The_Admiral

November 31, 2005 ATTN: Fans Well come Blues fans! I can guaranty you that the St. Louis Blues ixperience will be vastly emproved. All so, we plan on maxamizing revenues by recaliberating strategic price points thruout the arena. All so, I need tax money. You'res truly, Matt Huslizer

Holy crap. That's ridiculous. This looks really bad for the sport. You can't even give the "all the season ticketholders no-showed but that upper deck was a madhouse" excuse. There's no one up there, either! Pathetic. It's done.

It's a testament to just how long and winding this road has been that I stared at this post for like eight seconds thinking "what the hell does that even mean" before I remembered that Glendale tried to buy a parking lot from themselves. Creative financing!

I dunno, "creative financing" has become kind of a euphemism for "bullsh-t," and not wrongly so. I mean, this isn't exactly the found money it's being made out to be, either. You can say that this isn't directly taking away from money earmarked for public services, but operating under the premise that government pretty much always runs a deficit, what happens if actual public services require additional funding while tax dollars have already been committed to buying a playplace for a sports team? What happens if the casino doesn't bring in the projected tax revenue? There are hidden costs and unintended consequences with everything once you start getting the government involved in sports facilities; none of this can ever be as cut and dried as "we took out a loan and paid it off" like Palace of Auburn Hills/United Center/TD Garden/etc. Maybe this is just the simple cheapass midwesterner in me that can't comprehend what them there fancy number men in tall towers do.

Well, my initial point was that it's blatant misdirection to point to problems the Red Wings had thirty years ago when they've been the best hockey organization in the world for the last twenty years. My contention is merely that it's unfair to say that all other things being equal, every city is equally capable of sustained and fervent support. That's just the reality on the ground. Owing to not being a cultural institution and showing up late to the party, there's simply a lower threshold for what a lot of these expansion teams can be (and I would contend the same for baseball and basketball, too), such that it doesn't seem worth it to wait for them to reach that low threshold when players and owners have an urgent financial and competitive stake in leaguewide prosperity. When people say that because Chicago survived a ten-year dark age and came out with a championship and a successful organization, any marginal market can, it seems to me like they've got it totally backward: if backwaters can approach something resembling success, imagine what sleeping giants can do. I don't want to wait to see what Phoenix or Columbus can be if it's better for the sport to know what Quebec City is now.

Actually, I like new people. The point is that there's no sense in citing Detroit's bad attendance when the team blew goats and the Joe Louis was somehow even colder and alienating than it is today. I also wanted to pre-empt the sort of slack-jawed "well look at what happened in Pittsburgh and Chicago" analysis that always gets brought in to apologize for markets that are far less resilient. Anyhoodles, the Jackets' spending spree is going to blow up in their face if they're going to come hat in hand to the government while being as expensively bad as they've been so far. "Maybe you could pay your rent if you didn't pay James Wisniewski like Nicklas Lidstrom," the teabaggers would say, if I had any confidence that they know who either of those people are, which I don't. At any rate, I have a tough time believing that Columbus's bailout of an allegedly necessary mixed-use real estate development will go uncontested while Glendale's bailout of an allegedly necessary mixed-use real estate development remains a complete disaster. I suppose it helps to use the local newspaper as your house organ, though. Sodboy saying that a bad year could kill the Jackets seemed hyperbolic at first, but now that I think about it, all it'll take will be a prolonged losing streak and a snag in the bailout procedure, and suddenly the vultures are circling.

Can't say whether a team will play at the Colisee, but the mayor has said that the city can kick in a couple million to fix up the ice plant/AC and replace the boards to tide a team over till the Amphitheatre is complete. Would it be ideal to play out of the Colisee for two-and-a-half to three seasons? No, not really. However, 2012 might be Quebec City's best--or only--chance to strike: the Blue Jackets are staring down the prospect of demanding a taxpayer bailout in the shadow of a teabagger governor, and enough has been said about the myriad problems facing a Coyotes transaction. EDIT: Ugh, The Red Wings' attendance figures in the early '80s have no bearing on anything happening in 2011-12. The Coyotes' attendance figures in 2011-12 do. Additionally, don't mistake civic institutions such as the Red Wings and Blackhawks for real estate schemes like the Coyotes and Panthers. God, do we still have to be this remedial?

11,000, my surprisingly firm ass. No way that place was 65% full. If you go look at the clip of that Jamie Benn goal in Columbus last night, there's another place where Nordique Nation can descend. There was like no one there. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7soaj4yD0A

When Jesse Rogers is ripping on you, time to shut 'er down: bonus, the essence of Jesse Rogers:

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Gary Bettman.

