mcj882000

Given that was the only good year of his three two-and-a-half season tenure, it really starts to feel like that team accomplished what it did in spite of him. EDIT: also this wasn't even the first time in the last 10 years that the Flames soured on an abusive "hard-nosed" coach a mere single season after he won the Jack Adams Award

Speaking as the resident Flames fan here - meh. Proud of him regardless; in fact with how this past season went, in hindsight I wonder how much him (and Johnny) wanting out was just on account of Sutter being a past-his-prime hard that nobody actually liked playing under.

Perhaps this is better suited to here than the season or playoff threads? Vancouver: Let the 2011 core slowly rot, had an A+ goalie depth chart with a future HoFer and two future starters, kept none of them (but lucked out(?) when none of them panned out post-Vancouver), have basically been drifting aimlessly ever since save a fluke playoff run in 2020; Calgary: The '89 Cup was this team's peak, almost every move they've made since then has been the wrong one, save a Finals run in 2004 that turned out to mostly be a fluke (and which management refuses to let go of); it turns out "just try to sneak into the playoffs every year and hope for the best" isn't a viable long-term strategy! Edmonton: A decade of malaise culminating in a team that never has more than two good players and can't get past the second round of the playoffs; Winnipeg: The word is that their season ticket base is slowly dwindling, possibly because the market is oversaturated with an NHL, AHL and WHL team all in a city with fewer than 800k people; Toronto: 2 decades of being unable to even get past the first round, and now their most successful GM in 20 years leaves amidst a he-said/he-said on whether ownership was meddling in his affairs or not; Ottawa: [points feverishly to a photo of Eugene Melnyk] Montreal: Went all-in on 2021, lost, and have yet to make it back from that; arguably still haven't recovered from trading a HoF goalie in 1996 & siding with a coach they'd fire a year later; Quebec City: "Pfft, we can't put a team there! They already failed once! It's too small! Too French! Not enough corporate support! Nobody wants to move to the Western Conference, and we suddenly can't force them! There was an earthquake! A terrible flood! Locusts! It can't work here I swear to God!" I've explored this here before, but Canadian nationalists hockey nuts like to accuse Gary Bettman of rigging the playoffs & relocating teams to personally spite the Canadian teams for, uh, Reasons, and that's why no Canadian team has won a Cup in 30 years; but I think the reality is that the Canadian teams are all dysfunctional garbage fires who can never manage to scrape together more than a fluke playoff run and who still make millions upon millions of dollars despite themselves.

You're not wrong, the only problem is that the grey jersey is just nicer.

Oh, I'm... painfully aware. Phoenix gets to swing and miss a hundred times, everyone else whiffs once and they're out.

Do they have a plan to replace, and not just renovate, the building that the Whalers deemed too old in 1997? If not then zero chance, and I say that as a would-be Whalers fan.

Ron Hextall. Sent to the Nordiques as part of the Lindros trade, actually considered not reporting to the team because he was afraid of the culture clash, but ultimately sucked it up and moved his family there. After the 92-93 season he'd adjusted to the area so well that when the Nordiques traded him to the Islanders as expansion draft insurance, he was reportedly very disappointed to have to leave. EDIT: also the Stastny brothers, who all defected from communist Czechoslovakia to play in Quebec City. EDIT #2: not exactly "marquee" but I feel it's noteworthy nonetheless; from the 2021 memoir of ex-Nordique Bernie Saunders, Shut Out: The Game That Did Not Love Me Black:

I think it's worth noting that people dug up this job opening for the team's social media manager position: I think this guy knows he's got one foot out the door, and as such no longer has any left to give. Can't say I blame him honestly.

Tempe, apparently Like in all seriousness, we all know the NHL's taken some pretty impressive pies to the face over the last century - years back some of y'all were even planning a book detailing them all - but I don't think anything will ever top "city gets to choose between having an NHL team or having a landfill; city chooses the landfill." Just grade-A stuff from these carny clowns.

And the Brilliant Business Genius attempted this by doing the exact opposite strategy the NBA did.

Then maybe the PA should start voicing their displeasure about the situation; make it a labor fight or whatever. I mean a side-effect (or depending on you ask, the intent) of this whole mess is that the players' escrow is being held down, right? So it's affecting them too.

To put it in a simpler way, I think Quebec City is a diehard market, while Arizona, Houston, Atlanta, Salt Lake City, etc. etc. are all casual markets. And furthermore, to go off on a bit of a tangent, I think the NHL's refusal to put a team in Quebec City, bending in the wind to find any excuse they can to not put a team there, is symptomatic of a wider problem: that the NHL is perceived as taking its diehard fans for granted; making changes that the whales won't like and expanding in an attempt to Grow The Game™ towards a wider, casual audience, presuming that the whales will just suck it up and keep coming back for more. I'm always reminded of NASCAR's own attempts to evolve beyond their diehard regional base; but whereas NASCAR's attempt has been been mostly if not a total failure, the NHL's strikes me as more of a combination-success and failure. It's failed in that markets like Arizona & Atlanta have failed, Florida & Carolina have been mixed-to-middling (call me when they still draw big crowds during losing seasons; same with Vegas for that matter), Houston is risky and SLC is a total non-starter; but it's succeeded in that unlike with NASCAR the diehards haven't really gone away either - most of the northern (not just Canadian, for the record) markets still draw really well; thus enabling the NHL to do wacky market experiments in the south. I guess I just wonder how long that'll last.

