The_Admiral

39 minutes ago, CaliforniaGlowin said:

New images on Hornets social media pages

7 hours ago, Digby said:

Believe Chase Center is one of those basketball-layout-only type of arenas. Can't quite tell this with certainty, but it seems like their fancy VIP areas near the court would preclude an NHL-sized ice sheet. Is the Cow Palace still standing?

Correct. Seems like we're seeing a move away from fully dual arenas lately, with the majority of new NBA arenas since 2000 being basketball-only, per se. The only two I can think of that aren't are Houston, which could have an NHL team but won't, God willing, and Detroit, which the Red Wings built for themselves and then let the Pistons in on at the last minute. Everyone else has the not-quite-wraparound bowl if they even have an ice plant. 

The Warriors, as they would, seemed to take it to a new level of opulence with their VIP sections. The 76ers are probably trying to do the same. I think that Chicago/Philly/DC/Dallas era of buildings that necessarily put the NHL first is over. I wish it weren't, though, because I'd rather have a versatile arena for the Warriors and Sharks to share than a 1% palace for one and a rapidly aging big metal box for the other. 

On 3/9/2024 at 11:02 AM, GDAWG said:

Good on the Virginia Assembly for turning down a potential Caps and Wizards arena in Alexandria....or at least not putting the issue on this year's budget.  

Youngkin when he can't give a billionaire a taxpayer bailout:

https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/northern-virginia/insider-alexandria-texts-discuss-arena-plan-to-tax-the-crap-out-of-users/3562145/

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One of those answers reveals Monumental expected to pay $29.6 million in lease payments on the new arena. It’s a lot of money, but only a little more than the company spends now in mortgage and rent payments for Capital One Arena, according to information the I-Team gathered and The Washington Post reported.

 

The really eye-catching message was a text discussing the funding of the arena plan from Alexandria Mayor Justin Wilson. It reads, “The only difference between this arena deal and outdoor dining on King Street was scale.”

It’s not exactly clear who he was texting to, but he continued, “We finance and build the street, let a private restaurant use it in exchange for rent, and then tax the crap out of their operation to pay for the street and then some.”

 

Wilson stood by the message Thursday — even the part about “taxing the crap” out of people who dine or attend arena events.  In a phone call with the I-Team, Mayor Wilson called it “informal language” but told the I-Team the funding mechanism for outdoor dining in Old Town and a $2 billion arena is the same aside from the scale of the plan. He even pointed to his posts on X where he explained that.

 

He sent the I-Team the post he was referring to. It didn’t say anything about taxing the crap out of anyone.

I'm so delighted to see this fail.

There's something kind of grounding about Kroger and Procter & Gamble being headquartered in li'l ol' Cincinnati and not somewhere back east, but also, Kroger is terrible.

3 hours ago, SFGiants58 said:

The Warriors seem pretty hostile to the Sharks in general - did the Warriors even offer to make Chase hockey-compatible for them?

Doubt it, but I doubt the Sharks ever looked into it, either. It would have been pretty cool, though. So too would have been a new 49ers stadium at Candlestick, a new Raiders stadium on the Coliseum site, and the A's, I dunno, somewhere around there. 

Warriors and Sharks should have both gone in on San Francisco. 

Surveying the NHL cities that lost their teams by refusing to be held hostage, it's actually kind of a split decision. The Twin Cities didn't miss a beat financially with the loss of the North Stars/Met Center; they had a new arena and just built out the Mall of America even more. Everyone felt really bad about it but I don't think it had a devastating economic impact. I don't think losing the Nordiques helped Quebec City but probably didn't hurt it materially. Winnipeg is a rare case where getting the team back did seem to spur on economic development because TNSE captured pretty much all of downtown on the cheap, which wouldn't have happened without bringing the Jets back, so you can say that they were better off with hockey. Downtown Hartford was dying then and dead now; I think the causal relationship between that and the Whalers leaving is pretty solid but it's highly debatable whether Karmanos even held Hartford at ransom or was always going to try for Michigan anyway. Atlanta lost the Thrashers and hasn't felt a thing, but the situation never even progressed to tax-money-or-else.

So basically, if you're a moribund, borderline major-league market with very little else going for you but a desperate last gasp of civic pride, you might want to invest in pro sports at almost any cost, but if that's your situation, you may not even be presented with the option to begin with.

