The_Admiral

The first half of the dark age was truly bleak, all Vince Carter and Allen Iverson taking bad shots and missing them [EDIT: ugh, the New Jersey Nets, UGH], but the back end of the dark age had the '04 Pistons smacking down the proto-superteam Lakers, the fun Suns teams, and the '07 Warriors beating the Mavericks to close it out. Fond memories of staying up all night watching Inside the NBA with a big bag of Taco Bell and a tank of Baja Blast.

The era of Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, and LeBron James was overall a good one, though. 

2 hours ago, GDAWG said:

They do know that the Boston Celtics exist right?   Right?  

Yeah, it seems like the genesis of this was "hey, remember how the Celtics took their four or five Hartford games away when the new Garden opened? That sucked." And I'm sure it did, but Hartford essentially got a top-flight NCAA program--men's and women's--to more than fill the gap. If there's no hope for the Whalers, then there's less than zero for the Fightin' Fents of Springfield Mass.

People lament the stifling, non-marketing-friendly nature of hockey culture and how you're not really allowed to show people up on the ice and own them online and so on. It just doesn't seem to make sense. But it turns out there are good reasons for a lot of things we do that don't make sense, and in this case, it's that hockey is the cruelest and most fickle of mistresses, and the speed and severity at which your good luck can go bad can make you look, in a way that I truly believe is unique among pro sports, like the biggest bleeding gaping ass of all time. And that's where the meme team is at these days.

"Utahyeti" sounds like some Jersey English corruption of an Italian word. Gabagool! Marrone!

Wrong: Yeti's

More Wrong: Yet-TAY

Not Even Wrong: Yet-TAY's

Or just any NHL player.

Took another stroll through Lincoln Park and Bucktown yesterday, where Lincoln Yards continues not to exist. I bet the state would be happy to help the developer pull the ripcord on that one, but I'm just not sure whether a stadium fits.

EDIT: as I look at it, a stadium might fit, but maybe not enough parking, and 2000N/1600W is too far from the West Loop to make it easy for everyone to take the train in. You'd also have to rebuild the Armitage station to allow Red Line trains to stop, which might not work.

Well, the bones of the bad idea say 1997-1998, but the bad logo says "last week on Fiverr."

6 hours ago, Old School Fool said:

 

I actually found a screenshot of said Mariners look from when I was playing Road to the show.

 

Non-binary create-a-player having the time of their life wearing the bad Mariners logo!

15 hours ago, tBBP said:

the 60s drive-thru-inspired original branding

I have never once heard that the Tampa Bay Devil Rays were inspired by '60s drive-thrus.

Let's do this all again in five years having learned nothing.

I think that was also the year when the Utah Jazz' tagline for the year was "I Can't Wait" because someone told their marketing department "you need to get me a slogan for the year, I can't wait." Creativity was on an extended bathroom break around that time, I think.

18 hours ago, MiK said:

The era of NBA paint-bucket redesigns was infuriating and this one the most of all. Turned a work of art into a big blue blob so they could piggyback off the Mavericks.

I think what I still can't get past more than anything is that they tried to make a move against Chicago while staying in Cook County. Chicago and Cook County aren't officially consolidated like San Francisco or Philadelphia, but the two hardly have an adversarial relationship--broadly speaking, what's good for the city is good for the county, and losing the Bears would have been bad for the city. (Of course, keeping them under Saint Kevin's onerous terms might be even worse.) And so no one except the McCaskeys could be that surprised when the county assessor found a way to hit them with a tax bill they couldn't afford and scuttled their plans. Arlington Heights was going to be in its own county once upon a time, but then the northwest suburbs started voting Democratic and I haven't heard about it since. Maybe the Bears had bad intel there too.

I can still see an open-air stadium on Roosevelt with mostly private funds. Something like what the Seahawks have with covered stands. Bears, Fire, Red Stars. No ambitious surrounding development. Maybe Beyonce can split the difference and only do a ten-night residency.

2 hours ago, Sodboy13 said:

Governor Pritzker had a few more words to add today after the big showcase for Divine Intervention Stadium.

