The_Admiral

Well then that's that. Haha at "the profitable arm of the Panthers."

I saw that the owner (who was one of two who bought the team in 2009 -- the other guy ran out of money, always a good sign) is going through a messy divorce. Maybe it's like the Stars sale, where the whole thing could just be had for assumption of debt.

Still, giving primary ownership to a guy who's worth less than some pro athletes make in a year is more than a little disconcerting, especially on the heels of the Coyotes sale in which the team was transferred with a giant loan, a giant subsidy, and very little money down. I get that the NHL will do anything to hold down the forts, but these aren't going to hold anything down too well.

I think so, which is what makes this confusing if Vinny the String isn't buying the rest of SSE. What's the point of the loss leader if you just have the losses? Of course, he could be buying the whole package, in which case disregard.

There's been a lot of ownership turnover in the NHL, I've noticed. Three this year alone, then going back you have Dallas, then Atlanta/Winnipeg, Tampa Bay, and Florida again. I might have even missed a few.

The ECHL makes some sense in that these mid-sized arenas need anchor tenants and hey why not minor-league hockey. I can't explain the SPHL. No one can.

I don't think the Panthers are moving, though from what I've gleaned, this seems to break up the all-important cross-ownership between the hockey team and Sunrise Sports & Entertainment.

http://nypost.com/2013/09/17/buyer-set-for-florida-panthers/

The Panthers are so under the radar that we didn't even realize they had gotten to the point of a fire to be put out. I can't wait to see how awful this round of Panthers ownership is.

http://www.nhl.com/ice/news.htm?id=678238

I actually love the [Ravens'] font. It is unique and very cool.

Didn't seem so unique when the Warriors, Wizards, Hawks, Diamondbacks, and Mariners were wearing variations of it.

Is it just me or the is the orange a lot darker and less vibrant on those? It always looked that way to me. I don't like them.

The Flyers went to a darker orange somewhere along the way; the '70s throwbacks reinstated the original shade.

Western Conference (7-Team Divisions)

Within Conference (Division): 29 games

* 5 games vs. five teams (3 Home/2 Away vs. two teams, 2 Home/3 Away vs. three teams) AND 4 games vs. one team (2 Home/2 Away). Teams rotated on a yearly basis.

* 5 X 5 =25 games

* 1 X 4 = 4 games

Within Conference (Non-Division): 21 games

* 3 games vs. each team (2 Home/1 Away vs. four teams, 1 Home/2 Away vs. three teams). Teams rotated on a yearly basis.

* 3 X 7 = 21 games

Non-Conference: 32 games

* 2 games vs. each team (1 Home/1 Away)

* 2 X 16 = 32 games

(Exception: one team from each division plays one less game inside Division and one more game inside Conference outside Division)

Eastern Conference (8-Team Divisions)

Within Conference (Division): 30 games

* 5 games vs. two teams (3 Home/2 Away vs. one team, 2 Home/3 Away vs. one team) AND 4 games vs. five teams (2 Home/2 Away). Teams rotated on a yearly basis.

* 5 X 2 =10 games

* 4 X 5 = 20 games

Within Conference (Non-Division): 24 games

* 3 games vs. each team (2 Home/1 Away vs. four teams, 1 Home/2 Away vs. four teams). Teams rotated on a yearly basis.

* 3 X 8 = 24 games

Non-Conference: 28 games

* 2 games vs. each team (1 Home/1 Away)

* 2 X 14 = 28 games

The Stanley Cup Playoffs have a new division-based format. Playoff qualification will be primarily Division-based, with the top three finishers in each Division qualifying for the first 12 spots in the Stanley Cup Playoffs (and the first three "seeds" in each Division). The two additional playoff spots in each Conference, designated as "Wild Cards," will be awarded to the next two highest-placed finishers in each Conference, ranked on the basis of regular-season points and regardless of Division. The League will play under this new alignment and playoff system for a minimum of three seasons, through the 2015-16 NHL season.

See, if I proposed this inscrutable wall of crap, McCall would tell me it's a terrible idea. And he'd be right!

What exactly is the purpose of this thread?

The purpose is not to derail other threads with realignment proposals, so you post them here and then someone explains to you why it doesn't work. Isn't that clear by now?

The other problem with this ad campaign that dawned on me is that they're trying to sell a new regime that in so many ways is still the old regime, but for "a new owner." You locked up the same trap/shell coach for like eight years, guaranteeing more of the unwatchable hockey that so often went unwatched for the last four years. You locked up the dumpster-diving GM, guaranteeing that you'll still settle for digging up the Rob Klinkhammers of the world and having them shot-block their way to staying in the league for once. You locked up a goalie who just had a bad year and recently extended an aging compiler.

So yeah, continuity is good, I guess, but the only continuity is that of an organization that was just good enough to get by without acquainting itself with much greatness. So how do you sell that anything is new and improved when it's neither? Well, you just talk around it by talking about a season you had two years ago, then you flat-out Make Crap Up by saying you have "a new home," and then for good measure you make a bald-faced appeal-to-emotion fallacy by adding "HOCKEY BELONGS IN THE DESERT!" notwithstanding the fact that it wouldn't belong there anymore had a firefighter not signed over millions of tax dollars to "a hero" right after actual firefighters died being heroes.

