mcj882000

Uncensored version here.

Yes, in fact they even made a movie about him last year. Vine star-turned-voice actor ProZD is in it for a bit. The Hamilton NHL mess even factors into the film a little, and one of the guys from This Hour Has 22 Minutes plays Gary Bettman!

Over the last month or so I've had a friend insist to me that it could have worked in Phoenix if they only had a good owner, and to be fair yeah, they're probably not wrong; a hypothetical guy who had both the money to buy the team and the competence to hire the right people to run things probably would have helped fix the ship. Unfortunately, that's not the world we live in, and that remains a hypothetical. Even more unfortunately, I'm not sure that ever could have been in play to begin with. Even just to start off, "good" sports team owners (relatively speaking) are already hard to come by; for every Mike Illitch it feels like there's a half-dozen Jeff Fishers, Jeff Lorias, Harold Ballards, Donald Sterlings, Dan Snyders, etc. But even within that range of "good" would-be owners, I'm not sure if the Coyotes ever could have been bought by one, especially post-2009 - I think it's safe to assume that anyone who could have stepped up probably saw a team that's never turned a profit in Arizona, couldn't routinely sell out even the awkward 16k-seat arena in downtown Phoenix when they were good, let alone the 17k-seat arena in Glendale when they were mostly-mediocre, and with a history of bankruptcy, ownership turnover and political haggling over new arenas, and "nope'd" right out of the conversation; they would have seen that the attempt just wasn't worth it. And so what does that leave us with? The weird opportunists like George Gosbee just looking for a quick pump-and-dump opportunity, or the out-and-out con artists like Matt Hulsizer probably was, looking to just defraud their way into the league without any actual money. At best, you get a naïve optimist who thinks he can save the team but quickly realizes how in-over-his-head he is and bails after a season or two. The kind of owner they needed to turn things around would have been the kind of person smart enough to see what a waste of time, money and effort it would be to try.

From the video game side of things, I remember it was late enough in the offseason that NHL 12 shipped with the Jets in just generic NHL home & away jerseys, with the actual jerseys being patched in later & the OG Jets' 80s jerseys included as throwbacks, just to give people before the patch came out, or who's consoles couldn't go online & thus couldn't get the patch, any kind of actual jersey option. I forget what kind of stand-ins the AHL's St. John's Ice Caps got, but whatever it was, offline players were stuck with it. Still, could've been worse - as I mentioned years ago in the "wrong jerseys in games that should know better" thread, the Colorado Avalanche's branding came so late in the process (the name was revealed in August '95 according to Wikipedia), after the Rocky Mountain Extreme fiasco delayed things, that EA decided to just keep them as the Quebec Nordiques in NHL 96 when it shipped in early-October. (Similarly, because the Seattle SuperSonics' relocation to OKC didn't officially happen until late-August 2008, 2K Sports kept them as the SuperSonics in the PS2 versions of NBA 2K9 & patched in the appropriate branding for the 360 & PS3 versions.)

He has the "chance", but I'd be willing to bet he just takes the money and runs. The vibe I get based on what I've seen said about him from Coyotes diehards, such as they are, especially among those who actually live in Arizona, is that they hate Meurelo's guts now and wouldn't support him even if he did come back with a new team; meaning that there's strong odds that the Coyotes Mk. 2 could somehow be even more from the start than the original Coyotes were.

Same; as I've noted before Houston hasn't had any kind of hockey team since Les Alexander booted the Aeros out of Toyota Center and into Iowa in 2013. The only reason Houston's even up for consideration now is because Les finally sold the Rockets in 2017. 10 years is a long time for a market to go entirely unserved; even Phoenix still had the IHL's Roadrunners when the Coyotes came to town, IMO that's enough time for any local interest in the sport to wither away altogether. Despite that I'm cautiously optimistic still; as long as they're owned by the Rockets' owner and playing at Toyota Center, it'll probably go fine, perhaps merely an unremarkable middle-of-the-road success, which would still be a huge step up from Phoenix. Yet I'm also wary that if the situation ever changed, if the Rockets sold the Houston NHLers and/or made them get a new home elsewhere in town, I actually think it could have the potential to be a bigger failure than the Coyotes have been.

Now I'm not a resident, but looking at a map, Desert Ridge is actually farther away from the metro than Tempe, Mesa or even Glendale are. Granted it's at least somewhat close to Scottsdale, where all of the Coyotes' "real" fans allegedly live (though still not as close as Tempe or Mesa are, lol), but suffice to say I'm also skeptical that, even if it gets built, that they'll actually fill the place regularly & turn a profit for once.

