The_Admiral

3 hours ago, Jer15 said:

That part I don't recall.  Would make sense though. 

Did some research and finally found the land they bought: https://www.google.com/maps/place/43°24'36.7"N+80°17'01.0"W/@43.4101914,-80.2861965,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d43.4101875!4d-80.2836216?entry=ttu

This seems like it would have been a really terrible idea. Corel Centre II: Even Corellier.

Wasn't it like a big plot of land off an expressway interchange? 

Speaking of Copps renovations, I saw that after a series of moderately ambitious remodels that would put a whole new exterior around the seating bowl, they just settled for painting half of it black.

They just find new layers of "what could have been" in that town, don't they?

The age of the hockey announcer is over. Now is the age of memes.

1 hour ago, Walk-Off said:

IIRC, Balsillie was unwilling to lobby for an expansion franchise.  His NHL modus operandi was strictly trying to buy a US-based team with the intent of moving it to Hamilton.  Even the Pittsburgh Penguins — a team with a history dating back to 1967, back-to-back Stanley Cup titles in the 1990s, and a location in a traditional hockey market and a well-established major professional sports market in general — were targeted by Balsillie for acquisition and relocation in 2006.

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? 

4 hours ago, Sport said:

I'm kind of nervous about SLC for this reason. Found this website where you can find population inside of a certain radius. 

 

https://www.statsamerica.org/radius/big.aspx

 

I set Salt Lake City and drew a 200 mile radius, which I figure to be about the edge of where a normal person would drive to attend a game. The tool says about 3.7 million people live in that circle. Sounds like a lot of people, but consider that little small market Columbus, Ohio using the same radius is over 28 million (that doesn't even include Chicago) and it feels like trouble.

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!"

5 hours ago, SenatorJake said:

Utah Bobcats isn't bad. I like it.

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

6 hours ago, tigerslionspistonshabs said:

 

Would Saints work in this day and age? 

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. 

6 hours ago, Walk-Off said:

Over the last few years, some people here in the CCSLC have accused Major League Soccer of adding teams mainly to prop itself up financially through expansion fees.

 

Is it possible, then, that the NHL and its teams — even with a very different relationship from what MLS has with its clubs — have run into a troublesome monetary situation that is causing a compulsion, or at least a temptation, to get quick and easy funds by expanding to a shockingly gargantuan number of franchises?

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?

9 minutes ago, Sport said:

There's been so many bad moves with them it makes the Blue Jackets look like the Lightning. Remember when they hired a math-whiz middle schooler to be GM who thought he could moneyball the Coyotes to success and then threw a diaper tantrum and quit? Probably best known now as the guy with the hot sister. 

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!

18 hours ago, Digby said:

It's Mike Gorman's last regular season game doing play-by-play for the Celtics and there's all sorts of pomp around it. Hard to imagine the team going forward without him, he's been as much a piece of the Celtics as any player or coach over the course of my entire lifetime. One of the last of a dying breed, I've always liked hearing a classic Dorchester accent while watching a Boston team.

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

7 hours ago, GDAWG said:

Wasn't there a guy trying to bring the NHL to Hamilton a long time ago, only for the NHL to stop him?

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.

10 minutes ago, who do you think said:

The fact that this is how the saga ends - with :censored:ing Utah just sort of gliding in and taking it with little resistance, after multiple better options (Hamilton, Winnipeg, Seattle, Quebec City) were swatted away over the years - leaves a funky taste in my mouth.

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.

On 2/16/2021 at 10:53 AM, SFGiants58 said:

Contract the Coyotes. It is the only way to make sure the demon is truly dead.

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.

3 minutes ago, Sodboy13 said:

One of the big reveals is when we find out Logan Wade was at January 6th.

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.

15 hours ago, BBTV said:

People who want to are just going to do it illegally (and get their legs broken when they can't pay their losses), so might as well legalize it, regulate it, and tax it.  It's not for me, but someone with a problem is either going to lose their house legally, or lose it illegally, which leads to even worse things.

 

No need to waste limited resources stopping things that can't be stopped, so just make it as "safe" as possible, and instead of spending money policing it, make money by taxing it.  

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."