The_Admiral

No one would have begrudged them a plain NHL sweater to hold up at the draft, but to drag it out over a year because Fanatics can't do anything except be given money is a joke.

I had a great idea during lunch to post Ryan Smith's logo concept based on his Jazz logo, which would just be the words "HOCKEY TEAM" in black athletic-block letters. Now I can't do that because he already did it. We're not done here, not by a long shot. EDIT: also, the Whalers moved out of Hartford without an official destination in place (what an indignity), and Karmanos still managed to draw the Flushing Toilet on a napkin somewhere in Michigan in time for the next season.

Brian Burke: "I had an idea: we pretend to be the Army and then Chris Pronger elbows everyone in the head" "Hey, that idea worked! I think I'll take a nap" [sleeps through 2008-2024] "hey hey uh wha ah ahhh what the hell's goin on I was just gonna go golfing there"

Is there another two-team market where the teams are NBA and NHL? It's not a configuration that comes to mind off the top of my head. Plenty of NFL + one of the other two, but that's still only partial overlap. Salt Lake City has the sort of demographics that the NHL likes to go after, but the problem is that that NHL-friendly demographic is deeply committed to the NBA. The Utah Jazz fanbase is much less given to writing about Kendrick Lamar lyrics; mostly they're just loud idiots who like rooting for their sports team. Again, I think there's going to be a major local/transplant fault line here with the hockey fans riding the SLUT to amazing craft breweries while the Mormons stick with the Jazz.

I get so tired of hearing "the NHL NEEDS to be in Phoenix." Or else what? Their RSN went out of business this year and people from other places will just watch their own teams. The NBA needs to be in Seattle more than the NHL needs to be in Phoenix and they're not there.

Adam Silver banning Donald Sterling made franchise values quadruple. How will terrible people benefit from this one?

Yeah, that's not a place for a hockey arena, that's a place for an office campus for something called "Telesystems Unlimited." Bullet dodged (but the Coyotes still probably should have moved to Hamilton).

Did some research and finally found the land they bought: https://www.google.com/maps/place/43°24'36.7"N+80°17'01.0"W/@43.4101914,-80.2861965,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d43.4101875!4d-80.2836216?entry=ttu This seems like it would have been a really terrible idea. Corel Centre II: Even Corellier.

Wasn't it like a big plot of land off an expressway interchange? Speaking of Copps renovations, I saw that after a series of moderately ambitious remodels that would put a whole new exterior around the seating bowl, they just settled for painting half of it black. They just find new layers of "what could have been" in that town, don't they?

The age of the hockey announcer is over. Now is the age of memes.

The league wasn't looking to expand in the 2000s, having overexpanded in the 1990s and paying the price for it with Lockout II: Expansion Fees Can't Paper Over Our Crap Anymore. Even if they were to expand, they wouldn't have expanded to Hamilton for the same reasons they wouldn't have to Winnipeg and didn't to Quebec City (how's that "deferred expansion" going, anyway?). After they wouldn't even let him move the lousy dead-ass Predators, the subterfuge of buying the Coyotes out of bankruptcy court and winning the eventual lawsuit was the only play he had left to make money on a Southern Ontario NHL team. Incidentally, I swear there were reports that Copps Coliseum was only to be a stopgap while they built a new arena in, of all places, Cambridge, roughly equidistant to Hamilton and Kitchener-Waterloo, but I can't find any sources. But why would I imagine that?

To put a finer point on it, it's a metropolitan area that's about 120 miles north to south and, I dunno, like 10 miles west to east. It's a long boi. This is the same problem South Florida has, where everything is either relatively nearby or requires long drives up and down one artery, which I think is worse than Phoenix's 360-degree sprawl. I don't have the stomach for "but all our REAL fans live in Provo!"

Move the Jazz to New Orleans and the Hornets to Charlotte and the Bobcats to Salt Lake City and the basketball to hockey.

The company for which Salt Lake City is a company town would not be happy. They've declared the word "Mormon" a "victory for Satan" and have gone all in on "Latter-day Saints."

I don't think we touched upon this, but Salt Lake City was the Golden Knights' biggest secondary market and now that's gone, along with most of the rest of the Intermountain West that they'd been allowed to squat on. I believe the Golden Knights and Coyotes were both working with Scripps for their TV, so it's possible they get their games into Arizona now.

Wouldn't be the first time, would it, league that named four expansion markets at once?

HRification comes for everyone, even arcane special-interest message boards. How many warning points am I up to now?

The most amazing part of the John Chayka saga was that he was like "whatever you do, don't draft Mitch Miller, he stuffed urinal cakes in a disabled kid's mouth," then quit the team, then the team was so mad at him that they drafted Mitch Miller out of spite and everyone got really mad at them.

The line was "I am a Cardinal.", which is arguably funnier than the meme. We were all like 19 years old and stupid. HOWEVER, the Josh Hancock drunk-driving death was only 2.5 years before the Coyotes declared bankruptcy, which was almost 15 years ago. Time, man!

One of the very few local NBA broadcasters that matters or has ever mattered, I'd argue.

For anyone else so inclined, remember that "Today, we are all Cardinals" was never said by the person accused of saying it, just like how Edward G. Robinson never really says "who's your Moses now, n'yah, n'yah" in The Ten Commandments

That was the origin of the NHL owning and operating the Coyotes for four years. They went to court to stop Jerry Moyes from allowing Balsillie to buy the Coyotes out of bankruptcy court. The league said this was to protect their right to decide who owns which teams where, but if someone had bought the Senators out of bankruptcy to put them in San Diego, they wouldn't have lifted a finger. Mostly it was about protecting the Sabres (play in Buffalo) and Jeremy Jacobs (does business in Buffalo). The NHL even said in court that a Hamilton/Southern Ontario team would have been among their most profitable, they just weren't going to allow it. I think the Hamilton Tigers would've been kinda neat if they had loud barberpole sweaters and stuff.

The best situation would have been the Coyotes to Winnipeg and Thrashers to Quebec City both in 2011. A Hamilton '09/Winnipeg '11 scenario would have been okay too but my heart was never really in it for Hamilton, more of just a "hey what if." Seattle should have been expanded to long ago.

When you're right, you're right.

I think Phoenix would have had to have been an expansion for it to work. Acknowledge that there's not an NHL arena and build one. Take time to assemble a decent hockey-ops staff and business staff (whatever they inherited from the Jets was not it) and most of all, an owner who knows exactly what he's getting into. Not Minnesota guys who got derped by the worthless goddamn Timberwolves, not real estate speculators trying to get rich off a strip mall, not Wayne Gretzky, and not the parade of dopes who came in after the league. It needed to be a conscientious, from-the-ground-up project, but it wasn't, so it failed.