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But I would appreciate it if everyone involved could stop insulting our intelligence and just be honest enough to say, “We’re doing this douchey thing, which is purely an act of commerce, because that’s how we do business,” instead of pretending that they’re do-gooders striking a blow for justice.

the vibes they are a-shiftin'

33 minutes ago, chcarlson23 said:

But they’ll have to start winning, and look more like a Nashville, Dallas, or Tampa than a Phoenix, otherwise this franchise could be the Nordiques 2.0

They should have been Nordiques 2.0 13 years ago.

2 hours ago, LaGrandeOrange said:

With Atlanta United, Atlanta has shown it can use its' transplant city powers as a positive feature assuming that many of those transplants don't come to the city with strong NHL allegiances

Bad news: they do, generally for the Rangers and Flyers

Just now, FiddySicks said:

I once had a geriatric psycho yell at me that I was a “:censored:ing thief” because I was using light rail as a student, and apparently that meant I wasn’t paying as high of a tax rate as him (which is such goddamn bull:censored: it’s really hard to wrap your head around). Then when I told him to mind his own business, his frail little wife flipped out on me for “disrespecting my elders”. Phoenix is great.

Topped my joke with an actual anecdote. What a great idea that city was.

9 hours ago, GDAWG said:

Houston will probably pitch to the NHL a need for an in-state rivalry for the Stars and the belief that Houston can be as big of a hockey town, if not bigger than Dallas. Just because the NHL has worked in Dallas does not mean it can work in Houston.  

"Houston has 8 million people" yeah and like 5 million of them are just stumbling around strung out on codeine soda so who cares. 

1 hour ago, monkeypower said:

Like I said earlier in this thread, at least I think it was this thread, the relocation of the prior two Atlanta franchises can be argued away if wanted.

Every relocation can be argued away. One man's Norm Green or Peter Karmanos is another man's, uh, Pissed About Joe Johnson's Contract Guy. I think replicating the Phoenix Coyotes situation, right down to a 17,000-seat arena 20 miles from the downtown arena in a transplant-heavy region and crowded live-venue market, is harder to handwave. Incidentally, the Coyotes are the one relocation that no one can argue away because they won't let it f-cking happen.

35 minutes ago, Digby said:

Every American transit system outside of New York is very hub-and-spoke though, no? 

Marta is more of a big X, and I'm not sure what you'd call the Metro. Chicago has pretty much every railroad converging upon one square mile, and every plan to come up with a line that doesn't pretty much dies on the vine.

16 minutes ago, FiddySicks said:

Considering the heavy car influence from the behemoth to the west, I would probably put Phoenix in the second category, too. 

I didn't even think Phoenix could have a light rail without someone shooting it and yelling "GET OFF MY PROPERTY"

1 hour ago, FrutigerAero said:

-The Braves basically own the south.  There are holes in Charlotte and Nashville but you're basically still in Braves country.  This makes me wonder if Raliegh is actually the better long-term option for relocation/expansion, all things being equal. 

I could be wrong, but the vibe I get, at least from the Venn diagram of New York transplants and haughty Hurricanes fans, is that Raleigh is starting to see itself as the southernmost point of the Northeast whereas Charlotte is much more firmly in the South. I think they're wrong, of course, but I can see their ill-founded argument for breaking out of Braves Country. 

I still don't see expansion or relocation anywhere on this map. One team is trying to relocate and it's not even working. There are no good options.

Also, I need to find that article I read years ago about how the MARTA lines were all designed to be the biggest failure possible. Well, in the meantime, enjoy this ridiculous video.

I mentioned DC. The thing about the Metro's ridership numbers is that it acts as a de facto hybrid rapid transit/commuter-rail operation, with lines venturing out into suburbs where the Subway and L never would. MARC and VRE are relative afterthoughts compared with the enormous park-and-ride stations on the periphery. The Electric Line in Chicago has the opposite problem where it's a high-frequency line that primarily serves the city but is classified under commuter rail. If you count the L and Metra together, I think they'd have higher ridership than the DC Metro plus its semi-related commuter lines.

There are six actual transit cities in America: New York, Chicago, DC, Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia.  A seventh, Los Angeles, has deceptively high ridership numbers but would never cross anyone's mind as a transit-oriented city. Everything else is just "we actually have a surprisingly good light rail system." That goes for Atlanta, St. Louis, Dallas, Minneapolis, Denver, Miami, Seattle, apparently now Milwaukee for some reason, and yes, Salt Lake City. 

6 minutes ago, GhostOfNormMacdonald said:

    Mormonism is like if American exceptionalism was a religion. 

