monkeypower

5 minutes ago, Brian in Boston said:

Pulaski's Appalachian League team has been rebranded as the River Turtles. The name is a nod to Pulaski's heritage as a community within Southwest Virginia's New River Valley, as well as a sign of the team's "renewed commitment to Calfee Park's family-friendly culture".   

Odd that he's sliding in home from behind for some reason

Bell Media just cut a bunch of jobs, including Dan of Jay and Dan. SC host Natasha Staniszewski and TSN's Ottawa reporter Brent Wallace were also let go.

Losing the NHL really hurt Bell/TSN and then I don't think Jay and Dan were able to fully recapture the pre-FS1 magic and their second go around, plus Dan had a really weird incident back in the summer (which I don't think had any impact on the cut), but it's the end of an era.

Yeah one of their announcement tweets was oddly specific in saying

Quote

HSK will wear the chrome helmets during every home game at Orleans Arena

so I could see them waiting for the regular season, especially with VGK as their parent team.

16 hours ago, AFirestormToPurify said:

 

Maybe they're just not ready yet?

Maybe, but their announcement pictures had seven different helmets and if all the helmets weren't ready yet, seven seems like a weird number to get in one shipment (or they just had one and changed out the front helmet numbers for each different player picture but that seems like a lot of work).

15 hours ago, Dilbert said:

The AHL Stockton Heat (Calgary Flames) have received permission to provisionally play their season in Calgary at the Scotiabank Saddledome. The Flames say its due to cross border restrictions. Stockton will join the Canadian division with Manitoba (Winnipeg), Toronto (Toronto), Laval (Montreal) and Belleville (Ottawa).

 

So this leaves the two remaining Canadian NHL clubs with their affiliates still in the US, Bakersfield (Edmonton) and Utica (Vancouver). Now if the reasoning behind the provisional move is true I would think Bakersfield and Utica wouldnt be far behind. However something seems fishy to me.

 

The Heats lease with the City of Stockton and the Stockton Arena ran out at the end of the 2019-20 season. In February 2020, a one year extension was signed through the 2020-21 season to give the two more time to negotiate a new contract. The original lease was 5 years with an team option for an additional 5. The Flames and Heat declined the option. With parent owned AHL clubs wanting to be located closer to the parent teams in recent years, I think the Heat provisional move may be more permanent.

13 hours ago, rams80 said:

 

Also, Calgary torches every market they play in in 5 years or less.  It's a cardinal rule.

1 hour ago, the admiral said:

NHL, AHL, and WHL in the same city is bad for Winnipeg and it's bad for Calgary. Find someplace other than California's Rockford to put them. Nudge Boise or Salt Lake City up to AHL, I don't know.

If I had to say right now, I really can't see that happening in Calgary. At least in Winnipeg's case, the WHL's Ice are separately owned and play in a different arena, there's no direct connection there. Plus, the Moose were the only hockey team in Winnipeg for years and were there before both the new-Jets and the Ice.

Firstly with the NLL's Roughnecks, that would make four teams in one arena all owned by CSEC with the Hitmen, the Roughnecks and the AHL team all needing the same arena dates.

Secondly, I don't know how much of a market would be for an AHL team in Calgary (especially with the current economy). One because it would be a new minor league team in a "professional" sports city and not that I'm an expert on sports teams finances, but I would think CSEC would be cannibalizing their own market because the Hitmen and the AHL would fill the same "secondary to the Flames" hockey position for fans and advertisers.

If the Hitmen didn't exist or weren't owned by the Flames or weren't an established hockey team in Calgary in their own right over the past 26 years, then it could be a possibility, but I personally don't think it's a permanent move.

Henderson going chrome dome at home.

ECHL expanding to Savannah, GA for the 2022-23 season.

The Stampeders are rolling their 75th anniversary, which should have been last season had it been played, over into this upcoming season.

They also appeared to be teasing new jerseys back around early March (and a guy on Reddit back then said he'd seen the jerseys and "confirmed" they were not just 75th anniversary throwbacks) but those teasers stopped once the pandemic started and I don't believe have returned, so there appear to be new Stampeders jerseys floating somewhere around in the ether.

NBC's full list of NHL PxP and Studio for 20-21.

Milbury out, Mike Babcock in.

For reference, the WHL has not started yet. The planned start date was pushed back until Jan. 8th and then was delayed on Dec. 15th, with no new start date. "[F]ollowing further consultation with regional health authorities, the Board of Governors will meet in January to consider potential start dates".

