The_Admiral

A counterpoint might be that the Jacksonville Jaguars basically modified their color palette to black, metallic gold, and a vague suggestion of teal, and these "darker, more intimidating" colors at the low point of their franchise made a bad situation even worse. Loser stink comes for bright and dark palettes in equal measure; only a few timeless teams seem able to avoid it.

On 3/1/2024 at 9:00 PM, Morgan33 said:

Here's the thing people tend to overlook about black on sports uniforms...  Neither black nor white are technically colours. 

9 hours ago, FiddySicks said:

It’s similar to the Chargers current change. Like most people, I was DYING for them to ditch the navy and just go powder and gold. But after seeing it for a few seasons? I kinda hate it. It looks washed out and kind of frilly. I know that’s not a popular opinion, but I miss them having a splash of navy to ground that set a bit better. 
 

Lighter colors in football are just hard to pull off in general imo. It looks fresh and clean, but it doesn’t fit the feel of the sport that well (imo), and grows old pretty quick I think. It’s one of the (many) reasons why I don’t want the Bucs to ever switch back to the throwback unis full time. They look bright and fun for a game or two, no doubt. But sit through a few ten loss seasons in that pastel 70s kitchen look and tell me it doesn’t get old fast. 

Ask yourself this: would the new Chargers uniforms look better in an open-air stadium in San Diego rather than under fluorescent lights and ETFE? 

The NFL is a big league. There should be room for all sorts of approaches, from vivid colors to dark colors. I think the Chargers look great in powder blue, I loved seeing the Houston Oilers again this year, but I also love the Raiders uniforms and think the Ravens should wear head-to-toe black at home. As for the Eagles, they've gotten themselves into a dilemma where their main color doesn't reproduce well and they're messing around with black alternates and ice emoji, so they've functionally become a black, white, and tinted grey team. What they're doing isn't working and the set as initially designed barely worked to begin with. If they used, say, the Dallas Stars' green, I don't think it'd be any more out of place for football than it is for hockey.

I think losing makes any non-conservative design unbearable. I've always been a critic of the new Buccaneers stuff, but it was in the nadir of the warm, grey alarm-clock years that I was like "okay, screw it, honestly just go back to creamsicle orange, if you're gonna be bad, be fun bad." 

10 hours ago, BBTV said:

Oh what I'd give to be a 5'6" jewish billionaire that gets pro athletes and rappers to temporarily put aside their war against the chosen ones.

I was thinking the other day about Mickey Monus, founded of Phar-Mor and erstwhile investor in the Colorado Rockies, who bankrupted Phar-Mor by cooking the books and embezzling millions of dollars to fund a professional basketball league for people who weren't particularly tall, in what can only be called the most Jewish crime ever committed

Somewhere there's a message board that is abandoned for 364 days a year but for an annual reunion where all the 2006 Forum Guys convene to post "come at the king you best not miss" and "Omar comin'," ask after one another's wives and children, and then leave. 

On 2/26/2024 at 11:04 AM, FiddySicks said:

Considering we’re at the tail end of the “message board internet” era, I swear some weirdo is gonna eventually make a documentary about this place for Netflix or something. 

I would watch the hell out of a documentary about board culture in general. If you spent 2005-2006 arguing with a guy from Kitchener, Ontario eight years your senior whose avatar was the cover of If You're Feeling Sinister subtitled "turning down sex like my name's Al Bundy," you have lay awake wondering what possibly could have become of that guy. Maybe such a movie would find the answer.

Maybe organizations don't win championships. It didn't escape me that the Patriot Way without winning has them ranked second to last for their spartan facilities and uninterested ownership--sounds a lot like the 1960-1992 league laughingstock Patriots.

21 hours ago, Red Comet said:

NFLPA report cards are in

 

The impression I get reading about my team's facilities is that they've been in the 2nd act of Major League for the past 5 years all the way down to the Native mascot. 

