The_Admiral

But you did, apparently, advocate for more back flips in hockey, which can't be a bad thing.

6/10

Oh, and the Blackhawks' games against the Red Wings were all low-scoring affairs,

FAKE EDIT:

3-2 Hawks

3-2 Wings OT

3-2 Wings OT

2-1 Hawks

2-1 Hawks

3-2 Hawks SO

but objectively speaking, they were the best games I watched my team play all year. Probably because of all those really good players the two teams have. Even when Toews, Datsyuk, et al were missing!

ACTUAL EDIT: their games with Vancouver were pretty good, too, with each team winning close at home and then big on the road.

Great, now I ruined Sportscenter. I'm having a bad day.

On the contrary, I don't think any of their draft picks under NHL ownership have come up. Any graduated prospects were drafted well before then. The only recent draft pick I see is Ekman-Larsson, and he was 2009.

I don't like the way they're winning because it's bad, unentertaining hockey for most of us. Like I said, it's all about bringing the game down to the lowest common denominator. What they're playing isn't worth saving. I make no apologies that I like uptempo, edge-of-your-seat hockey with abundant scoring chances and amazing players doing amazing things. I do not like A Bunch Of Guys camping out at the blue line, getting a turnover, scoring on an odd-man rush, and then sitting back on a 1-0 lead forever. I think it's bad for me and it's bad for the game at large, having seen the last time much of the league had no greater aspirations than to grind the game down to a big nothing. It shouldn't be rewarded, and should in fact be better proscribed by the rulebook and officials. However, great seats still available.

The Frogurt Is Also Cursed: FAILED COYOTE SUITOR FOLLOW-UP

Jim Balsillie: lost all his money because Zooey Deschanel doesn't endorse his smartphone

Ice Edge: never had any money to lose, has been repeatedly clowned, reduced to wanting to put an ECHL team in Thunder Bay

Matt Hulsizer: couldn't afford to buy the Coyotes nor Blues because his wife wouldn't give him the money, wound up a laughingstock for this and publishing strange memos sent from the future of Egypt's past or something

Jerry Reinsdorf: signed expensive designated hitter to hit 40 points below the Mendoza Line, had pretty much all of star basketball player's joints explode

Didn't the original Jim Balsillie deal actually pay Glendale a severance package of sorts in exchange for taking the team to Hamilton? Turns out Glendale would've come out ahead with that one, though the utter collapse of Blackberry--and in turn, Balsillie's fortune--probably wouldn't have been good for the Hamilton team. All hypothetical, of course, because there was and is never going to be a team in Hamilton.

So you like the NBA model where you got 3 or 4 good teams that can win and the Washington Generals and a baked up schemed up final with the officals helping to get the biggest stars in the biggest games.

The NBA isn't perfect, but one thing I love about the NBA is that you can't fake being good. You are or you aren't. Sure, you can play zone now, but all the zone in the world won't help you if you're up against elite talent and you have none of your own. The Spurs and Pistons who won with "defense and fundamentals" still had multiple Hall of Famers. The 2004 Pistons were most decidedly not a ragtag assemblage of scrubs, unless you live in a world where Rasheed Wallace and Chauncey Billups are scrubs.

It's a tragic flaw of hockey that you can win without being good, something that prohibits success in every other team or individual sport. For all of Tony La Russa's daft tinkering, he never figured out a way to win ballgames that didn't involve scoring baserunners at bat and recording outs in the field.

McCarthy, this league owned line of yours is utter crap. Was it bad for baseball that the Rangers were league owned half a season and went to the World Series?

Or was it better to have the leagued owned Montreal Expos have their hands tied so tightly behind their back it has taken nearly a decade after moving and getting stable ownership to finally become a good team.

Would you rather have a league owned team allowed to compete like the Coyotes or broken down like the New Orleans Hornets?

I want neither. When you have a league engineering the fortunes of a team to determine where it will do business, that looks terrible. The way the Montreal Expos were gutted to facilitate their relocation as was galling as the way the Coyotes' brand of lowest-common-denominator hockey suddenly became good enough to overtake a previously finesse-oriented league.

Anyone who's rooting for the Coyotes to keep stacking defenders in the slot and clogging the neutral zone waiting for turnovers because it's a "good story" is a "bad fan." It's really a fundamentally unwatchable brand of hockey they have going, but I suppose that's the way you win when you're being made to win without talent: just bring everyone else down to your level. Unless, of course, it's commonplace for elite teams to get doubled up in shots on goal on a regular basis.

Shane Doan threw a huge bitch fit and threatened not to report to Winnipeg if the team moved there, any talk of the Coyotes handling their uncertainty with quiet dignity can be shoved up an array of asses.

