The_Admiral

Imagine if football uniforms had grey shirts and grey pants. Every sport has its own conventions.

Yet it seems to get worse every time... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xy0UBpagsu8

Let me see if I can guess how this goes. 1) "We believe this team is a highly undervalued asset that we have the means to turn around overnight." 2) "We really believe in this team and can't wait to start taking a closer look at the business side of things." 3) "We're really excited about the imminent purchase of the Coyotes as soon as we forge a meaningful public-private partnership for the community." 4) "Y U NO GIVE FREE MONEY?!?" 5) There are no (anglophone) bidders at this time.

I don't mind the solid red socks. I suppose they might as well be, right?

How can you say the Islanders deserve no respect but the Rangers do? "mommy, mommy, look, I can be a New York sports team that spends lots of money on big free agents too!" This is a perfectly acceptable color scheme. You're freaking out as it if it's highlighter yellow and pea green.

double post

New York sports teams should look like sports teams, not clownshoes technicolor fever dreams. There's a place for those sorts of uniforms; that place is Salt Lake City or Jacksonville or Phoenix or whatever. The old/new Isles sweaters had New York's colors and a no-nonsense striping pattern. They won four Cups in a row with these. They play in the suburbs of the biggest city in the country. Why shouldn't they look like professionals?

The glorious Pac-# and its Lofty Academic Standards™ will never be sullied by the likes of Boise State and Kansas State blargh yargh blorgh

Well, yeah, it is. Why is that bad? Those are truer to how the Red Sox should look than the all-midnight blue look, even if they were on pullovers. I never understood the fascination with sucking the soul out of road uniforms by using drab blue so much. Why shouldn't the Red Sox on the road look like the Red Sox at home but for a grey base rather than white? Also strange about that redesign is that it runs counter to the Henry regime's obsession with making red the team's primary color rather than the navy/red mix it had been before. Red pullovers, red BPs, red undershirts, red this, red that, because after all they are the Red Sox. So with that whole push, why introduce a road jersey that uses no red at all? For the record, the best balance of navy and red for the Red Sox would be to have navy undershirts along with the traditional red lettering/numbers on the jerseys, as modeled by this jerkass: Really lets the red stand out. Red doesn't look right as a base color for them.

Oh, dear!

To write out what I know about college sports could barely fill a postage stamp, but all I know Mizzou as is a team that is often involved in the wrong side of notable games. (The pro wrestling slang for this is "jobber to the stars.") I don't know that they squander what they have, though. Seems like they have a strong statewide fanbase to me. If the squandering you refer to with Illinois is their failure to wholly capture Chicago, that's going to happen when you have a large population that goes every which way for school and lends its primary allegiances to professional football and basketball. I'd say they do well enough with a big downstate fanbase and a decent alumni foothold in Chicagoland. For that matter, Northwestern does about as well as they should for a school that doesn't emphasize athletics.

Yeah, there's obviously some kind of deep discount or something going on. Also consider that they can lead the league in new STHs when others can't because the good teams all maxed out their season tickets while the Coyotes have (virtually) nowhere to go but up. It's also entirely possible that they're lying.

No, they like to write inscrutable blog posts with titles like "why LeBron James is like Eric B. and Rakim"

I think it's really the bohemian bourgeoisie we're talking about here, not honest-to-goodness liberals per se. I don't think there are ever enough of them to kill a sports team, but if there's any sport and any place where there are enough of them to at least send it reeling a bit, it would probably have to be hockey in Seattle proper. For all the howling about how no one in the city wants to schlep out to places like Bellevue or Renton, I think that might be where a hockey team has to be if it's going to be near middle-class suburbanites with disposable income who don't have deep-seated issues with the idea of intense white sports and how it affects the perception of their consumption patterns. I know Cascadia is different from the rest of the country, but I still think people away from the heart of the city might be just a little more whitebread, just enough to make hockey work there.

I said "it's not that liberals hate hockey" right at the top of the page, though. It's just a certain type of content consumer who has serious objections to the culture of hockey, especially vis-a-vis basketball and soccer. It's weird how hockey inspires equal parts unwavering adoration and bitter hatred. It's such a simple game. You put the play implement into a goal at either end of a rectangle. It doesn't have to be anything bigger than what it is. I enjoy hockey games immensely without giving the slightest consideration to race relations in America.