The OHL has also not started and delayed its Feb. 4th start date on Dec. 23rd, also with no new start date.

The QMJHL started its season, paused it and now the Quebec-based teams will be starting a series of mini bubbles on Jan. 22. I don't know if they have decided what the Atlantic-based teams will be doing.

It's been discussed a couple times on here, by @the admiral mostly I think, about how much of a developmental league the AHL really is nowadays, and this news got some internet “analysts” (read: Redditors) discussing the NHL-CHL agreement again and which is more beneficial for development.

On 12/15/2020 at 5:49 PM, Ridleylash said:

New home and road jerseys for the Wheat Kings;

I am so happy to see the wheat stalks back, this set is such an improvement over what they had before.

(Though it does look like the stripes are printed and not stitched, which sucks).

The Brooks Bandits of the WCBL unveiled new logos.

I just love the maple leaves in the logos, because this is an all Canadian league where the C in WCBL stands for Canada...

They also kept the weird script tail that comes out of the the bottom of the S and not the end of it.

Old logos in spoiler

The name isn't great.

It'll stick out like a sore thumb because they went with the Euro-soccer style while the entire rest of the league is the North American nickname style.

11 hours ago, M4One said:

Is that an Adidas jersey made by CCM?  Who would have thought going with the Adidas collar would be the better choice.

1 hour ago, philcar1994 said:

Many jersey manufacturers have copied the Adidas collar. Athletic Knit, CCM, many others. Same trend when the Reebok Edge template was introduced. 

Yeah, once you get to Jr. A and lower, you'll see "proprietary" templates and designs recreated by whoever the jersey supplier for the league is or whoever the team gets their jerseys from.

Here are two "Adidas" jersey made by SP. Check the collars.

(Cc: @infrared41 @IceCap @Still MIGHTY and @CS85 and the Flin Flon Moose Leg)

I missed this from a couple weeks ago.

The 2021-22 relocation/expansion Blackfalds Bulldogs of the Jr. A AJHL unveiled their jerseys.

I'll give them the credit for admitting there was no real reason for the pattern and not NikeSpeaking it.

I also will never not love that West Virginia's helmet bumper is "Country Roads".

Watching them so far this season, I've decided I don't like Texas Tech's pants. The previous set had half and half colouring on the stripe, but this current set is more 5/6 to 1/6-ish. The top colour stripe is lost if the player's jersey isn't completely tucked in or they aren't standing straight up. Plus I think the 5/6 to 1/6-ish is just kind of a dumb look even if the jerseys are tucked in.

I assume they'll just formally switch to the Moose alternate they added a couple years back.

The U18 Moose Jaw Warriors use this as the primary already.

The only problem is that the Warriors jerseys are absolutely terrible, but they'll probably stick around. Mostly because the current Moose alt jersey is the same template and the U18's use that jersey template too with the Moose logo.

I first saw this place in the summer of 2018 and have had this picture on my phone since the summer of 2019, so I guess it's finally time to get around to posting it.

Shawnee's General Store on the side of Mount Moosilauke Highway in Wentworth, NH.

I assume they're trying to match the helmet numbers to the numbers on the corresponding colour jersey. The white jerseys have blue numbers, so the white helmets have blue numbers. Same thing with the blue jerseys having white numbers and blue helmets having white numbers.

That doesn't explain why the helmet numbers have outlines and the jersey numbers don't though...

Also doesn't explain going with a logo on one side and the numbers on the other. Just pick either, don't do both.

I've never liked Ole Miss' (Ole Misses? Ole Ma'ams?) football look. They have the same problems the Giants have where the colour usage (including the addition of grey) and striping aren't consistent across parts of the uniform, but the Ole Miss issues are magnified by the extra combinations they have.

Like the set in the post above has a powder blue helmet with a red stripe and a red fonted logo, then there's a powder blue jersey with white stripes and no red, and then plain white pants with neither powder blue nor red.

Their uniforms are like those word ladder puzzles where you have a word at the start and you have to change one letter at a time to make a new word and continue doing that until you get to the end word. We'll start with a powder blue/red/white helmet then go to a red/white jersey and then end with grey/navy blue/red pants.

Texas Tech with the throwbacks today.

Back on topic,

Were they even paid for the bubble? I genuinely don't know.

I know they don't get paid for the playoffs in a normal year, but were they still paid for the qualifying round games because those weren't technically playoff games? I wouldn't think it would be allowed, contractually or whatever, to pay the bubble players and not play the non-bubble players.

