The_Admiral

Seattle trails Quebec City in every metric you could use to determine where the NHL should go next, except the ever-important "not being Canadian" metric, where Seattle holds a commanding infinity-to-nothing lead.

Joyce Clark has a twitter feed and it seems to consist entirely of her talking to that George Fallar creep. She also posted a photoshop of the council member who voted against this (and was also behind the Vast Mexican Conspiracy), handing Greg Jamison a novelty check.

I mean that's not even good shooping, to say nothing of the incredible immaturity of being an old woman trolling another old woman on twitter because you made her suck at her job.

Five home games before the end of the month, hardly any to end the year, so that should help bank the money if things go bad.

Positive news regarding the Coyotes here. As dismal as their television ratings are, they still more than double up the Panthers.

http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Journal/Issues/2012/04/09/Media/NHL-RSN-ratings.aspx

Despite being in the playoff race the entire season, the Florida Panthers once again limped into the end of the season with the league’s lowest rating (0.21) and viewership. An average of 3,000 homes tuned in to FS Florida for each Panthers game. Phoenix Coyotes games on FS Arizona drew an average of 7,000 homes for each game.

The Penguins get 101,000 in a medium-sized television market. The Blackhawks get 108,000 in a big one. Bruins, 112,000. 7,000 TVs in Phoenix! And less than half of that in South Florida!

"don't worry the team is an awesome loss leader for all the other events so they're never gonna move derp derp derp derp derp" YOU GUYS CAN GO TOO

I think Molson has expressed interest in going to Quebec City, actually. Just make sure they're serving his beer at the Colisee.

New mayor/council, Jamison still doesn't have the money, NHL still owns the team.

My soundtrack to this thread

Yeah, people seemed to like that stopgap uniform a lot and I don't know why. It was black, silver, and eggplant at a time when the Kings were black, silver, and purple. Even without that, black and eggplant make a terribly drab color pairing. The wordmark was ugly, the MD shoulder logos were faux-retro, what a mess.

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.