeiters are probably gonna lose money on it.

Definitely the case with Ryan Lambert, Puck Daddy's resident smug, uninformed contrarian. Only time he's come off as halfway-decent is when he pitted himself against John "Ovi's on steroids because his mom lived in Russia in the '70s" Stiegerwald, who is pretty much one of the worst sports people around.

If the Blues get sent to Quebec to keep this farce alive, I'm going down to Glendale with a sledgehammer and turning the Jobberdome into a parking lot my damn self.

Oh man, in this thread, of all places.

Taking two different things said by two different people and making them into one argument tends to yield awful logic. Kansas City isn't off the list because of a one-off lackluster exhibition; it's off the list because no one has wanted to pay to put a team there since Boots Del Biaggio, which means that no one has wanted to pay to put a team there, ever. And AEG is reportedly filling arena dates for Sprint Center without much problem despite the closest thing to an anchor tenant being the (baaaahahaha) Command of the Arena League. Does anyone familiar with the area know if the Arena District in Kansas City has stopped sucking yet? I thought I heard things around there were kinda dire.

No city needs a hockey team, or any pro sports franchise, for that matter. It is simply a question of want. Houstonians have liked their Aeros enough to keep the team going relatively strong for 18 seasons, but there is a gaping gulf between minor-league sustainability and major-league success. For now, the money doesn't appear to be there.

Houston has an NHL-caliber arena, but no local major sports ownership has expressed serious interest in bringing NHL hockey to town. Hartford doesn't have a suitable arena (smaller than Winnipeg's and 30 years older), nor does it have anyone with the necessary funding interested in any form of sports ownership in the market. All it has is a minor-league-caliber owner trying to ride a wave of nostalgia for all it's worth.

I'd say that's a fairly accurate ranking, though it bears noting that there's a very steep drop-off of plausibility after the first one on the list.

I could see Markham, IL as an expansion destination before Markham, ON. Hey, the Vancouver Grizzlies got courted by Dixmoor!

Mmmm, that's some good baseless speculation. Markham still ranks behind Atlanta on likely NHL relocation/expansion cities.

Cross-referencing from the NHL Season thread: 10,976 announced tonight, on another $1 hot dog/soda/beer night, for a matchup of two division leaders. The ultrs-cheap food and drink is not attracting any additional butts to those seats. Now the Jobber normally has one of the highest beer prices in the league, at $8.00 for a 16-ouncer. I think I remember reading that the dollar beers are a smaller size, at 12 ounces. So for each of those dollar beers sold, the Coyotes are actually losing $5.00 in revenue, and not making up for it through additional ticket sales and accompanying additional concession and merchandise purchases. Bill Veeck, the baseball owner/pitchman known for filling caverns like Cleveland Stadium and Old Comiskey, once said something to the effect that it didn't matter how little he charged for tickets, so long as he filled the stadium with people who would spend on concessions. The Coyotes, then, would be doing things exactly backward.