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Though the players received actual chairs with backs to sit in at their lockers in response to last year’s feedback

lol here you are, your majesty

2 hours ago, throwuascenario said:

If a team provides a crucial piece of the city's identity, I think it makes sense to pay to keep them. The StL Cardinals.

Busch Stadium was privately financed, in a rare case of the Cardinals occupying the moral high ground while actually having earned it.

What I can't get over is that it's the same guy! It's the same guy who did it last time. "If you don't give me a free stadium, I'm moving the team!" 35 years go by, "hey, me again. You're not gonna believe this."

3 hours ago, Digby said:

I'm choosing to consider this an NHL bad decision becuase I assume it's the Jacobs' fault. The Bruins have a new bag policy for home games that bans any bags larger than 6 x 4 x 1.5 inches. Even if they're clear. Only exception is, conveniently, shopping bags for any purchased items from the Garden pro shop in the train station. (I assume this is also in effect for Celtics games and concerts, but I ran into it first via the Bruins.)

 

6 x 4 is absolutely tiny for a bag! I get banning huge backpacks or whatever but come on, this is a nuisance.

I thought you were complaining about feet, not inches. I did a reverse Stonehenge. My spatial reasoning, it's not so great.

There's a lot to like here, for sure, but I would have preferred royal blue, and I don't think the clipper ship (that is also a basketball) reads much like any kind of ship. To me, it looks a little like a beehive.

2 hours ago, BBTV said:

As for MLB doing it for "visibility" purposes, while that may be their reasoning, I don't get it. The MLB "brand" isn't really a thing, and it's not like you don't see it on 80% of players, so I don't see any benefit to moving it.  There's no benefit to trying to make the MLB brand equal to the players' or clubs.  In fact, I think it could only hurt.

The NBA is a popular television show and social-media content mill that is basically the Kardashians for men. Major League Baseball is just some abstract concept that won't let you do stuff without express written consent. It's about the teams, the teams, the teams. The NL/AL logos deserve more play than the MLB logo.

I would have put the MLB logo above the cuff on the non-logo sleeve. I don't understand why it needs to be that prominent. MLB isn't really A Brand the way other leagues or its own teams are. NHL, same deal.

On 2/18/2024 at 9:39 PM, Germanshepherd said:

Agreed wholeheartedly on them needing to have separate logo and team colors. 
 

Pick one of the blues and one of purple/pink and I think it’d be much cleaners. 

Purple and light blue seems like the best way to be distinct but mass-appeal: navy is overdone, and prioritizing pink might get accusation of trying too hard to be girly.

On 2/18/2024 at 11:09 PM, monkeypower said:

The Charlotte Checkers did a Florida Panthers night, because that's the current affiliation, on Saturday and instead of having a themed Checkers jersey, they just dressed up as the Panthers.

 

This feels weird and almost patronizing to me.

Not to mention dishonest. I agree, what an odd move.

I wonder if Billings will ever get another whack at the WHL.

I think homelessness has become a bigger problem in the major cities than it had before, especially in Vancouver, but the issues are with cost of living, not quality of life. Every house in Brampton is like 30 guys named Padjit living cheek-by-jowl, their quality of life probably isn't exceptional, but mostly it's just that everything is prohibitively expensive. Canada has a reputation of crapping out publicly funded sitcoms about handicapped Muslim lesbians but underneath that veneer is capitalism as ruthless as any we have here.

45 minutes ago, BBTV said:

 

Yeah, Canadians are basically living in igloos and yurts, killing their food with their bare hands, and praying to various gods that their diseased children heal quickly before reaching the estimated Canadian life expectancy of 30 (since nobody can afford health care, unlike in the States where everything is affordable and everyone has access to care, nobody's defaulting on loans or living on streets or in subway stations, etc.)  Add in the wars, and yeah - the standard of living all the way up there is awful.