Apologies for the late reply, but I remember this! The story about why it's unused is hilarious: sometime in the late-00s, I wanna say 2008 or 2009, they were planning on bringing these back for the playoffs when they made it... but then, of course, they missed the playoffs (as they did every year between the last two lockouts) and couldn't use them. Oops.

Good news, this set was finally added to 2K24. And these ones are in 2K23 already, along with other sets like the last San Diego Clippers jerseys & the early-00s Cavaliers jerseys (the minimalist black/orange/light blue ones) but in a frustratingly limited way: they're only useable if you play as that team in those specific years of Eras, and either keep them wearing that yourself or export it to a more modern MyNBA file, an option that'll only be available for another year or so. As well, those Cavs jerseys and the Clippers' 90s jerseys (which aren't quite the one you were asking about, but it's pretty darn close) have also been added to their teams' normal rotations for 2K24.

Flames greatly outshoot their opponents, Markstrom gives up a stinker or two and we still lose in the shutout. New coaching staff, same old problems.

Been playing a bit of ESPN NFL 2K5 again lately, grinding out Crib achievements and figured I'd search for any jersey inaccuracies, and found surprisingly few that stuck out to me. True to form for the old 2K games, it has a huge collection of retro uniforms, and most are depicted accurately, from what I could tell. There are a few errors to be found, though: -1996 Baltimore Ravens: Using their modern logo instead of the original, of course, because the Ravens & NFL aren't legally allowed to use that logo anymore, but also it's listed as 1995-1996 when the Ravens didn't exist in 1995, and also the number font on the that version is also wrong, as they didn't add drop-shadows to the numbers until 1997. -1994 Green Bay Packers: The away of their throwbacks from that season should have blue numbers instead of yellow. (Yeesh, just when I think these jerseys couldn't worse, Sega went and proved me wrong...) 1995-1997 Jacksonville Jaguars: A a mess of issues here; IRL the Jags used a generic block number-font for their first two seasons, 1995 & 1996, and changed to their more well-known stylized font in 1997 which came with black side-panels that only lasted the one season. According to Sega though, they never changed fonts and had the side-panels for two seasons! (Also, the outlines on all of Jacksonville's away jerseys are in the wrong order - they should be teal w/gold & black, not teal w/black & gold.) For the most part the only real retro jersey errors are in the years they're listed as being worn; there's quite a few of those, far too many to list here, but just as one example... The Detroit Lions are listed as wearing blue pants on the road in 1999, but in reality they did so in 1998 - Barry Sanders' last season, and the only time the Lions wore blue pants at all until 2017. (I wonder if after Barry retired, the team assumed they were cursed & scrapped them for that reason? )

I'd rather there just not be a tournament at all, have everyone go out and do one round, the guy with the most homers wins. You could probably even double the number of entrants and have it take around the same time. Seems like every single year the guy who hits the most homers in a round doesn't actually go on to win the entire Derby, even though "hitting the most homers" is supposed to be the entire point.

