The_Admiral

13 minutes ago, Sport said:

A thing I think is interesting is most people's response has been "ahh yeah well probably for the best" Very few people defending Phoenix.

Not on this board, no, but the ass-grabbers on reddit are all holding each other and weeping about how Phoenix is really a great market that was done wrong by a horrible league that just gave up too soon. I get annoyed but then it's possible some of them are 14 years old and literally were not alive when Jerry Moyes first :censored:ed off.

Yeah, that's the other one. Arlington Heights will be worth it in the end because we'll get a WrestleMania. Maybe ours will set the record with 50 run-ins in a single match.

6 hours ago, GFB said:

You could get away with a name like Clippers or Barons or Zephyrs decades ago, but in the era of Kraken and Wild and Lightning it has to be something more exciting to capture the public interest.

THE UTAH SANDWORMS! THE SPICE MUST FLOW! 

On 4/11/2024 at 10:10 AM, spartacat_12 said:

Based on the reporting, it seems like the league is trying to come up with a deal that allows them to move the team without risking being sued by Moruelo. Part of that deal likely involves preserving the branding for the imaginary future franchise (which will most likely never see the ice).

At that point they're halfway to a Charlotte Hornets retcon where they could reunify the NHL Winnipeg histories and declare the 1996-2024 franchise to be something new to be resumed.

I'm still waiting on the Seattle Supersonics that the Thunder have just been hanging onto in the meantime, by the way.

How many March Madnesseseseseseses are there that every Hooterville in America thinks they can justify building a domed stadium by getting one? I might argue that it's unwise to create a race to the bottom that Indianapolis and New Orleans will generally win anyway.

Man. Salt Lake City. The league is a Portland/Austin expansion away from an in-season tournament for smug transplant cities.

Lest you think that the good guys won in any way here, Alex Meruelo is being rewarded with a billion dollars for not paying his taxes. Somewhere in Scottsdale, Jerry Reinsdorf is like "this guy is stealing my ideas!"

16 minutes ago, neo_prankster said:

At this point, Bettman should just let the Yotes move without a league vote.

I almost wonder if the league just voted to move Bettman.

Friedman deleted that tweet but added a new one saying roughly the same thing.

Let's not forget that the Coyotes once came 15 minutes away from death and escaped, but this really might be it.

"Oh, sure, but what about the social media managers who will be out of a job?"
 

The social media managers who will be out of a job:

I wonder if Shane Doan's kid is going to copy his old man and say he won't report to Utah because he has a no-move clause.

I'm not sure it helps, but separate ownership would have doomed them.

I think this team's fanbase will have a very similar profile to that of the Hurricanes fanbase. They will be the team of the "Ride the SLUT" set. Does Salt Lake City have low-key amazing craft breweries???

9 minutes ago, Sodboy13 said:

There's a good column today detailing this pivot by companies from planned obsolescence to active consumer hostility. More and more companies are now waving it in our faces with "yeah, our product is worse now, what are YOU gonna do about it" and having it happen in something as familiar and comforting as baseball (and not just on the uniform front, either) strikes a nerve in a way the tech overlords' bullcrap or constantly shrinking ice cream cartons doesn't, and it also makes consumers more aware of the increasing frequency at which we are being rawdogged.

Think of how many of this message board's boutique issues in this vein have rapidly gone mainstream. "Why do these official uniforms look like cheap Chinese counterfeits that fall apart?" "Why does this sports team need a new building already?" "How do they charge me THIS MUCH for parking and still claim that they lose money?" Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.

4 hours ago, Sport said:

I don't think that's happening. People don't seem that excited for Utah (I know I'm not). Utah might as well just be NOT PHOENIX right now. I've seen excitement from some people that the Phoenix experiment is finally coming to an end, but the where and the how isn't what people are worried about at the moment. 

I have no excitement for this. I have major reservations about a market of 2.5 million with heavily directional sprawl where the only other team in the market runs concurrently and is almost as established as the Church of England, where hockey does not have a long history of success, where the arena has the same NBA-first sightlines that doomed Phoenix in the first place. The only advantage Salt Lake City has over Quebec City is staying on Mountain Time.

But the Coyotes have been on life support for 15 years, the league has cockteased four or five different cities now only to keep doubling down on stupid, and every owner since the days of league control has run out of money, not paid taxes, or both. Enough already. I'm old and tired. Just let this end.

On 4/8/2024 at 4:18 PM, spartacat_12 said:

But sure, let's dump all over a privately financed arena plan and advocate for the team to play in a building that rinsed taxpayers out of hundreds of millions of dollars. 

You're describing anything the Phoenix Coyotes have done or will ever do as a victory for private enterprise and the free market? Do you ever get tired of carrying your balls around in a wheelbarrow?

Everything around us is getting crappier, meaner, dumber, and more expensive, and I think we're seeing that more than ever in baseball this year. Five years ago, the idea of teams just not having uniform stock would have been unthinkable. So too would have been "I dunno the Sacramento Athletics for a while I guess and then Las Vegas I hope maybe." Everything sucks so bad.

I'd like to see a team use "Salt Lake City" instead of Utah. Not a lot of three-word city names out there, and I think it could prove important to differentiate a more gentile-based following from the very Mormon-based Jazz fanbase: Salt Lake City is now more than just the Mormons (at the expense of becoming Second Denver; the first one is mediocre enough as it is), whereas "Utah," well, less so. Basketball is part of Mormon culture and hockey isn't.

Before Mike Marshall died, I wish more pitchers had taken him up on his unconventional pitching mechanics. I wanted to see if it would work.

Purple is a hard color to get consistent and the Rockies have always seemed to struggle more than most. I know many of us here have advocated for a more desaturated "purple mountains majesty" shade so that it would be a little harder to shift into blue.

Vudu Fandango sounds like a co-conspirator of Ron Mexico and Pierre Delecto.

Hope you're doing well, eriqjaffe.

Arlington Park, where the Bears want to build a stadium, isn't really in the middle of Arlington Heights proper; it's a little peninsula jutting into Rolling Meadows and Palatine. You're not gonna believe this, dude: the governments of Rolling Meadows and Palatine had concerns regarding construction.

12 hours ago, BBTV said:

Is "pre-emptive Tommy John" a thing?  And if so, is it just because it helps reduce the current inevitability of needing it during their career, or that (anecdotally) people come back even stronger from it?

There are now teenagers who undergo Tommy John surgery, so it's preemptive in the sense that it happens before they've ever been signed to a major-league contract. We're doing something wrong if we're making kids throw so hard and so often that they need to switch out a tendon by age 17.

[to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic] stop developing a desert, stop developing a desert, stop developing a desert, the water is all gone

Wow, Caitlin Clark really is the LeBron James of the women's game.