Seriously?

He said he had a no-move clause and thus couldn't be made to move with the team and wouldn't; what that elbow-throwing gomer failed to grasp was that "no-move" refers to trades/releases/assignments, not relocations.

Shane Doan threw a huge bitch fit and threatened not to report to Winnipeg if the team moved there, any talk of the Coyotes handling their uncertainty with quiet dignity can be shoved up an array of asses.

Competent hockey team for right-wing loon would be a good trade for the two states to make.

Sounds like the "announcement" is that they're trying to work on a deal unless someone gets in their way. Slam dunk.

Blues, master lease, Opera House, Rivermen for $130 million? They're getting more for less than Jamison would, plus the fact that the Blues/arena might actually make money.

Other than the Coyotes, I don't think there are any emergencies right now. The Blues are finally about to be sold. The Blue Jackets got their bailout creatively financed public-private partnership. The Devils are going to file for bankruptcy but they won't be moved. Again, Winnipeg got their team because the arena manager in Atlanta said it would not host an NHL team in its building anymore and so they had nowhere to go but Winnipeg or liquidation. I don't see an analogue to that situation. The NHL could theoretically own the Phoenix team forever if having a hockey team in Phoenix at all costs is really the most important thing in sports history as they've made it out to be.

This still relies on the city giving away money they don't have and wouldn't be allowed to give if they did have it. This sounds like another dog and pony show, just like when Hulsizer was "just about" to buy the team. Great seats still available.

Which they can't consummate because the powerful bread lobby Goldwater Institute is stopping their research subsidies.

No, Atlanta couldn't have survived. The Inner Sanctum of Retards basically evicted their own team after years of wanting to get out of the hockey business. I don't think they could've been persuaded to hang on any longer. Besides, if the team were to have stayed under new ownership, they would have been paying rent and collecting little/no ancillary revenues, something no new owner was willing to do for blatantly self-evident reasons. Unlike the situation in Clown College, there was no magic subsidy to keep them at the city-owned arena. Atlanta Spirit had the master lease to the building and they said gtfo. If not for True North, the team very well might have folded altogether.

As for Bill Wirtz Lite, I'm sure he'll change his tune if Quebecor negotiates a big fat concessions contract with Delaware North.

No, it's all the way foreclosed. It's half empty, but then again rumor has it I'm a little bit of a pessimist when it comes to this thing.

We need to keep the team here so that we can encourage people to go to our strip mall.

*raises sales tax to highest in the country*

What's even more annoying than the fact that the fans who stand to benefit from Glendale's taxes going up and employees being fired live and spend money in far more affluent municipalities is their whole cavalier attitude about not supporting the team.

"Do you go to games?"

"I won't go until I know who the owner is."

"But they might move!"

"Nah, because Big Daddy Gary Bettman says we're his special little guys and he's not going to let that happen."

Meanwhile, some neighborhood kids won't get to go swimming this summer. That's okay, though, because sports.

I want it to succeed.

Why? It's virtually impossible for them to have an NHL team at league-comparable price points and without massive taxpayer subsidies. It's hurting the league and the city to keep this going. It's better for the whole league to be somewhere where they can make money. I like hockey.

Jack up the sale price and keep people coming to Phoenix games, yeah.

Kind of amazing, the lack of respect the NHL has for its customers, to turn them against one another like this. Oh well.

The guy at the Jets boards who purports to have an inside source (had all the details on the Thrashers move, in retrospect) said there'd be one big deke to scare all the QC people and then it'd be all over. I hope this is that. The subsidies being afforded the Coyotes this time around are disgusting and probably illegal.

The upside here is that if something about my composition should change and I can suddenly handle an arid climate, I know I can move to Glendale, because in Glendale, landlords pay rent to their tenants. Reports that they wear hats on their feet and their hamburgers eat people are still unconfirmed. I might have to reconsider, because I can't do dry heat and live in fear of free-roaming, man-eating burgers.

Okay. The Predators are the best organization in hockey history. The rest of the world has a lot to learn about churning out fourth-liners and chanting "You Suck" at games. This is the Nashville Predators' league and we're just living in it.

With all due respect, Nashville feels for all the world like an actual case of the "they only have 15,000 fans but they're all at every game" trope that people always fallaciously apply to various hockey teams. Their television ratings never seem to get published (neither do the Hurricanes, so it must have something to do with being on subfeeds of Fox Sports South), so we never get to see how far their audience does or doesn't extend beyond the gate. I'm highly skeptical that this team is really the "success" the apologists make it out to be. I mean, they're a rousing success in relation to the Coyotes, I suppose I'll give you that, but some people are making them sound like the freaking Canadiens in yellow shirts these days.