Good stuff, but there is a cost-of-living crisis going on in Canada even worse than ours. They're dealing with the same price-gouging at the grocery stores and gas stations plus a massive real estate bubble. You can't buy a house, you can't pay the mortgage, you can barely pay rent, it's insane what's going on up there. It's going to hurt a lot of Canadian cities, and the solution won't be to move the Calgary Flames to an office park in Alpharetta.

That being said, the Jets aren't off the hook for all this. By their own admission, they took advantage of ridiculous demand at the outset and did f-ck-all with it for the better part of a decade, and now that their sales reps have to be more than just passive order-takers, they realized no one knows how to sell a product. And what product? Kevin Cheveldayoff has been overseeing a rebuild that's been going on since the release of the iPad and has failed to build a team that's reliably in the conversation every single year nor a team that picks a few years to go all-in. I don't think that's because Winnipeg is scary, it's just years' worth of insufficient drafting/development, which, under guaranteed payouts and a hard cap, any organization anywhere needs to get right.

I don't think this means Winnipeg fans are bad. Frankly, that they went this long with TNSE running on autopilot is impressive. Loosening up on shared season tickets and getting more corporate sales can help. More than that, so will lowering prices. TNSE has basically captured most of downtown Winnipeg at this point; they're sucking up everyone's money one way or the other. 

I don't know, I just don't see the support at the city or state level for giving Jerry everything he wants. I can't imagine Brandon Johnson speaking in favor of this plan, but then he's drowning so badly already that he may grab onto any life preserver he can.

Aren't all the other Sox owners a bunch of octogenarian Jews from the Old Neighborhood? They're not gonna kill their team. 

I think back to when he and Einhorn first bought the team in the '80s and looked on in abject horror at Andy the Clown and shirtless Harry in the bleachers and cheap seats and cheap beer and all the general weirdness of the Sox back then and immediately went about getting rid of all of it. This is a guy who for 40 years has hated the fans of his team. I wouldn't be scared of his partners buying him out because to move the team to Nashville would be the one final screw-you only Jerry could give.

It's time to realize the third jersey Mike Keenan scrapped on sight. It's just another Chicago Winter Classic, it's an automatic win for the road team, have fun with it.

I've given Reinsdorf credit for knowing how to work the government better than the McCaskeys--the bar is the floor on that one--but JB Pritzker and his quiet-but-not-that-quiet presidential aspirations may make him a worthier adversary than Madigan or Big Gay Jim or whoever else Jerry could buy off.

On 2/19/2024 at 6:53 PM, Walk-Off said:

Ballpark Digest: Report: Reinsdorf to seek $1B in state money for new Chicago White Sox ballpark

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Using hotel/motel taxes to fund sports facilities has a long history in the sports-facility world across the country: because the overwhelming amount is paid by out of towners, the impact on local taxpayers is minimal. 

WE DON'T GET CONVENTIONS ANYMORE. NO ONE TRAVELS FOR BUSINESS ANYMORE. The hotel tax is not some pot of infinite money. We're not even done using hotel taxes to pay for New Comiskey, which is 34 years old and in fine condition. There's not a billion dollars lying around to let 12,000 people look at the Sears Tower while complaining that A.J. Pierzynski should be the manager.

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Also part of the mix: a TIF district–also known as tax-overlay districts in Illinois–would divert sales-tax revenue generated by the development, up to $400 million. The Illinois Sports Facilities Authority would then issue bonds to back the ballpark construction. Again, TIF districts are a popular tool for financing sports facilities: the rationale is that the increased tax payment wouldn’t exist without the sports facilities.

There's our old friend, the TIF district. Longtime readers of the NHL Anti-Thread remember that Jerry Reinsdorf's plan to buy the Coyotes was to pay for it in installments from TIF district revenues, thereby making the taxpayers buy the team for him. Good thing Chicago doesn't need money for literally anything else right now [next Blue Line train to O'Hare departs in 35 minutes]

To what extent was the players' union consulted on these new uniforms? They're the ones who have to wear them. We're not talking about player input for aesthetic purposes, but more like "will your pants split."