The_Admiral

I discovered Victory Journal because I saw that Jeb Lund wrote about Tony Romo for it, and it's good, but there's certainly an a-bit-muchness to it all (my suspicions of Nathaniel Friedman bylines were confirmed) that makes me want to revisit my idea I've bounced around here for a site that parodies longform prestige sportswriting. The pitch runs into more than one problem, of course: I can churn out titles like "Aaron Gordon, Instagram, and the Pursuit of Grace" all day, but actually writing the articles to go with them would be much too hard for me to actually bother doing. Also, the joke (they don't suck, so it's, ah, it's funny, you see!) is so esoteric that it would really only be funny to like five people, and because doing the joke any justice requires the writing chops that only the craft's genuine practitioners themselves have, otherwise it's just artless flailing. It's like, how do you effectively parody Ornette Coleman? How do you effectively parody "How the 1985 Denver Nuggets That Won Games 153-152 Were Basketball's Answer To Ornette Coleman"? I dunno, something to revisit down the line, I guess. I think it's been like two years since "Jamie Benn" "wrote" for The Players' Tribune and said "I like to listen to music when I drive to work" and to this day I'm still so mad about how good everyone thought it was. I can't stand idly by forever.

postscript: "yeah, our attendance is bad, we meant to do it that way, sorry you can't understand the larger plan" carries the smugness in defeat that you can only really get from these fcking nerds who like the Hurricanes. We've ripped on Coyotes/Panthers fans a lot for bad attendance but at least they have the good sense to agonize over the ramifications of poor attendance themselves.

The Carolina Hurricanes are almost always last in NHL attendance, and that’s (at least partly) by design

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Distinguishing between paid tickets and complimentary tickets has been a crucial part of Waddell’s revision of the Hurricanes’ ticket strategy. Under previous management, Waddell said, there was a significant focus on giving away complimentary tickets as a way to fill the arena, aiding the team’s optics and giving them a more pronounced home-ice advantage.

 

In the four years since Waddell took over, things have been much different. The Canes have decreased their number of complimentary tickets from an average of 4,000 per game in 2014 to about 1,000 this season. The remaining comp tickets, Waddell said, largely consist of tickets the team is required to give players as part of the collective bargaining agreement and tickets for staff members.

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The pre-Waddell group, under current Penguins general manager Jim Rutherford, may have believed it was better to have at least some people in seats at PNC than none. This, in theory, would at least generate some auxiliary revenue from parking, concessions, and merchandise sales. What the previous group failed to consider, Waddell believes, is the intangible effects that system had on the team’s most loyal fans.

 

“When I got here, that summer we were having a tough time renewing [season tickets],” Waddell said. “I called about 160 people about their reasons for not renewing, and the common theme was people sitting next to them for free and people sitting next to them with real cheap tickets.”

Genius team president Don Waddell is dynamically rethinking gate revenues: it's better not to have people at the games! The last block quote, Jesus Christ, he's been possessed by the ghost of Bill Wirtz! Come to think of it, that would explain the Thrashers trading the best player in their history for a pile of turds.

But seriously, I remember reading years ago about how Karmanos charged some of the most expensive ticket prices in the league in Greensboro to demonstrate to a new and fragile market how they weren't devaluing themselves just because they were in a new and fragile market. If you don't know how this went, well, it went exactly how you would think it went. Good to know they've gotten more sophisticated over the last 20 years, huh? I hate this team, I hate this league, these guys are all carnies and a lot of them aren't even particularly good at it.

But Columbus wouldn't have fit in the NASCAR Division, may it rest in peace, as well as Nashville.

Anyway this Hurricanes deal sucks and it amazes me how they keep finding suckers to buy these failing teams whenever Canadian buyers come calling. 

ESPN is going to try to buy the Fox RSNs because we live in a very normal and healthy country where such transactions are totally cool.

Ovechkin is still going to desert the Capitals during the Olympic fortnight but with no team to play for he's just gonna hang around and chain-smoke.

1 hour ago, tigerslionspistonshabs said:

Also- if anyone had to move east, wouldn't Nashville be the logical choice?

We could have saved a lot of headaches by flipping Nashville and Winnipeg as soon as the Thrashers moved. 

On 11/28/2017 at 5:51 PM, Tracy Jordan said:

I am honestly shocked that they're not putting the Eagles and Rams in a primetime slot.