I don't think it's about politics so much as consumption patterns. Hockey-haters generally are liberal, but it's not because they're liberal, if that makes sense. I don't get the blue-collar meathead stereotype when most hockey fans I know are either affluent white-collar types, physically inept nerdlingers, or both.

In fairness, it's usually meathead hockey fans who precipitate everything by saying dumb crap like "basketball? more like African ping pong!" (I HAVE READ THIS I SWEAR TO GOD) or "it's alls just a bunch a thugs in dat thug league!" which causes the basketball fans (who are almost always white, but almost never college fans) to recoil and come back with accusations of whitetrashness, racism, and the whole thing about being aghast over fighting. Trust me, it's a thing. DDR's in St. Louis now, but I'm sure he can vouch for the fact that there's now a Bulls-Blackhawks dualism parallel to Cubs-Sox (though the battle lines aren't really the same). I hate it, personally, because I really like both teams (well, I really like one and unhealthily agonize over the other). There's this fallacy that if you're a hockey fan, you have to hate basketball and basketball fans, and that basketball fans have to dismiss hockey as bloodsport for white people who are too uncultured to appreciate a real sport, the usually-unspoken implication being that no real sport can be thoroughly dominated by Caucasians. I'm not buying it for a minute, but others are, which is a shame.

I worry about this too. There's a certain strain of liberals who absolutely detest hockey and all that it supposedly "stands for." I'm not saying anything so broad as "liberals hate hockey," because that's stupid. They don't. If anything, hockey is most popular in places where people tend to be liberal, or moderate, or not conservative. But those freakin' bobos who think they're too sophisticated for the supposed barbarism of hockey, man, I don't know what you're supposed to do about them. Football is fine, and basketball is fine, and even baseball is okay, but God forbid a white guy draws hard physical contact with another white guy. You'll choke on your fair trade coffee at the sight of it all.

I don't know what a Grand Rapids Rampage is. I do know that Grand Rapids might as well be American Hamilton: there may be a lot of hockey fans, but most of them are proudly spoken for by some big team kinda nearby. If it were even approved with heavy indemnifications, it wouldn't be terribly successful anyway. The top Red Wings affiliation, where they load up with pros and age their prospects like steaks, is the perfect fit for the market.

Yeah. Somewhere in the journey, the subsidy has been shifted from covering losses to paying the NHL for arena management services, surely so as to circumvent the gift clause. However, this would seem to raise a new crop of objections, namely that $25 million a year is over market value and this wasn't the result of an open bidding process. I'm beginning to suspect the Goldwater Institute either isn't very good at watchdogging, or they were so exhausted with the Hulsizer stuff that they couldn't bear to deal with Glendale Clown College again for another eight months and just slept through the subsidy renewal. I think Atlanta Spirit set this theory back a little bit. It turns out you can fill dates with cheaper events than hockey games. It's not just dollars and cents here. You have to really want a hockey team in your portfolio, too.

http://www.glendales...1cc4c002e0.html Things are slowly, slooowly going rancid. *they came close with the proposed Reinsdorf and Hulsizer sales.

"Money can be exchanged for goods and services" really nipped those guys in the bud. Good to see someone stand up for the cause:

I'm not averse to melted cheese with fries, but I can't see it occurring to me to order them in the near future. I guess I don't really like fries all that much. Anyway, I guess I misunderstood Blueland Believer's "10 minutes" thing. I didn't realize he was talking about the city council thing, because I thought 15 minutes was the meme on that one. I thought he thought someone called the office to buy the Thrashers ten minutes after the True North sale closed. Though I guess there were some groups that wanted to keep the Thrashers local despite not actually having money to buy the team. I guess they figured it hadn't stopped this league before.

Detroit would freak. The end. I'm surprised the Coyotes are playing a game on a Thursday. I thought the NHL made them another birthday-boy special schedule of all Fridays and Saturdays. Ketchup + mayonnaise is big out in Utah. "Fry sauce," they call it. I tried it once, but inasmuch as I hate ketchup and mayonnaise, I unsurprisingly hated them together. Not sure what I thought was gonna happen there.

Yeah. Poutine (pronounced roughly "poo-CHEEN," if I'm not mistaken). I think it's Quebec's national food, either that or simmering discontent.