I would like to live in a luxury condo in the middle of a desert. I would really like my luxury condo in the middle of a desert to be adjacent to a Jimmy Buffett-themed restaurant, a hockey arena, and Cracker Barrel. 9/11 ruined everything.

hahaha hahahahaha this is awesome

But no one's watching on TV, either. I'm watching tonight, though! I wish I weren't. The Coyotes are sludge on skates and there's hardly anyone there. I don't like it when hockey fills me with despair.

This has such a weird science fiction feel to it. I feel like the whole thing is just a microcosm of the recession. Just a ziggurat of terrible ideas contained herein.

They're starting work on an 18,000-seat arena that should be open by 2015. They'd have to play three years at a half-assedly renovated Colisee in the meantime. Also, Quebecor, the prospective owner for a new QC team, is supposed to be establishing a new TVA sports channel that would be carried in the entire province. So the pieces are coming together, it's just a matter of whether the Phoenix thing will get ugly enough that the league stops messing around with Reinsdorf, Goldwater objecting to Reinsdorf, and the union objecting to everything, and just decides to cash out to Quebecor.

Um, this is all kind of remedial. The Maple Leafs control southern Ontario, and there is no interested ownership in Portland or Houston. The only options are to sell to interests in Phoenix that require taxpayer subsidies, which will be contested by the Goldwater Institute and now apparently the NHLPA, or sell to interests in Quebec City, who themselves have subsidies for their arena construction but there's nothing left to fight there. That's where we are now. One or the other, as best I can tell. No Kansas City, no Tacoma.

It's true. No matter how this ends up, at the very least it augurs quite poorly for the hope of amenable labor negotiations ahead. I don't have high hopes for a quick and easy CBA re-up with a shot as big as "hey, you're hiding $28 million from us, we're taking you to arbitration to get it out of you" fired across the bow.

57% of two years of $25 million equals $28.5 million getting yoinked from a league already losing money on this enterprise. Mais nous avons l'argent...

The NHLPA is claiming that the $25 million per year in taxpayer money to keep the Coyotes playing hockey in Glendale is thus Hockey-Related Revenue to which the union is entitled. At my house, we call these uh-ohs!

http://www.sbnation.com/nhl/2011/10/12/2475303/nhl-realignment-mlb-nfl-model Boy, if this is accurate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_and_Canadian_cities_by_number_of_major_professional_sports_franchises The only unserved metro larger than Tampa Bay is, of all places, Montreal! I didn't realize metro Toronto was smaller than metro Detroit. Thought the GTA would be #7 or #8. Maybe it depends on whether you count Hamilton, Kitchener, etc.

I don't think it was that set before they left because Karmanos was seriously floating the idea of playing out of an abandoned airplane hangar in Columbus until an arena was built. I don't think NC State--and it was NC State that poached the team, because they needed another anchor tenant to get free money--got it together till very late in the Whale's last season, or early in the offseason. This league, I swear. Why should any of that have to be written? Abandoned hangars, Columbus, second fiddle to college basketball. Man.

Shane Doan has been a blithering bitch. He threatened that he wouldn't report to Winnipeg if the team relocated because he has a no-move clause, even though no-move clauses don't cover relocation. He also told anyone who'd listen that Winnipeg was a terrible place to work/play/live, resulting in the whole team bitching its collective ass off while the Thrashers players expressed excitement about going to Winnipeg or Quebec City. Shane Doan can sit and spin, that overrated third-liner. Hartford Whalers? I don't know what in God's name possibly could've been more appealing about Greensboro.

You can't understate the effect of the language charter (Loi 101) on baseball in Montreal. I'd say the wheels really started turning when the province made it unpleasant to speak English in Quebec. Baseball was always more of an anglophone game, which isn't to say that that francophones didn't like the Expos, just that culturally speaking, as it were, baseball isn't very French. Remember that it was Montreal, not Toronto, that was the largest city in Canada when the Expos were established. Part of the reason it isn't anymore is that so many anglophones, about 300,000 I believe, were de facto expelled from the province and moved to Ontario. Montreal's not the same. Vancouver is a more intriguing Canadian destination now.

There's a famous cover of The New Yorker that depicts "The New Yorker's Concept of Geography" or something, which consists of Manhattan in painstaking detail, followed by an abstract "Jersey" and the rest of America being inconsequential. We need to come up with The Rays Fan's Concept Of Geography, wherein St. Petersburg is separated from the rest of greater Tampa by a vast ocean marked "Here There Be Monsters," because apparently this is THE ONLY FREAKING PLACE IN AMERICA where it's moderately difficult to get to a sporting event.