The_Admiral

The NBA by far has the weakest divisional rivalries. Why place a premium on those?

Seriously, your like a cross between Rainman and Cousin Eddie from "Christmas Vacation".

This truly is a thread in which the sh-tter is full.

I can just picture the goalie asking their GM Who Own Coyotes?

And if he doesn't like the answer, he'll swing his stick at him like a masamune!

My favourite part about all of that was when Shane Doan threatened to evoke his no trade clause if the team moved.

I hate so much the way people make Doan out to be a hero for staying with his team, as if he's not only the last vestige of the original Jets but the last vestige of a bygone era of player/franchise loyalty. Let's be real: he stays where he stays because the weather is nice for his horse farm, the shopping is good for his wife, the schools are good for his kids, and the expectations are low for his job. That's not selfless loyalty, that's selfish loyalty. There is no real sacrifice on his part; it's an arrangement that by any rational valuation (which is to exclude "your life is measured in Stanley Cups"), what he gives is vastly, vastly outweighed by what he gets. It's not Ray Bourque gamely sticking around till he could stick around no more, it's just some longtime second-line winger gaming a unique idiosyncrasy of the NHL's economic and geographic footprint for his personal gain. Beyond that, he tries to mitigate his dirty game on the ice by identifying as an evangelical Christian, the worst trick in the book. He's lauded as a Stoic Leader Captain because he's been around a while and wears #19 like Yzerman and Sakic did, but he sure pouts loudly when his team loses or might move away from his cushy rut. He's a first-order charlatan. Easily one of my least favorite players in the league, now or ever.

Yeah, it probably was, but I'm having trouble working around the fact that the owners effectively evicted their own team to make room for more profitable bookings. I don't think they were going to be talked into keeping the team one more year; they had no fealty to Bettman (it's mentioned in The Instigator that they bought the Thrashers just to flip them after the 2005 CBA) and didn't have to keep owning a team if they didn't want to. Whether the idiots sold the rest of their properties or not, the Thrashers wouldn't have been able to play at Philips Arena, and without a second 16,000-seat ice-capable arena in the region (or someone willing to stick them in Gwinnett for three or four years while a second arena was bankrolled, planned, and built), they had nowhere to go. The local buyers, as I recall from the whirlwind of close calls prior to the eventual sale, included a slapdash group of questionable investors led by Anson Carter, a slapdash group of questionable investors led by Tom Glavine, and some private equity guy who made his fortune by investing in churches or something (and, befitting an NHL ownership discussion, seemed to have a lot of merely imaginary money). That was about as good as it got. So I'm not sure what you were going to do with an extra year in Atlanta other than tread water till Quebec City had shovels in the ground for the new Colisee (which is chugging along ahead of schedule now, au fait).

And as someone who kinda likes the Jets and looked forward to kinda liking the Jets, this group of guys turned out to be a better fit than the Coyotes, who bitched and bitched to anyone who would listen that they didn't want to be cold or Canadian or held accountable for their jobs. So that kinda makes up for the wonky lineage.

Does their drummer only have one arm?

I'm Fran, and I'm a woman!

Boy, Shannon and Sunnucks, this is like a baking-soda-and-vinegar volcano of misreporting.

Nothing could have been worked out if nobody was going to buy the entire Hawks/Thrashers/master lease bundle. If the Mexican pizza magnate (that is to say, a pizza magnate who was Mexican, not a magnate of Mexican pizzas) had bought the Hawks and the lease but not the Thrashers, then the entire business model would have been untenable and the Thrashers would have eventually failed. If he had bought the whole thing, it would've been yet another NHL owner who bought into the club with imaginary money, and they'd have been screwed that way, too. Yes, Atlanta fans got a really raw deal the way the team was hustled out while Phoenix has been death-rattling longer than a Jethro Tull song, but both markets were/are fatally flawed. Had the league sold the Coyotes off to buy the Thrashers, they probably would have ended up selling them to Quebecor.

This is all Joe Johnson's fault.

Oh, BTW Proskauer Rose is apparently helping to represent these jokers. Don't expect major strides in student/athlete rights out of this Conference.

Hahahahaha the evil of Proskauer Rose apparently knows no bounds. In honor of them, I now propose that we call this league the You Should Just Be Happy To Even Have A League.

JESUS CHRIST WHO ARE YOU AND WHY

Realignment based on math.

Detroit is about 20,000 miles from every other team.

San Jose is about 55,000 miles from every other team.

Too bad the circumference of Earth is only about 25,000 miles.

oh dear.

Ummm....Valpo's Lutheran (generic).

Huh. Damn Spanish name threw me all these years. Those Spanish Indiana Lutherans.

Get off the mescaline.

http://www.businessw...ers-muni-credit

“If you look back to 2009, they were a perfectly normal city,” said Neene Jenkins, an AllianceBernstein analyst in New York.

Part of the vacant land around the baseball facility was recently purchased, while a plan has been announced to build a 500-bed hospital near the hockey rink.

This could prove life-saving for the next busload of children Raffi Torres tries to kill.

Greg Jamison couldn't even get The Nigerian Prince to invest. You'd think after all these years, he'd have the money to spend!

