The_Admiral

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.

I'd really like to know just how many Southern Ontario ticketholders come from north or west of Hamilton, or even Hamilton proper. While there's no question that there's a Canadian presence at Sabres games, I feel like the extent of their necessity is overstated by Canadians who want to pretend they have a seven-and-a-halfth team. This isn't an argument for a team in Hamilton; I'm not really in favor of one because I know it can't be allowed to happen. Hamilton's just sorta dicked. The end.

if the Maple Leafs weren't The Passion That Unites Us All

You and Saintsfan should have a British-Guys-Who-Exclaim-Too-Much-off.

Yeah, I meant other than the two we already have. More likely than an actual Hamilton team would be the Sabres "reaching out to their underserved Southern Ontario fanbase" by getting telecasts somewhere on the region's basic/extended cable systems. In other words, squatting. Not sure what the CTRC's rules on such a thing would be, but you'll see them re-assert (or even assert in the first place) their commitment to the region if talks start getting loud, and then that will be that.

Oh, there's no question it's going to be Quebec City over Markham. It's silly to pretend there's ever going to be a team in Markham. While either relocation would represent an encroachment of sorts--the Canadiens and Nordiques will share all of Quebec and New Brunswick's TV sets the way the Astros and Rangers do in Texas--Quebec City will be far more amenable to the Molsons than Markham would be to MLSE. I'm going to make a bold prediction and say we'll never see another NHL team anywhere in Ontario.

The thing about the Devils is that when they were based out of the Meadowlands, they were running a tidy little operation where no, there wasn't a ton of money coming in, but there was never a ton going out, either. When the Devils moved to Newark, they took on a huge load of debt to build the new arena, where price points drastically went up across the board without a commensurate increase in demand. You're charging more, they're not buying, and oh you have millions in debt to pay down. That's how the Devils have gotten themselves in such trouble. The Devils would've been able to run an acceptable niche-team model without people screaming "oh my god they have to move" if they had stayed at the Meadowlands. PRO TIP: if the real estate bubble is going to swallow you whole, make sure your untenably expensive real estate isn't in freakin' Newark. I can see the exact same fate befalling the Islanders, but they do not have the option of staying in their building.

I would like to see Hartford back in the league, but not at the expense of the Islanders. Might be tough to shoehorn them back in, though. The Rangers and Bruins blobs of fandom have kind of spilled into Connecticut. Nature abhors an east coast hockey vacuum.

The Quebec City rumblings are getting louder. I don't know why it took so long, because we've been saying for months that Quebec City is the only viable relocation option and maybe the only viable sale option, but Fischler's on it: http://www.msg.com/blogs/stan-fischler/bluelines-hall-of-fame-devils-avery-s-back-and-the-emergence-of-dan-girardi-1.77253 Well yeah. So make it happen. You have to if you're in the business of making money.

Blessing in disguise for my Bluenote brethren.

Well, Missouri wasn't in the Confederacy, but they were a slave state. I guess they can be in the SEC if that's good enough for Kentucky.

http://weblogs.sun-sentinel.com/news/politics/broward/blog/2011/11/florida_panthers_asking_browar.html "We need tax money to upgrade our luxury suites. I asked for white tigers!" Galling.

You're quoting a post about the Devils. They aren't in the South. And while it's satisfying to see the Devils get a little fiscal comeuppance for the way they pushed the sport to the brink of extinction, I don't want them to fail. Insofar as the NHL still generates and will always generate much of its revenue on site--tickets, parking, concessions--and insofar as salaries and revenue-sharing payouts are functions of leaguewide revenue, it is necessary that the league does its business where money can reliably be made. Quebec City will make more money for everyone than Phoenix will, which currently costs each team owner about $2 million a year to run, just as Winnipeg has already proven more lucrative than Atlanta. Hockey will never be much more than what it is, and that's fine. You don't need us for NASCAR, we don't need you for this. We saw what happened with overextension in both.

Personal bugbear: it's a belated happy birthday. The birthday itself isn't late, the well-wishing is. I wonder how many people will be in attendance for Blackhawks-Panthers. Boy, there's a win I want more than usual, just to stick it to that farce of an operation and the beloved Crusty Old Hockey Guy running it, probably mumbling some tired crap about getting the Panthers to play "Panther hockey." Ugh.

Would you say there were 11,000 people there.

http://video.nhl.com/videocenter/console?hlg=20112012,2,158 this looks really bad get out of my league

http://www.sportsnet...shannon_sather/ Oh, man, if Hulsizer is relying on Oren Koules to help close the deal, the Blues are about to live in interesting times. What a pair of big shooters there. What a surprise! The vaunted Greg Jamison group never had money! Of course not, because Greg Jamison is not and never was an independent billionaire, just a businessman playing with OPM. With the recent Trib story about just how disgustingly Reinsdorf is bending Illinois taxpayers over the barrel, maybe there will be some much-needed backlash against him. I hope this plan, like all his other ones, requires tax subsidies that the Goldwater Institute will block, and then we can finally be done. That's pretty bad if the Panthers' race to the salary floor was immediately followed by an ownership-mandated salary dump. But the Panthers are okay. NHL ownership, extant and prospective, sucks.

You can also use "irrespective," but you can't split the difference. I predict 7200 announced, ~3000 AIS for that game. Total shots on goal under 40. This is we're counting on to win over Suns/Mavericks diehards, huh, you rubes?

One of the things I hate about the sport I love is how easy it still is to obfuscate your way to success with markedly inferior talent. What I love about the NBA is that much more often than not, talent ultimately prevails over dragging the game down into the muck. Let's be honest: even "defensive fundamentals" teams like the mid-'00s Pistons and Spurs were using those defensive fundamentals with multiple lottery picks and/or Hall of Fame players. Teams like the Coyotes and Predators can still BS their way into good records without necessarily having talented skaters, and I don't think that does the sport any favors. I'd love to see a crackdown on the sort of benign obstruction that allows bad teams to succeed, so that their clutching and grabbing either leads to power play goals or a fear of power play goals that hogties them into failure, where they belong.

They can cover the whole Metroplex in billboards. It's not gonna make people want to watch a bunch of replacement-level muckers play four men back all night. The "you've heard of Brett Hull and these other teams suck" ad campaign doesn't work when Brett Hull is retired and the other teams don't suck.

"The Stars draw well when they pay for big names, win a lot, and don't have to compete with more successful neighbors" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement. Even if they do buy up as many star players (as it were) as the salary cap allows, and win a lot, what happens if entertainment dollars still go to the three teams that are more popular? It took a ridiculous confluence of occurences for the Stars to seem like a success. Their ceiling is low. Not so low as to fail like Atlanta or Phoenix, but they're never going to be more than a niche now. Kind of like Anaheim.

Gagliardi's getting 50% of a very busy arena and I think he's just assuming debt while not really paying much else. That's a pretty sweet real estate deal, whereas Atlanta was only ever about unloading the Thrashers. Reminds me of when Jeff Vinik bought the master lease and some adjacent vacant land for $90 million, and they threw in a hockey team for free. Buffalo has as much to do with blocking Hamilton as I do. It's all Millsy there.

Maybe whichever derivatives traders own the Panthers this month will realize what Atlanta Spirit realized, which is that it's smarter to cashier the hockey team and fill the dates with cheaper and more lucrative events. Or, seeing as the owners allege that owning the Florida Panthers is not a losing proposition, they are frauds and will go to jail for something else they lied about.