WASP exceptionalism predates America. There was an old boutique belief that the English are the lost tribes of Israel, best encapsulated by the old hymn "Jerusalem." Utah, ethnically the most English state in America, has kind of kept that going through Mormonism, which I think has more in common with Judaism and Islam than with trinitarian Christianity. 

Indigenous American Christianity is fascinating stuff, though, for real. Mormons and Christian Scientists both did some neat stuff architecturally for a while there.

Population doesn't really matter for the third-tier hockey league. Do you have an arena that you can get a good lease on? Were you unable to get into the AHL? Okay sure fine.

Jason Kelce is the less annoying Kelce and is still fairly annoying.

Kevin "He's Here To Get the Stadium Deal Done" Warren has been taken off the get-the-stadium-deal-done beat. Apparently waking up at 5 in the morning to engage in quiet contemplation didn't prepare him for a county government that wasn't as amazed by him as he is by himself.

Longtime Bears observers will note that this feels a lot like the time Michael McCaskey tried to move the Bears to Gary, Indiana and even failed at that, generally being so odious that the Bears had to pull random-ass Ted Phillips out of the back office and make him the new point man. Phillips then earned a job for life as team president by getting [checks notes] a hideous 61,000-seat stadium that everyone hates and is already in the process of being replaced.

On 3/3/2024 at 4:36 PM, FiddySicks said:

I have to wonder though if local corporate money would be an issue with SLC. I don’t have any real idea what their corporate base is out there, but for a place like Sacramento, that’s probably the very biggest hurdle. 

They have this one really really big corporation with a diversified portfolio of retail, agriculture, broadcasting, and investment funds. The problem is that the corporation thinks it's a church.

A counterpoint might be that the Jacksonville Jaguars basically modified their color palette to black, metallic gold, and a vague suggestion of teal, and these "darker, more intimidating" colors at the low point of their franchise made a bad situation even worse. Loser stink comes for bright and dark palettes in equal measure; only a few timeless teams seem able to avoid it.

On 3/1/2024 at 9:00 PM, Morgan33 said:

Here's the thing people tend to overlook about black on sports uniforms...  Neither black nor white are technically colours. 

9 hours ago, FiddySicks said:

It’s similar to the Chargers current change. Like most people, I was DYING for them to ditch the navy and just go powder and gold. But after seeing it for a few seasons? I kinda hate it. It looks washed out and kind of frilly. I know that’s not a popular opinion, but I miss them having a splash of navy to ground that set a bit better. 
 

Lighter colors in football are just hard to pull off in general imo. It looks fresh and clean, but it doesn’t fit the feel of the sport that well (imo), and grows old pretty quick I think. It’s one of the (many) reasons why I don’t want the Bucs to ever switch back to the throwback unis full time. They look bright and fun for a game or two, no doubt. But sit through a few ten loss seasons in that pastel 70s kitchen look and tell me it doesn’t get old fast. 

Ask yourself this: would the new Chargers uniforms look better in an open-air stadium in San Diego rather than under fluorescent lights and ETFE? 

The NFL is a big league. There should be room for all sorts of approaches, from vivid colors to dark colors. I think the Chargers look great in powder blue, I loved seeing the Houston Oilers again this year, but I also love the Raiders uniforms and think the Ravens should wear head-to-toe black at home. As for the Eagles, they've gotten themselves into a dilemma where their main color doesn't reproduce well and they're messing around with black alternates and ice emoji, so they've functionally become a black, white, and tinted grey team. What they're doing isn't working and the set as initially designed barely worked to begin with. If they used, say, the Dallas Stars' green, I don't think it'd be any more out of place for football than it is for hockey.

I think losing makes any non-conservative design unbearable. I've always been a critic of the new Buccaneers stuff, but it was in the nadir of the warm, grey alarm-clock years that I was like "okay, screw it, honestly just go back to creamsicle orange, if you're gonna be bad, be fun bad." 

10 hours ago, BBTV said:

Oh what I'd give to be a 5'6" jewish billionaire that gets pro athletes and rappers to temporarily put aside their war against the chosen ones.

I was thinking the other day about Mickey Monus, founded of Phar-Mor and erstwhile investor in the Colorado Rockies, who bankrupted Phar-Mor by cooking the books and embezzling millions of dollars to fund a professional basketball league for people who weren't particularly tall, in what can only be called the most Jewish crime ever committed

Somewhere there's a message board that is abandoned for 364 days a year but for an annual reunion where all the 2006 Forum Guys convene to post "come at the king you best not miss" and "Omar comin'," ask after one another's wives and children, and then leave.