The_Admiral

That's not the Golden Gate Bridge, it's a span of the Bay Bridge that hasn't been built yet. Dynamite design choice, the old Fictitious Landmark.

I don't think the organization itself is going to do all that much moving. The sad side of this whole thing is that while Shane Doan bitches his ass off about having to make millions of dollars someplace else, we may lose sight of the fact that there are scores of comparatively mundane white-collar employees who are going to be out of work at the end of the season. All those sales reps, accountants, ticket agents, and other front office types probably won't be needed in French Canada. I don't think we're going to see quite what we saw with True North and the Thrashers, where everything but the player contracts were left behind and replaced with the organization of the Manitoba Moose. Quebecor doesn't have that sort of shadow government in place. Still, the matter of the language barrier means they'll be building an organization of their own, from the people in their offices down to the chairs they're in. All of these behind-the-scenes breaks in continuity will be good stuff to chew on when we try to reconcile the fact that the Winnipeg Jets are the Quebec Nordiques, going through the same ridiculous "never forget where you didn't really come from" song and dance that we had to go through last summer.

The Blues will be in Quebec, the Blue Jackets will be in Kitchener, the Panthers will be in Markham, the Islanders will be in Halifax (still vaguely seafaring!), and the Stars will be somewhere in the Northwest Territories, but the Coyotes are just waiting for Jerry Reinsdorf to buy them next Thursday.

I don't think Matt Hulsizer has bought the Blues yet.

Ow can dey skate when da hice ear is in derrible shape?

AW MAN NOT AGAIN YOU GUYS

Okay. The Carolina Hurricanes are God's gift to hockey, Raleigh, and the world. They are widely considered by many [source?] to be the Montreal Canadiens of the Raleigh-Durham/Piedmont Triad corridor.

I know where Wake Forest is. That was kinda my point. It wouldn't have been quite as effective if I just picked the school down the street! I'm not buying that being a professional team really has that much cache in the land of college basketball diehards, who profess that they love college basketball precisely because it's not professional. I know the Hurricanes have enough of a niche in the market to get by, but nobody asked for them and nobody else wants them around, so it's fun to make fun of them, their irrelevance, and their utterly death-inducing, personality-devoid, directionless brand of hockey.

WTF are you talking about? The fact that pretty much every ACC basketball program is more established and followed than the Hurricanes? Or that they're the secondary tenant to NC State, who aren't even the most popular team in the region? That they didn't even have dedicated television and radio deals to begin their tenure because everyone had pre-existing commitments to various ACC pbp?

I don't think Houston is the hockey goldmine some people make it out to be. Yeah, it's big, but it's also very poor, very black, and very Hispanic. To be brutally frank, these are not the NHL's target markets. I mean, obviously there are people in Houston and its surrounding areas who are demographically aligned with the league, and it's certainly not as if poor, black, and/or Hispanic people cannot or are not allowed to like hockey, but it's just not going to be a slam dunk there, that's all.

I've heard Alexander has lost a great deal of his fortune since then and is much less interested in buying a hockey team.

I don't think the Canucks have the rights to Seattle. They sort of squat on the American Pacific Northwest by airing a limited slate of Canucks games on one of the RSNs, but I'm not sure it's a full-fledged claim of the region, nor does the region fully claim the Canucks. I don't think the NHL is that worried about playing second fiddle to the Newpersonics, though. They probably figure they can carve out their niche either way. I mean, the league let a team move to Raleigh conceding fourth place to Wake Forest basketball. I feel pretty safe in saying there will never be another team anywhere in Ontario, and that's okay. It's way, way, way too late to double up on a mega-market.

Another flaw in this argument is that a team in Markham cuts into the Leafs' bottom line much more than a team in Hamilton would, and we've already decided that Hamilton is cutting it too close. At least with Hamilton, you could make an argument that the team would represent the nebulous "Southern Ontario" region comprising Hamilton, Burlington, Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge, Brantford, St. Cats, etc., rather than the GTA. Now, of course a Hamilton team would market itself to various points east (with what success, I don't know), but at least there's some sort of argument that it's not reasonable for the Leafs to claim everything as far west as London. Markham would be right in their backyard, and represent a much clearer threat to the bottom line. Also, the argument that Rogers and Bell would love to have another team competing with their team because they'd own the broadcast rights is flawed as well, because even in Canada, unless something has changed and nobody has told me, the NHL is a gate-driven league. You don't want people spending their money elsewhere.

I'm not buying that it's actually better for RogersBellMLSE to cede its monopoly of Toronto, or that greater Toronto is really all that underserved when the Maple Leafs are one of the most popular sports teams in the world. The market is crystallized by now; pretty much all of southern Ontario now and forever belongs to the Leafs. I'm also not seeing how this won't piss off the Sabres, with two years spent right in Hamilton and many more spent siphoning off the unserved GTA fans they claim to serve. Again, most of this guy's premise is based on fiction regarding the Quebec City bid. Je ne m'inquiete pas.

But these aren't true. The owner would be Quebecor, they have an arena ready to build, and they sorted out the funding. Quebec City is still the frontrunner. There's going to be a lot of wishcasting from the Toronto-based media on this.