Yeah yeah yeah, heard this all before, everyone said this when Atlanta moved to Winnipeg, to an arena far smaller than Centre Videotron is too, and it went fine. They have one, don't they? The guy who owns Quebecor?

Also it kinda makes the league itself, as in the leadership & executive branch, look weak too, doesn't it? If any attempts to make a stronger, more stable league are stymied by one or two teams who refuse to play ball? I mean we always take great pains to point out, accurately or not, that Bettman's just the owners' , but maybe they shouldn't make it look so obvious in public?

Sorry to be pedantic but acktually it's from the World Figure Skating Championships a year earlier In all seriousness yeah, it's from 20 years ago, but it's not actually any better now. At the very least this more modern photo shows that the NHL rink does not, in fact, have to run under the sideline bleachers the way the international-sized ice seemed to, thankfully, but it's still not good as a long-term solution. And since I don't think the Jazz are looking for a new arena (yet), a long-term solution is what it would have to be. At said 2002 Olympics though, they didn't even do the hockey gold medal games here, they ran those at the E Center way out in West Valley City; and lest anyone think another suburban arena is the solution to the Coyotes problems: the E Center only seats 12,000 fans.

With the same exact problem the Coyotes had when they played there in the late-90s/early-00s: From almost the same vantage point, no less.

Alright, so having done some research on this, I've come to the conclusion that Delta Center in SLC is completely inadequate for NHL hockey. You all mentioned how it has the problem of stacked seats on one endzone because the rink is too long for the normal arena space, ala Barclays Center and Talking Stick Arena? Well, it turns out Delta Center has that problem on both endzones. (And possibly along the sidelines, depending on how wide this non-NHL rink is!) Listed capacity for hockey, according to Wikipedia: 14,000.

Well, also that the instant success made their players, front office (look at the way they unload players like MAF) and general fanbase a bunch of entitled brats, but sure, let's go with your strawman version of things.

The "Bettman hates Canada!" stuff always cracks me up; if that was the case he wouldn't be NHL commish at all, he wouldn't have joined the league with the biggest Canadian presence in the first place.

try and stop us

And as for Houston, like yeah, they're probably a better market than Phoenix at this point, but that's a pathetically-low bar in my opinion. Its metro area is huge but as a city proper it's only slightly bigger than Phoenix; their last pro hockey team folded a half-century ago, a year after Gordie Howe & his sons left them to go play in Hartford; and their last hockey team period got chased out to Iowa by the Rockets' previous hockey-hating owner a decade ago. At least Phoenix had a long history of minor league hockey to lean on, with various incarnations of the Roadrunners existing on-and-off at various levels from the late-60s right up until the Coyotes settled there; and obviously Quebec City has to be mentioned, since the Remparts are always one of the top-drawing junior teams, occasionally out-drawing some NHL teams even; but Houston hasn't had any hockey team to care about in 10 years! So it has to be asked: does anyone there still care now?

I'm way late to this so I apologize, but just to add to what's already been said, the NHL actually didn't want the Canadian teams, at least not at first. the WHA/NHL merger almost didn't happen because the Leafs, Canadiens and Canucks tried to block it; the Canucks due to travel issues (which were satisfied by the promise of a perfectly balanced, "everyone plays everyone 4 times" schedule) but all of them because they didn't want to split Hockey Night In Canada revenue 6-ways instead of 3. (Let me stop and point out how ironic it is that the Canucks joined this, considering that the Leafs & Habs pulling the same exact stunt in 1967 is why Vancouver had to wait until 1970 for an NHL team.) It took a boycott of Molson (who owned the Canadiens and were the Canucks' official beer at the time) that started in Edmonton, Winnipeg & Quebec City but rapidly went national before those two teams caved; the Leafs never did, since Harold Ballard hated the WHA on principle for killing his beloved reserve clause, but by that point they were the lone holdout and the merger went through anyways.

Excellent news, if true. Honestly two-tone blue never fully clicked for the Jets with me, and their alternate is basically what I wish the Rangers still looked like, albeit without such a dark blue; since they don't seem to want to go back to that striping, I'm glad at least someone is willing to.

Finally! Never liked the "smile" logo, good riddance.

In a way, NHL & Fanatics are a perfect match: the least competent jersey manufacturer partnering with the least competent sports league!