The_Admiral

Phoenix gave the Suns a bunch of money to renovate their arena yet again, which means no new arena, which means no Suns/Coyotes collaboration. And because this was a city council meeting in Arizona, it featured a resident arguing against the payment, citing the time he literally shot an alderman in protest of Chase Field.

I've never been very good at noticing distinctions between parks in one class of minors and the one right above or below it. I can tell a short-season A stadium from a AAA stadium, but somewhere along the way they all blend in. There's always a berm in the outfield, I dunno. I don't see why the one in New Orleans couldn't be a AA stadium.

The Baby Cakes identity was self-evidently horrid, but the blue and grey Zephyrs identity before it wasn't nearly novel enough for New Orleans. They could have done something in purple, yellow, and green that was locally relevant without going into over-the-top N'AWLINS tourist crap, figuring that the radius for minor-league baseball fans is going to be much smaller than that of the Saints. Whole lot of getting it wrong.

11 hours ago, nash61 said:

Cattle Drivers isn't Brandiose enough. It's going to be something like "Cow Movers" or "Steer Jockeys"?

Beef Logisticians

It would be so Brandiose to take a landlocked state that's just a big rectangle of grain and say "no we're doin' fish"

13 hours ago, JH42XCC said:

I submitted Cattle Drivers

I'm a cattle driverrrrrr, on a long run, on a long run

AND IF YOU DON'T LOVE ME LET ME GOOOOOOOO

I have too been to Minnesota and I am aware of their new density-friendly zoning rules.

Remember the pants you stopped wearing because they were a safety risk? You should wear them again now that you're old. What, I'm good at management.

"Wichita Zephyrs" has a great cadence to it. Sometimes the best answer is right under your nose, or wherever your nose was five years ago.

"Goodbye, Baby Cakes" sounds like the title of a Cole Porter song but not a particularly good one.

Parking Lot Math! I'm having flashbacks to the Coyotes thread.

I

am

livin'

on Channel Caaaaaa^{aaaaaaaaaaats!!!!!!!!!}

On 1/8/2019 at 1:10 PM, Dante_X said:

Shawinigan Cataractes 90's throwback:

 

Love it! So much better than the Disappointed Indian they have now. 

I don't know every past and present arena in the Q by heart, but I remember seeing a picture of Arena Jacques-Plante and I loved it, it's precisely what a community rink should be:

I love public-works buildings from the '30s and '40s that look like they were built to last forever.

One of the admins at HFBoards (yeah I know) used to work there or at NESN and said there was a small ownership stake.

I think the ownership deals are more common with the NBC and AT&T channels than the longtime Fox Sports ones. I think Fox pays big for the Rangers and Cardinals but there's no equity involved.

Whalers television should go down as one of the great wasted resources. The team owned a percentage of SportsChannel New England, from what I understand, and had coverage throughout the region (minus Fairfield County, always a problem for them), but were never able or willing to broadcast a full schedule. I know they shared the channel with the Celtics, but for a long time the Celtics had all their road games on free television, so there couldn't have been that many conflicts. I think Karmanos himself even admitted that had he known what he had in SportsChannel, the market could have worked after all.

These are always fascinating to me: through the magic of the Usenet archives, here's a guide to NHL TV and radio coverage from September '94, heading into the season that almost wasn't but then kinda was.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.sport.hockey/3NtD0-3qnSg

Of note:

- The Mighty Ducks had a radio affiliate in Greensboro? Why?

- Islanders radio seemed to be daisy-chained across a bunch of small local stations: one for Nassau, two for Suffolk, and one for the city, but its signal doesn't seem to get to Manhattan or Brooklyn. One was the station for Five Towns College -- there is truly nothing new under the sun.

- The Habs had nationwide francophone radio coverage through Radio-Canada, the French service of the CBC. Nice deal.

- No English media for the Nordiques, but they did have the bilingual Mike Bossy working en français, which feels like it was a pretty good get. I wonder if they would have tried to make some anglophone inroads in the Maritimes as the easternmost team if they had lasted into the more media-heavy era to come.