First things first, "sightline issues aside" with America West is like "assassination issues aside" with Mrs. Lincoln's night out. Second of all, I think between the Suns, concerts, and whatever else they have there, it's one of the busier arenas in the country. Now, if the owners of the Thrashers decided their arena dates were more valuable on anything but their hockey team, why would a third party give up arena dates to a commodity as compromised as this one? On the other side of the transaction, how would the Coyotes, who are getting $25 million a year from Glendale just to cover partial losses, have the money to rent out another building besides the one they're being paid to play in? Who has the master lease? If it's the Suns, they'd probably tell the Coyotes to piss off because they have better events to book. It would be an interesting experiment to see just how full of crap Valley fans are (I submit "very") about it being SO HARD to get to games, but the dollars/cents logistics of such a thing would prohibit it, not to mention how ridiculous it would look to build an arena with arguably the best sightlines in the league (I hear it's them or Montreal, depending on how you like your seating rake) after years of being in one with the worst, and then going back to the one with the worst. What an utterly inscrutable message to send to your consumer base. Screw it, they're done.

The kindest thing I can say about Howard Baldwin is that as far as past, present, and prospective NHL scam artists go, he merely seems to be a benevolent dreamer rather than the outwardly self-interested sketchy OPM jockeys and convicted felons who otherwise make up his ranks. I can believe that he really loves hockey and really wants to do well and do good, he's just a bumbling cash-poor doofus. So congratulations, Howard Baldwin! Despite your best efforts, which included destroying the Whalers and almost destroying the Penguins, you are, in fact, not John Rigas or Bruce McNall!

Maybe a Hartford team could muster up enough Nutmeg State pride to get their channel on Fairfield County cable systems, but a New England sports channel isn't going to have any carriage in New York, whether tri-state area or upstate. They would have all of New England along with the Bruins, the same way the Habs and Nords would each have all of la province. Haha, speaking of Connecticut and being America's team, wouldn't it be something if ESPN2 were to pick up a slate of Whalers games. Old times' sake!

The happy medium between the old Sonics uniforms and the neo-retro would simply been to put yellow numbers on the road and incorporate the Seattle skyline in their basketball logo rather than just an S. The radial-without-rotating arching of the old uniforms looked hysterically cheap even then.

A new arena for Hartford would be shared with UConn hoops, of course, just like how the original Whalers are also the secondary tenant to a college basketball team. Anything between 17 and 18 would be fine for Hartford, maybe even down to 16,750 if they're able to get that much-needed corporate support and sell lots of luxury boxes for UConn/Whalers/concerts/etc., and control parking/concession revenue. That was a really interesting history of the Whalers, Brian, particularly how the notoriously risk-averse insurance companies found themselves risking a good deal of money on the Whale. Where did you get all the numbers for that? Something to consider with the attendance hypotheticals: 1) the capacity of the Civic Center was rather low compared to the post-Palace-of-Auburn-Hills superarenas. Over the past twelve seasons, there haven't been a lot of 15,000-seat dumps in the league, have there? 2) speaking of dumps, much like in Winnipeg, the arena was not a very good one, and this surely kept many fans away when the vaunted live experience of the NHL was still a crappy one, what with the low-end arena and its bad sightlines. 3) a 12,000 (or 80% capacity) average is bad, but consider the move across all sports leagues from reporting butts in seats to reporting either tickets sold or outright bald-faced lies. There are probably more teams closer to 12,000 than whatever numbers they're cooking up on the box score. A Whalers team wouldn't be a slam dunk today, but I think they'd do better than you think they would. With respect to Hartford-New Haven's small media market, a Whalers team would certainly anchor a New England-wide sports channel, probably pairing up with the Celtics on Not NESN like they always did. If they become shareholders in the channel this time around and sell their television rights to themselves, jackpot. This would allow them to be a regional team, serving as an alternative to the Bruins if for some reason you would not like to be a Bruins fan right about now. As we're seeing with the Jets now and will see with the Nordiques soon, the Power Ballad effect (you don't know what you got till it's gone) will keep support relatively high. Consider that more people care about sports in more ways than they ever did when the Whalers were around. Even the weak sister NHL is much bigger business now than it was then. I don't think it's ridiculous to surmise that their support would go up simply by virtue of being a major league team. All that said, I don't think it's gonna happen, and Howard Baldwin is the kind of owner the NHL needs like it needs a hole in the head.

I've not heard anything about anyone in Kansas City or Houston wanting to own an NHL team. If they're out there, they've kept awfully quiet.

Contraction would be a public relations cataclysm and would make the NHL look even more bush-league than moving five more teams to Canada. They're never going to admit failure on that level. They'll unload the Coyotes, then continue juggling the rest of their problems indefinitely.

There's not enough talent for 32 teams unless you know something I don't about the KHL ceasing to exist. There also are not and will never be 32 locations capable of supporting the NHL. There aren't even 30 right now.

The deadline has been "last Thursday" for like three years! It's not just a hockey-mad small market, it's a hockey-mad small market where the owners are making money in multiple places. Whereas True North controls every virtually revenue stream related to the Jets and downtown Winnipeg entertainment, the key for Quebecor is that the Nordiques will anchor an entire sports channel, one that by my rough math will reach at least nine, maybe ten million people (Quebec, New Brunswick, Ottawa-Gatineau). While your immediate market is small, the expanded media market is equal to Montreal's.

The color scheme was interesting, I'll give you that, but a charter franchise in a major city should have a relatively classic palette. That would've been a neat color scheme for, say, the Rockets, if they were dead-set on scrapping the championship uniforms.