Protected, maybe?

double post!

52 minutes ago, ChicagoOakland said:

I really am the only Canes fan on these boards, aren't I?

Well, you see, when you look at the numbers, they actually lead the board in fan attempts. 

Maybe Seattle will fail to submit an expansion bid again. I would much rather see Seattle get the Hurricanes, not just for alignment but because their smug hockey-hipster fanbase would adapt to Seattle just fine.

It looks like they searched "sports" on freefonts.ru

The Cowboys are backdoored into a virtually national schedule all year, every year. When they're not in a Monday/Thursday/Sunday night game, they get the late game all to themselves or all to themselves minus the two markets directly involved in the second game. Look, I know a bunch of cokeheads in Dallas were really good back when Nirvana was still around, but this is what the flex system was designed to do: put games with playoff implications into national telecasts while irrelevant games penciled in for national slots just because they involve Dallas or New York are downgraded. The Packers and Steelers have to play games at noon and they survive, the Cowboys will too.

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Did anyone think it might be the right climate for a video about someone exposing themselves in a workplace?

Considering the revelations coming out seemingly daily about sexual harassment in workplaces from newsrooms to film sets, maybe just maybe now isn’t the time to make a joke like this. It still doesn’t have comedic value in a vacuum, but it’s especially unfortunate in the current climate.

2017: a nation reported to HR

But anyway, they were clearly trying to rip off the This Is SportsCenter spots, but Ryan Kesler is somehow simultaneously detestable and uncharismatic, so there's nothing funny about it. And if they had set it in someplace identifiably hockey-adjacent, like not the dressing room (nudity's not incongruous there) but in the arena concourse or on the ice, maybe they could swing it, but what's happening here is the defacement of what we know now to be the holiest space in America: the generic white-collar office environment. If the Perds did the same premise and same punchline but with PK Subban, the internet would eat it up like the Cookie Monster.

That dais a great idea.

13 hours ago, Discrimihater said:

What, they couldn't be the Hannibal Lecters?

swingingfavabean.jpg

The West Point game would almost certainly involve the Golden Knights, Panthers, or both.

5 hours ago, BringBackTheVet said:

 

I don't think playing at State College makes a lot of sense.  It's one of those compromise deals where everybody loses.  I look at State College as being Western PA (basically, everything that's not the Delaware or Lehigh Valley might as well be western PA) so it's not like there's a lot of Flyers fans there, other than maybe the students from the Phila area.  You're just making Flyers fans drive 4 hours west, and Penguins fans drive a few East, rather than having one of the fan bases stay put.  

I think a lot of people liked the novelty of a huge crowd at a huge stadium more or less equidistant between rival teams, having already done one in either city. Hawks-Wings at Notre Dame would have had the same appeal if we were still acknowledging that the Blackhawks and not the Senators are the Red Wings' rivals. It's not a perfect comparison because like we said, South Bend isn't that far from Chicago, but it's close enough for the sake of argument.

I hate Penn State as much as anyone, but the Flyers and Penguins could use their facility for a one-off without it constituting an endorsement of child rape.

I love that poster style. I wish Metra would do stuff like that for their lines but their aesthetic never left 1994 desktop publishing.

I don't understand. Do you think people in and around Chicago fail to get to Notre Dame games? 

Genius GM John Chayka boldly reimagines office budgeting: you can save lots of money for next year if you don't pay people!

Yeah, I played it for a joke because it's funny. It's also sad and fascinating, but on some level, adults getting embarrassed on the internet by a teenage girl -- and not just a teenage boy, the likes of whom have been creating internet mischief for decades, but a girl -- is funny. I don't think it's the sad indictment of sports blogging that some people want it to be; women have been writing well about baseball in print and online for years. Maybe it's been a tougher road to hoe, but creating an alter-ego with a failing marriage and an abusive/self-harming edge used to manipulate women into sending nude pictures has nothing to do with beating the odds to write about baseball. That's extra, that's just being a sociopath on the internet, which people have been doing long before the proliferation of low-paying sports blogs.

Yes I am, particularly the part where people talked to her on the phone or had her on a podcast and could not recognize the voice of a teenage girl. Wild stuff.

Today's top story: women in sports tricked into DMing nudes to what was very obviously just three kids stacked on top of each other under a trenchcoat