- Speaking of the more media-heavy era to come, everyone got on Old Man Wirtz for the Blackhawks' no-home-telecast policy, and rightly so. But if you scroll down, there were a lot of less-than-comprehensive TV deals around the league in 1994. The Sharks, in the enormous San Francisco TV market, were only slated to telecast 55 of 84 games. 60 for the Stars, 35 for the Panthers, just over 50 for the Lightning, 45 for the Ducks, and these were emerging markets that should have been getting all the television exposure they could get. Maybe that was all the television exposure they could get. Presumably, the non-televised games were at home. There were also teams that worked a free-road-pay-home split like the Lakers did with KCAL up until just a few years ago: the Bruins, Flyers, and Wings seemed to do that. But the Wings and Penguins also have games set aside as pay-per-view, as the Hawks did with the hated "HawkVision." I guess what I'm getting at is that the Hawks' crime wasn't "committing to the season reservation holders" in the first place, it was adhering to that while the rest of the world passed them by. It just took the NHL the longest to do that.

- For going on 25 years, there hasn't been that much turnover in the announcing ranks. Lots of familiar names in the list, including some in the minors who made it to the NHL. I feel like we're about to lose a ton of classic NHL voices -- Rick Jeanneret, Pat Foley, Ken Daniels, Joe Bowen, Mike Lange -- in one fell swoop.  Hope not.

On 12/26/2018 at 10:52 AM, RyanMcD29 said:

Two chapters into The Down Goes Brown History of the NHL and I'm already calling it OITGDNHL: The Book

21 hours ago, kimball said:

 

Just finished reading it. Loved it. Totally agree.

I have to finish Thesis On That Time The Islanders Changed Their Logo and then The Battle of Alberta, which I received as a very thoughtful Christmas gift, and then it's on to this one. Can't wait.

Don't sweat it, having completely unexpected reserves of esoteric knowledge is a prereq for posting here.

9 minutes ago, MCM0313 said:

I for one would like to see a team called the Boing-Boing.

Brandiose is gonna do the Bo-oi-oi-oing and it's gonna be an infinite regress of boners swinging boners as bats

Cesarano having a conniption fit because that Crash Test Dummies song about the disfigured kids came on the radio

Moo is a word. You just wrote it. It's spelled m-o-o.

The NHL is, indisputably, weird. One moment, you're in awe of the speed, skill and intensity that define the sport, shaking your head as a player makes an impossible play, or shatters a longstanding record, or sobs into his first Stanley Cup. The next, everyone's wearing earmuffs, Mr. Rogers has shown up, and guys in yellow raincoats are officiating playoff games while everyone tries to figure out where the league president went. That's just life in the NHL, a league that often can't seem to get out of its own way. No matter how long you've been a hockey fan, you know that sinking feeling that maybe, just maybe, some of the people in charge here don't actually know what they're doing. And at some point, you've probably wondered: Has it always been this way? 

    The short answer is yes. As for the longer answer, well, that's this book.

Hell yes.

  In this fun, irreverent and fact-filled history, Sean McIndoe relates the flip side to the National Hockey League's storied past. His obsessively detailed memory combines with his keen sense for the absurdities that make you shake your head at the league and yet fanatically love the game, allowing you to laugh even when your team is the butt of the joke (and as a life-long Leafs fan, McIndoe takes the brunt of some of his own best zingers). The "Down Goes Brown" History of the NHL is the weird and wonderful league's story told as only Sean McIndoe can.

I wouldn't say only.

When you're a Gawker writer, you're expected to write like that on Twitter. it's all ironic "lol no u" and stuff.

On 12/19/2018 at 1:06 AM, the admiral said:

If he wrote for Barstool they'd already have posted "Big Dumb Drunk Idiot Stops Showing Up To Work Because He's Too Drunk To Write Poop Jokes" but he doesn't.

On 12/19/2018 at 12:57 PM, McCarthy said:

My guess is he got too drunk at their awards show and injured himself somehow. 

You'll never go broke betting that someone who writes for a living is an alcoholic, huh.

His GQ stuff, where he's presumably under the auspices of an editor and not just getting paid for long message board posts, is much better than his Deadspin stuff, which was cool at one time but feels so rote now.

With Gawker Media's unflagging commitment to transparency, we'll know what's up any day now. Just kidding! If he wrote for Barstool they'd already have posted "Big Dumb Drunk Idiot Stops Showing Up To Work Because He's Too Drunk To Write Poop Jokes" but he doesn't.