So really, the only signs of new management to be found are

1) parking was free and now they charge for it, and

2) they signed Mike Ribeiro, who is being hailed as a savior right now, but give it a month before we find him doing gargantuan lines off some Scottsdale hosebag's leather-coated water balloons.

Their policy, as best I can suss it out, is that you're not allowed to hurt a fanbase's collective feelings, but because people in, say, Hamilton and Quebec don't have teams, they can't constitute fanbases, per se, and so they don't have collective feelings to hurt and subsequently manage. It was open season on Winnipeg fans before they had their team, and the mods didn't let them retaliate. So by saying "this commercial sucks" or "there are major rhetorical flaws and errors which I would like to point out," you are flaming an entire fanbase, I guess.

and HFboards is already deleting posts critical of the commercial, of course they are

The problem is that the whole campaign is running a year late. Yeah, you went to the conference finals and lost. In 2012. That's yesterday's news. Last year you sucked and missed the playoffs and the attendance was so bad that the cameramen weren't allowed to do wide shots of the arena coming out of commercial breaks. And I laugh at the notion that Shane Doan has ever been able to outthink a non-sessile animal.

And I do believe they used a not-actual Rangers logo. Tee-hee.

EDIT: also, what "new home"? A new subsidy =/= a new home.

Why does Quebec City deserve an NHL team when they couldn't even support a yeti skiing on a hockey stick with a fire-scarf around his neck?

I don't love the Citadelles identity that much. The Nordiques were about as wonderfully idiosyncratic as a major league sports team could possibly be, right down to the fact that they played in a small French-speaking city that still has fortifications from the 17th century. The goat head is an objectively better logo, but it doesn't make you wonder what the hell is going on. s'just a goat.

If I remember the sketches correctly, the whole thing is going to look kind of like a big wood-paneled jellybean. Those are probably just big support columns that will be built around later. I like the idea of big watchtowers, though. They should have steeples!

That time Alabama wore houndstooth trim was pretty rad.

Better picture of the new Colisee, with a sliver of the old Colisee to the far right. I like the towers in the corners.

How does this constitute an unpopular opinion? Who doesn't like the Pacers pinstripe uniforms?

I don't. The idea was to cultivate an Old-Time Basketball Field House sort of thing with the new arena, but pinstripes don't really have precedent as an old-time basketball design and are in fact more associated with progressive '90s designs in Orlando and Toronto. The best Pacers uniforms were the FloJo uniforms just prior, which connoted the speed associated with the name and the city without going for easy vroom-vroom conceits. Even those had some sloppy drop-shadows, though.

See, I was under the impression that the Whiz Kids shanghaied the entire Westgate parking complex and were going to make mall shoppers pay for parking. Seeing that this is not the case is really funny, and that's not even counting the possibility of the execrable Bidwills popping into the story to siphon off the parking money. Arizona is the literal worst.

I wonder what they're going to do with that ballpark now that the team is gone. Give it back to the city to let kids use, hopefully.

the Columbus, Ohio, Blue Jackets

oh lord

Cute Maine coon, bro.

I'm sorry, I'm still in awe of Glendale's erstwhile crooked city attorney getting a job with the Coyotes. Not that he did -- I knew he would. I'm just awestruck by how amateur-hour he is about taking the gig.

Tindall, a Phoenix resident, worked for about a month with the Phoenix law firm Fennemore Craig, before transitioning to the hockey team. He enjoyed working at the law firm, but the Coyotes presented a unique opportunity, he said.

He attended a press conference at Jobing.com Arena on Aug. 6, when National Hockey League Commissioner Gary Bettman formally turned over ownership of the Coyotes to IceArizona, an investment group headed by Canadians George Gosbee and Anthony LeBlanc.

“The opportunity came up with the new owners and I thought, ‘Well alright, I’ll give it a shot. It seems like fun,’” Tindall said.

Yeah. Like he just wandered in and someone offered him a job. "hurr durr, seems like fun!" Chicago's paths from public corruption to private enrichment are so well-worn that no one really has to say anything as they go, so the artless brazenness on display here is just so jarring to me. I bet you could walk in on this guy nailing your wife from behind and he would say "you seem to have caught me trying to retrieve a pen I dropped, which I can't quite reach."

Let's hope they get the Panthers or the Winter Olympics. What's the Panthers' lease anyways?

The building is owned by Broward County. The master lease is contracted out contingent on the operation of a hockey team. Ergo, the Panthers fill arena dates and lose money while giving the owners the right to have concerts and stuff that make money. All in all, they'd be better off just running concerts and lingerie football and whatever the hell else doesn't have expenses of over $48 million a year, but unlike the situation in Atlanta, where the owners could just dispense of the hockey team without consequence, they're required to have the team there. Liberating the Panthers from their swampy purgatory would thus require the owners of the parent company, a "Sunrise Sports & Entertainment," to want to get out of the arena business altogether and maybe take some penalties from Broward County for breaking the terms of the lease (costs that would no doubt be built into the sale). It's a longshot, but who knows what the future holds? I remember a time when everyone who said it might be Atlanta that True North was circling was told "nope, not a chance! the naming rights require there to be a hockey team!", and well, it's still Philips Arena, isn't it.