The_Admiral

The league wasn't looking to expand in the 2000s, having overexpanded in the 1990s and paying the price for it with Lockout II: Expansion Fees Can't Paper Over Our Crap Anymore. Even if they were to expand, they wouldn't have expanded to Hamilton for the same reasons they wouldn't have to Winnipeg and didn't to Quebec City (how's that "deferred expansion" going, anyway?). After they wouldn't even let him move the lousy dead-ass Predators, the subterfuge of buying the Coyotes out of bankruptcy court and winning the eventual lawsuit was the only play he had left to make money on a Southern Ontario NHL team. Incidentally, I swear there were reports that Copps Coliseum was only to be a stopgap while they built a new arena in, of all places, Cambridge, roughly equidistant to Hamilton and Kitchener-Waterloo, but I can't find any sources. But why would I imagine that?

To put a finer point on it, it's a metropolitan area that's about 120 miles north to south and, I dunno, like 10 miles west to east. It's a long boi. This is the same problem South Florida has, where everything is either relatively nearby or requires long drives up and down one artery, which I think is worse than Phoenix's 360-degree sprawl. I don't have the stomach for "but all our REAL fans live in Provo!"

Move the Jazz to New Orleans and the Hornets to Charlotte and the Bobcats to Salt Lake City and the basketball to hockey.

The company for which Salt Lake City is a company town would not be happy. They've declared the word "Mormon" a "victory for Satan" and have gone all in on "Latter-day Saints."

I don't think we touched upon this, but Salt Lake City was the Golden Knights' biggest secondary market and now that's gone, along with most of the rest of the Intermountain West that they'd been allowed to squat on. I believe the Golden Knights and Coyotes were both working with Scripps for their TV, so it's possible they get their games into Arizona now.

Wouldn't be the first time, would it, league that named four expansion markets at once?

HRification comes for everyone, even arcane special-interest message boards. How many warning points am I up to now?

The most amazing part of the John Chayka saga was that he was like "whatever you do, don't draft Mitch Miller, he stuffed urinal cakes in a disabled kid's mouth," then quit the team, then the team was so mad at him that they drafted Mitch Miller out of spite and everyone got really mad at them.

The line was "I am a Cardinal.", which is arguably funnier than the meme. We were all like 19 years old and stupid. HOWEVER, the Josh Hancock drunk-driving death was only 2.5 years before the Coyotes declared bankruptcy, which was almost 15 years ago. Time, man!

One of the very few local NBA broadcasters that matters or has ever mattered, I'd argue.

For anyone else so inclined, remember that "Today, we are all Cardinals" was never said by the person accused of saying it, just like how Edward G. Robinson never really says "who's your Moses now, n'yah, n'yah" in The Ten Commandments

That was the origin of the NHL owning and operating the Coyotes for four years. They went to court to stop Jerry Moyes from allowing Balsillie to buy the Coyotes out of bankruptcy court. The league said this was to protect their right to decide who owns which teams where, but if someone had bought the Senators out of bankruptcy to put them in San Diego, they wouldn't have lifted a finger. Mostly it was about protecting the Sabres (play in Buffalo) and Jeremy Jacobs (does business in Buffalo). The NHL even said in court that a Hamilton/Southern Ontario team would have been among their most profitable, they just weren't going to allow it. I think the Hamilton Tigers would've been kinda neat if they had loud barberpole sweaters and stuff.

The best situation would have been the Coyotes to Winnipeg and Thrashers to Quebec City both in 2011. A Hamilton '09/Winnipeg '11 scenario would have been okay too but my heart was never really in it for Hamilton, more of just a "hey what if." Seattle should have been expanded to long ago.

When you're right, you're right.

I think Phoenix would have had to have been an expansion for it to work. Acknowledge that there's not an NHL arena and build one. Take time to assemble a decent hockey-ops staff and business staff (whatever they inherited from the Jets was not it) and most of all, an owner who knows exactly what he's getting into. Not Minnesota guys who got derped by the worthless goddamn Timberwolves, not real estate speculators trying to get rich off a strip mall, not Wayne Gretzky, and not the parade of dopes who came in after the league. It needed to be a conscientious, from-the-ground-up project, but it wasn't, so it failed.

If you understand it as a convoluted legal plot to make this deadbeat stop embarrassing them by giving him a series of unattainable goals, it makes perfect sense. The "Coyotes history" will be consigned to the same basement file cabinet as the Thrashers' history; the only question is whether they sort out the Jets' lineage while they're at it now that nothing matters anymore.

Look who has thoughts! It's Joyce Clark! If it weren't 80 out, I could do this all day. This blog has it all. Steadfast belief that Glendale would have worked? If you ignore over $100 million in taxpayer subsidies, sure. Forgetting that the Coyotes made the playoffs three years, not one? Oh yeah. Botching a pretty common figure of speech? I wouldn't expect anything less! I wonder how many of the characters are dead.

LITTLE LOGAN WADE! God, all the names are burbling back up. My Coyotes-saga life is flashing before my eyes. Remember the lawyer for the city of Glendale and also the Coyotes who negotiated the Coyotes' lease while working for the city and then went to to work for the Coyotes, which got the lease cancelled? That didn't kill them either!

Sounds like the Jazz will run the business side of the team now, the way apparently the SacKings are going to run the A's (THAT'LL GO GREAT). Reminder that Meruelo was going to buy the Atlanta Hawks right after Atlanta Spirit unloaded the Thrashers but Stern's NBA vetted him and decided he was a dope and a fraud and told him to get lost. Then he regrouped, made a play for the Coyotes, then on their third permutation of ownership since the league sold them, and Bettman was like "I don't see any problems here." Who could have seen that a professional sports team would resort to playing dine-and-dash with team meals? Well, a handful of accounting and law firms in Manhattan, presumably.

This is the same bare utilitarianism behind marijuana legalization and I would argue that both have made life a little more sad, crass, and gross. Picture a subway tunnel plastered in DraftKings billboards reeking of stale pot smoke. Is this progress?

They could go with the "Utah Salt Barons" and accidentally get invited to join the WHL. That would actually work out, because the WHL and Utah both love having dudes named "Paxtyn" and "Kristansyn."

I thought there was potential in "Red Rocks" until I realized that's just Scooby-Doo saying "Red Sox."

Again, now's the time to put all the Winnipeg NHL records under the current Jets organization and have the Phoenix history separate.

What in the WordArt is going on with that header? Is that italic and an arch at the same time?

This reminds me of the Matt Hulsizer Fax Machine