The_Admiral

The palace intrigue around WEEI is somehow dumber, louder, and more racist than that of 670 the Score. I thought Chicago was the clubhouse leader in sports talk radio hosts forming a Venn diagram of ignorant louts and grown-up high school drama queens. Goddamn East Coast has to beat us at everything.

On 7/28/2018 at 9:55 AM, Cujo said:

 

Space Chimps
A tribute to Miss Baker, one of the first animals safely launched into space. She is buried on the grounds at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center.

Galileo just asked why, he said why are you renaming the team.

Disappointing but unsurprising, considering I'm pretty sure Karmanos mostly ran the team from the home office in Michigan and only in the last couple years showed any interest in actually being in Raleigh. It's fun to tease the Sharks for the World's Greatest Rec League or whatever but they're doing exactly the kind of stewardship teams are supposed to be doing.

Incidentally, I wonder how much of the much-heralded increase in American draftees is simply that playing hockey has gotten prohibitively expensive for too many kids. I mean, where would escalating costs hit first: small towns of Quebec and the Maritimes, or the suburbs of Boston and Detroit? Is this really anything to be proud of? 

20 hours ago, Sodboy13 said:

 

Also worth noting that, at this time, the Blackhawks were buying airtime to get their games on the radio, and were being labeled the worst-run franchise in North American pro sports. So, uh, congratulations, Carolina!

Definitely some striking similarities between the darkest-before-the-dawn Blackhawks and the current Hurricanes, but the biggest difference is that the Hurricanes don't have and can never have a John McDonough type who can go through a rolodex the size of Infinite Jest to tell everyone how great the team is and how they should always be talking about them. It's become very fashionable in the smart circles to rag on McDonough (doing what the dumb circles have been doing from day one), and I kinda get it, but I still remember the smothering hype that surrounded the Hawks when he came on board, and it was important to have that hype just in case the Blackhawks didn't rattle off three Stanley Cup wins. Maybe such a winning team didn't need all that ballyhoo, but we've seen a major-market quasi-dynasty with a decided lack of ballyhoo, and it's the 1993-2003 New Jersey Devils.

Anyway, it'd be a neat project to go around the league and take inventory of whose radio has a rights fee and whose is brokered. I believe the Blackhawks have been on a profit-sharing deal since they moved to WGN (and have had an oddly hostile relationship with the Score ever since), and I'm guessing the TSN teams like the Jets and Senators have their radio as throw-ins on their admittedly overvalued TV deals. 

EDIT: another difference is that when the Hurricanes got rid of a cheap, duplicitous, union-busting scumbag, they somehow came out behind

The sneering nerds who make up the Carolina Hurricanes fanbase have been going on about how no one who matters even listens to the radio anymore so firing a veteran broadcaster is Actually Good and now this money can be put to better use. I'm guessing the better use is an assistant coach who will help them shoot more bad shots. There's some real Hockey Math going on here that this franchise that no one likes cost almost half a billion dollars but simply they can't afford to produce a free-to-air broadcast in service of selling tickets to games.

Buffalo's simulcast is built around Rick Jeanneret and the fanbase's loyalty to his call. I'm sure they could run two booths if they felt like it, and whenever Jeanneret retires or dies, they probably will. Dundon is basically telling the world that hockey play-by-play on the radio isn't worth crap. I feel this is, indeed, a Bad Business Decision for the league. Even if radio isn't a lucrative property around the league, why devalue it further?

Oddly enough, the Blackhawks were at a low point similar to the one the Hurricanes are in now when they abandoned their simulcast, getting rid of Pat Foley on both TV and radio. Foley would come back to do TV when the old man died and it's probably for the best, because John Wiedeman is one of the best play-by-play men in the league, both on radio and overall and Foley has lost a little off his fastball to where he can't really do the auctioneering of hockey radio pbp.

EDIT:

11 minutes ago, Cosmic said:

This is probably an unpopular opinion (and maybe colored by the fact that I'm in one of the simulcast markets), but I don't see why you need a separate radio PBP. I'm actually shocked that 28 out of 31 teams still have a separate radio broadcast in 2018.

Radio is a play-by-play man's medium, television is an analyst's medium. A lot of radio play-by-play is superfluous when you can see the game for yourself, and a lot of television analysis relies on replays and telestration (this is certainly the case in Chicago with the verbose Wiedeman and the OKNOWSTAHPITRIGHHERE Eddie Olczyk.) Again, special dispensation for Jeanneret, who I think kinda splits the difference between radio and TV pbp and is such a singular voice that I totally understand why Sabres fans would only want one call at one time -- why dilute that product?