Yeah, I was just going to mention the Portland/Scottsdale thing. Scottsdale dithered over the whole Ellman arena-mall plan and finally said no, while Glendale took roughly three days to approve it. Due diligence as always. Would Portland have been a success? Considering they'd have been in direct competition with the well-established Trail Blazers and not much else in a small market that really didn't start its meteoric rise till recently, probably not. Would it have been better than the dumpster fire now? Hell yes.

By the way, all, if you got Barnes & Noble gift cards or some cash for Christmas, and you've been a regular reader of the Coyotes threads or lockout thread here, you have to buy this book.

Because of the other question that the mayor asked and he couldn't answer: the council members are going to get cushy jobs for voting him in.

I got The Instigator for Christmas, and tore through it in past two nights (thanks for the recommendation, Admiral). One of the interesting bits of Coyotes history I was previously unaware of was that Jerry Colangelo, the point man in bringing the Jets southward in 1996, wanted to be free and clear of the thing by 1998, and it was more or less in Gary's hands (either by his own choosing or not) to scrape together enough couch cushion change and various local investment to keep the 'Yotes afloat. Bettman's taken the lead on saving desert hockey with duct tape and Fix-a-Flat for nearly 15 years now, not just the 4 since Jerry Moyes went teats-up and tried to shuffle them off to Noted Enemy Jim Balsillie. They are, in so many ways, his team.

Remember how the genesis of the OITGDNHL meme was that we were going to make every instance into the chapter of a book? The Instigator pretty much is that book! It's lonely at the forefront.

Option A looks like the most likely and I like them taking the Metro name, but I think Option B could be interesting. Here's how I would change it.

ECC: Georgetown, Villanova, St. Joes, La Salle, Seton Hall, St. John's, Fordham, Providence, Duquesne, St. Bonaventure

GMC: Marquette, DePaul, Xavier, Dayton, Creighton, Butler, Loyola-Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland State, Chicago State

In B the GMC would take Bradley and St. Louis which actually have aspirations (delusions?) towards being good at basketball and have fans rather than tripling down on Chicago with 2 schools that even fewer people care about than DePaul.

I know a few Loyola fans, which is to say I know a few people who go/went to Loyola.

Chicago State, though? Aren't they always on the verge of losing their accreditation? If you want another school of dubious relevance in the Chicago area, go with Valparaiso. Catholic, too!

Households that are hitting a breaking point in how much they pay for cable. Disaster lies down this path.

Thank you for being one of the voices of reason on this thing. Cable as we know it is going to come tumbling down in a matter of years. Thanks, sports!

The Oilers' modernization wasn't completely terrible (though the greater Darken & Desaturate trend of the era sure was), but had some critical flaws. For instance, why the red? It muddled the copper stripes, and looked strange as the secondary color on names/numbers rather than copper. I could have lived with it without the red, but the red was distracting -- especially with the Flames down the road. It was fine as a product of its time, I suppose, but now that the Oil is back on the cusp of run-and-gun greatness, they absolutely belong back in their old jumping-off-the-ice colors.

same thing with the Islanders to an extent

They lost $9.5 million last year, which puts them ahead of eight teams, though that perhaps says more about the other eight teams.

The Blue Jackets are bleeding twice as badly, and you've gotta think that between the complete history of futility, the 1.5+ lockouts, and the cancelled All-Star Game, the earth out there is tasting mighty salty. Of course, they just got that arena bailout, which nevertheless makes them nearly immovable for the next thirtysome years, so that should be a fun zombie team to watch in about four, five years or so.

Yeah, that's too many teams to cut, but I'm missing the part where the Carolina Hurricanes were successful, unless having won a most forgettable Stanley Cup with the second-liners of the late '90s while otherwise missing postseasons and hemorrhaging money constitutes "successful." I'm against contracting six teams, and not even that high on contracting two, but I can't think of any team more inessential to the league than they are.

Columbus, Florida and Phoenix. Maybe even Nashville.

Phoenix and Miami, for all their myriad flaws as hockey towns, are at least large enough population centers and media markets that you can halfheartedly defend having given them a whirl. Raleigh gives you roughly the population of Hartford or Milwaukee with none of the hockey culture and three college teams to stand in line behind (though admittedly, their roommate is kind of the Shemp of the three). Nashville and Columbus, I'll happily give you, but I dunno, at least Nashville is something in the great quilt of America and not just a bunch of office parks and ring roads where people flee from Pittsburgh and Buffalo.

Your 28-team alignment is intriguing, but the costs and logistics of merging three organizations into one kinda makes my head spin.

Yeah, that's too many teams to cut, but I'm missing the part where the Carolina Hurricanes were successful, unless having won a most forgettable Stanley Cup with the second-liners of the late '90s while otherwise missing postseasons and hemorrhaging money constitutes "successful." I'm against contracting six teams, and not even that high on contracting two, but I can't think of any team more inessential to the league than they are.

That was the perfect color scheme for Edmonton.

Why.

Lost in the Coyotes craze was the fact that the Predators were sold to a criminal and passed on to a guy who's broke. Chapter 49 of the new book Only the Goddamned NHL.