 

 

It is bonkers that the guy born into ten-figure generational wealth is better at understanding this than the unionist semi-socialist organizer from the West Side, but here we are.

Do you suspect, as I do, that Pritzker is still cosmically annoyed with the Bears for their initial "we bought Arlington Park, now do as we tell you for we are the Bears" stunt and is not really going to let them get away with continuously trying to big-time everyone? It feels like the Bears have been operating under an old paradigm where the governor of Illinois only exists to officially open the state fair. Just inept at every turn.

Yeah, Lambeau Field and Soldier Field are both Ships of Theseus, except more a Lifeboat of Theseus in Chicago's case.  Even with Yankee Stadium before and after the renovation, they looked like the same place. 2003 Soldier Field's seating bowl is a completely different shape from the original, which lopped off the end of the stadium and actually had more seats facing the endzones than the sidelines.

EDIT: 

Weird old building.

Oh, and Warren also said the stadium would draw 77,000 each to the men's and women's Final Fours. And then he said Chicago would get World Cup games. GENIUS, the next World Cup in the United States is in two years; when, pray tell, do you think the next one will be? At the rate they're going, the Bears would be replacing the new stadium before it ever came back here!

I loathe this team.

There's a lot wrong with Soldier Field. It's too small, the field doesn't drain right, it's a pain in the ass to drive to, nor is it terribly accessible by transit relative to Wrigley, Comiskey, the United Center, UIC Pavilion, Northwestern's stadium, the new DePaul arena, and pretty much every other sports venue. The only one harder to not-drive to is the Horizon. Most of all, it's absolutely hideous, which is amplified by the Packers doing a terrific job improving Lambeau at the same time.

But it's exactly what the Bears asked for. They wanted seats close to the sidelines, many more luxury boxes, and a low capacity to goose demand and keep out the poors, and that's basically what they got. They were gifted a stadium on their terms and 20 years later asked for another. And thanked God for Kevin Warren. Despicable.

You'd have to be a grade-A moron at Bovine University to think you can and should drive right up to the doorstep of a building on the Chicago lakefront, but the parking doesn't exist because this stadium won't exist.

You can't take the L to the University of Chicago because a pastor had the tracks torn down for his real estate investments. What the hell is this guy doing?

What I witnessed today is one of the most bizarre presentations I've ever seen. 

A pastor thanked God for giving us Kevin Warren and prayed that the Bears would be granted public funding for a stadium. So if you've been watching the Bears hire like five different "chief stadium officers" and asked "what is is that Kevin Warren actually does," the answer is "tell the clergy to praise God for his existence." Then Kevin Warren said that he almost missed a Beyonce concert because it rained and that with a domed stadium, she and others would do 20-night residencies here. He said "it is a fixed roof dome. It will be very bright. You will need to wear sunglasses," which was a Casio preset and a Wheaties slogan away from being Wesley Willis lyrics. He asked "who wouldn't want to go to Chicago for the Super Bowl," to which the answer is "everyone." The stadium rendering is just Allegiant Stadium with the field switched out, which is at least better than the Arlington Heights rendering that was just an opaque white cube.  And then they got coy about maybe running back to Arlington Heights anyway. I saw this on my lunch break, so I can only assume that when someone asked Brandon Johnson how they're going to pay for this with "no new taxes" while also requiring billions of dollars in taxes, he said "help help I'm having a panic attack" and ran away.

They obviously did this today so that everyone would forget about it when they draft Caleb Williams. I don't think they thought any of this through.

45 minutes ago, Sodboy13 said:

If you go "Black Diamonds" and work off Smith's color scheme remarks, there's something to be made of purple, sky blue, black, and sparkle silver. Maybe you could ape the '90s Jazz a little and make the hem striping evoke a mountain range and... Crap, I just realized I'm making the Colorado Avalanche on a bad monitor.

Utah has a long tradition of borrowing from Denver on the NBA side of things, so I guess it's just as well that they start doing it with hockey and the perils of snow-covered mountains, too.

9 hours ago, jp1409 said:

Nuggets current branding is awful... 

What else is new?

Black Diamonds is compelling. 

One more "Soakers" joke and I start trying to give adults shaken baby syndrome.