I've noticed that the Canadian teams' radio crews more than American teams seem to use their second seat in the booth as more of a supplemental play-by-play than typical ex-jock analysis.

Hurricanes fans on reddit seem pretty supportive of the move, which is a bit of a poison pill, because supporting Genius Owner Tom Dundon on this also requires one to lean very hard on "well come on what are they supposed to do when only 2,000 people are listening." 

Incidentally, if their radio numbers are that bad, how bad is the TV side? The Canes and Perds are able to hide their television ratings because of some quirk in how Fox Sports South is distributed, but I maintain that if they had numbers to brag about, they'd find a way to tell us.

 The team pays WCMC-99.9 FM to carry the broadcast, incurring six-figure losses while apparently drawing fewer than 2,000 listeners per game.

iT's ImPoRtAnT tO bE iN tHe RaLeIgH-dUrHaM mEdIa MaRkEt

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/walmart-sauce-hockey-paul-bissonnette-nhl-t-shirts-1.4742380

Some hockey t-shirts had some attached copy about the habits of puck bunnies. This surprised me because I'm not used to jokes about gangbanging teenage girls being so out in the open like this. But what really surprised me was this part:

Quote

The current owners of Sauce Hockey also expressed surprise and dismay over the descriptions.

"It's offensive and sexist. There's no question," said Daryl Jones, one of the company's investors.

He said he and a group of fellow investors took over the company three years ago, and they had no knowledge of the product descriptions.

 

YEAH IT'S THE ICE EDGE GUY THEY NEVER GO AWAY

Coyotes are back on their bullsh-t, trading for dead cap space, but this one's a real doozy:

They're paying $200,000 in real money for $5,275,000 in cap hit. EVERYTHING'S FINE

I was afraid it was Jordan Peterson Night.

Here come the Deadspin layoffs. Hannah Keyser, who was behind their Pivot To Video that was Actually Good when everyone else's Pivots To Video were Actually Bad, is Actually Gone.

On 6/30/2018 at 10:48 PM, pHiL Kizer said:

Hell, I was living in Oklahoma when the Thunder arrived (who got a taste of the NBA due to Hurricane Katrina) and I can say that it seemed I was more excited than the born and raised locals for a NBA franchise to show up.  Oklahoma is a high school and college football state.  Most of the people there didn't care about the Thunder until they ended up in the Finals against The Heatles.

I don't know, Oklahoma City supported the Hornets so well that I thought for all the world that the temporary relocation would become a permanent one. And it should have.

Hartford-New Haven and Springfield Mass combine for about 2.2 million, certainly enough for the NHL to fly solo once you figure in New England-wide cable carriage. They'd get by. Plus they'd keep travel costs down for Boston, New York, Long Island, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, so that's rad.

The adapted New Haven Line lettering is too elegant for Brandiose's factory-standard clunky cartoons.

On 6/25/2018 at 10:44 AM, DeFrank said:

 

I was a big fan of the screaming eagle logo. Although I would imagine a blue/black/bronze Weagle could look good: 

Look at those letters! Now that is a wayward path!

Truly a man who deserves his place in the basement of a disused bank.

"Grand Rapids Dutchmen" would be an interesting concept. They could wear a lot of oranje.

On 6/12/2018 at 11:46 AM, kroywen said:

This is like naming a team after "I Can Has Cheezburger" in the year 2018. Sorry, you were way too late on this, SI Yanks.

 

Also, as @Waffles mentioned, the pizza rat was on a stairwell to a subway. There are no subways in Staten Island. This is like renaming the Brooklyn Cyclones after a Broadway reference. 

The Hudson Valley AYYYYYY I'M WALKIN' HEREs

That being said, if the Hawks could trade for Mike Hoffman at a bargain-basement price, I'd love it, of course. He's not the one who's a crazy-ass bitch.

OITGDNHL or 4chan: Mike Hoffman's girlfriend trolled Erik Karlsson's wife on the internet about her dead baby. Hoooooooooly crap this is just toys-in-the-attic crazy. Why? Why?

It's triple-A hockey, but I like the AHL's mix of NBA markets without NHL teams and depressed mill towns of upstate New York. No, just kidding, I hate the mix, I want more depressed mill towns!

Tigers, Indians, White Sox, Brewers?

I always wonder how major-league expansion will trickle down to the minors. I didn't realize West Michigan was a Grand Rapids team (I thought maybe Battle Creek? Kalamazoo? Benton Harbor?) so that would be an obvious candidate for AAA expansion. Jacksonville or Vancouver would be another.

PIzza Rats doesn't work for Staten Island because Staten Island doesn't have subways for rats to harvest pizza from.

Grand Rapids seems like a rather large market for just Single-A. Maybe it's a matter of geography, I dunno.