Maybe I'm just a grumpy old man longing for the simpler-seeming times of my youth, but as someone who got into NASCAR in the late-90s but fell out of it after about a decade, I've come back and watched a race or two every few years or so, but I just can't get myself back into it; I want to like it, but I just can't. I look at modern NASCAR and I just can't help but think it looks and feels... artificial. The drivers and their white-meat personalities feel fake; everyone drives hyper-aggressively in their oversized, state-of-the-art, 6-figure-valued race cars, which makes the race-day drama feel fake; the stages forced cautions and overtime make races feel fake; and the playoffs make the championship feel fake. None of it feels special to me anymore; it used to be that blowout race or championship wins would make the closer battles that much more impactful, and the occasional off-track disagreement or even fight would heighten the drama as the season goes on - heck, a brawl in the infield literally helped NASCAR go national - but now every race is a nail-biter thanks to stages & overtime, every championship comes down to 4 guys in the last race whether they're actually the top 4 in points or not, and there's at least a half-dozen spats, heated disagreements or out-and-out fights every single season, so it just all comes off to me at least as contrived; artificial; fake. It's just become a different kind of Sports Entertainment, and worse yet not a single bit of it has moved the needle in a positive direction long-term; their ratings, attendance and overall relevance have been in free-fall for at least 15 years. I can't help but notice the contradiction in their goals with the playoffs, too; they clearly want wins to matter in the long run, and they would like it if the guy who wins the most races wins the title, but they also want every season to be like 1992, while ignoring the fact that in 1992 the champion was an underdog Underbird who won 2 races all season upsetting two 5-win powerhouse drivers by mere race positions. (And again, ignoring that 1992 was special for a reason, a reason they have now taken away entirely.) You can't have it both ways, and we've seen that with some of the playoff results we've gotten. (Heck, Matt Crafton won the Truck Series playoffs a few years back despite posting 0 wins all season; the system isn't even that good at doing the thing it's intended to do!) The ironic thing is, they used to have a pretty good balance; wins did matter, but consistency mattered even more - it was fair. But now a white-hot driver consistent all season can have 2-3 bad races in the fall and that's it for his title bid, or a guy misses a third of the season but still wins the championship, and everyone gets P.O'd about it. They sacrificed fairness for entertainment, and now we get neither. I very much get the impression that NASCAR is extremely insecure about being "the sport of dumb hillbillies watching cars go in circles for hours", based on the decisions they've made with the sport. "Look at the clean-cut, corporate-friendly drivers we have!" "Look at how close these races & championship battles are now!" "Look at all the road courses we run on now!" And it's all to appeal to an audience that will never be into stock car racing, who are not willing to see it as more than just "dumb hicks driving in circles". It's one thing to try and appeal to a casual audience, every major league/franchise/IP does that nowadays for better and for worse; after a while it starts to feel like NASCAR is sacrificing their diehard fans in an attempt to court an openly hostile audience, and it's gone about as well as you'd expect it to.

It also had Oakland Coliseum still without Mount Davis, even though that renovation had happened two years prior. I guess Angel Studios agreed that the renovation made the place look worse and refused to even acknowledge it.

I'll never forget when WWE held their 2019 Royal Rumble event inside Chase Field and Elias, in full heel, "sing songs about how much the host city sucks" mode, made a comment about how the Diamondbacks hadn't seen a crowd that big in a long time, and the Chase Field crowd cheered him for it.

The last page & a half of this thread in a nutshell. See y'all next year.

Speak for yourself, that jersey was great.

Thank God that's over; that series sucked. I've seen more life out of Finals teams who got swept than the Panthers showed in these Finals.

True, but that fact still isn't stopping the discussions about them getting a team.

it then, just give all 4 markets an expansion team, each to a different division. SLC to the Pacific, Houston to the Central, Atlanta to the Metropolitan and Quebec to the Atlantic.

I touched on this a few pages back, but imagine being such a weak-willed league that you can't be bothered to incentivize anyone to switch conferences for the sake of a balanced alignment. I'd be embarrassed if that was the sport I ran; but then we know if Gary ever once felt embarrassment or shame, he would've left the position ages ago. Besides, it's not as if having dodgy divisions has ever stopped the NHL before; might I remind you that this is the same league that once had Vancouver in the East Division, the New York Americans in the Canadian Division*, Montreal & Los Angeles in the same division, and Winnipeg in the Southeast Division? (Yeah, I didn't forget the last time the league was forced to move a dead sunbelt team north & they just kept the divisions the same.) * - extra stupid: in 26-27 the Detroit Cougars had to play their first season in Windsor while the Olympia was built, so that year you had a Canadian team in the American Division and an American team (named the Americans) in the Canadian Division.

More suitable than Mullett is EDIT: In all seriousness, last season the Roadrunners were 28th in AHL attendance, averaging just 3,625 fans per game. Their best-drawing season was 2018-19, when they drew 4,294 fans per game and finished 23rd. And that's all considering that the Roadrunners are basically the only pro game in town; the city doesn't even have a D-League team, and hasn't had a MiLB team since 2013. Perhaps an NHL team could actually fill the 8,900-seat Tucson Arena, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

I guess one important question is, has there been any indication that the Jazz are looking to build a new arena? Because I figure no new building will happen without their input, and though I hate repeating myself it really cannot be overstated how suboptimal the soon-to-be-again Delta Center is for NHL hockey. Four words: "Barclays Center, but worse": Like, if we're gonna move the Coyotes here full-time? Just put them back in downtown Phoenix at Talking Stick/Footprint/whatever it's called now instead, because that'd still be better than this; at least the Suns' arena has hockey-ready seating in a endzone!

I thought that was Jon Moxley?