There would also still be the pay for last few weeks of the season once the season shut down. Did that ever get sorted out?

3 hours ago, CS85 said:

ESPN has a great read on how the NHL conned players into going to Edmonton's bubble which was, by one account, a prison with a Tim Horton's truck in its exercise yard.

 

https://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/29939605/nhl-bubble-confidential-go-toronto-edmonton-playoff-hubs

 

 

"Even playing golf was a hassle," one Western Conference player said. "You have to set up a golf time. It has to be an exact time, but it has to be everybody or nobody. Realistically, what team is going to set up a full-team golf outing between Games 3 and 4 in the second round?"

 

It wasn't just the lack of golf trips that irked players. "They promised us excursions: 'Oh, we're going to have fly fishing and golf, a golf course just for us -- you can go whenever you want -- and a field,'" a Western Conference player said. "We went to the field one time. It was a fight to even golf once. And please let me know if you talk to anyone who went fly fishing."

In fact, fly fishing became a punchline.

 

"In the little brochure they sent, there was a picture of a man fly fishing in the mountains, and one of the guys was like, 'Where did they get this picture of the mountains? The mountains are three hours away,'" a Western Conference player said.

As someone who's from Calgary and lives in Edmonton for school, I (and a bunch of other Albertans) already kind of knew that some of this was going to be the case. Some of the promo videos showed the mountains and Edmonton isn't part of the mountains, if it was a Calgary bubble than the mountains could be a possibility, but not Edmonton. The Toronto bubble also always seemed to be the better of the two and the comments from players here now look to prove that. I have not gotten around to driving up to the arena and bubble to see it for myself but maybe I should make the time to after this article.

I know some Edmonton teams went to the Rec Room, which I would describe as a more upscale Dave & Busters (as someone who hasn't been to a Dave & Busters), but that's a 20-ish minute drive away and I only saw video evidence of two teams going there and it probably was just for an afternoon.

There was also a little noise that players were ready to complain about the amenities right when they got to the bubbles, but then they (or their agents) saw what was being said about the NBA players complaining about that bubble (as seen here in this thread) and nixed it.

2 hours ago, kiwi_canadian said:

Oh please! What a bunch of whiners. If they didn't like it, they could opt out at any time without having any repercussions. So you didn't get to go fly fishing or golfing when you wanted? Just shut up already! You are one of the few lucky people to not have to worry about possibly not having a place to live or food to eat during all this. There are millions of people who have lost their jobs and ways of life during this COVID thing and you are complaining you don't get to go fishing? Sounds like their are a pretty entitled bunch. I'm getting tired of athletes who make millions of dollars to play a game complaining about their way of life.

 

There, my rant is over.

So this kind of thing has come up many times about the NHL and NBA players in the bubbles.

Is there a personal wealth or privilege threshold that we as a society have decided that when broken by a person, they are not allowed to complain about anything anymore?

With the NHL bubbles, specifically the Edmonton one, it's clear that the NHL overpromised (and underdelivered) at best and straight up lied at worst about what the players would be able to do and be able to have. They've been locked in and isolated for two months now, I know that if I was a player, I would be having mental and emotional health issues with the bubble.

I could also say that I'm tired of people like you complaining about hockey players complaining, when you are so entitled because you have internet access and the ability to watch hockey when there are people in third world countries that will never get easy access to clean water in their life.

Everybody is privileged in some form or another and it becomes just a sad game of trying to reverse outdo each other and policing what can and cannot make other people sad or unhappy depending on their status.

Are there times when the sadness can be a bit much when you do consider the context? Yes.

Is it easier to just fallback on the money argument and post zombielandwoodyharrelsonwipingtearswithmoney.gif to upvotes or retweets? Also yes.

Do I think it's right? No.

I don't know if Anaheim is going to get an NBA team because I don't know if a third team in that market would fly and I don't know the Samueli's interest in a basketball team. I know the Clippers had toyed with moving to Anaheim a couple times in the past, but that's clearly off the table now, and the Kings were reportedly pretty close to moving there around a decade ago, but that never happened. There are going to be improvements and renovations made to the Honda Center in time for the 2028 Olympics so maybe there could be more talk about an NBA team in Anaheim then, but even then I don't know if it'll happen.

(A Seattle group also tried to buy the Kings back in 2013 and move them to Seattle, but the relocation was voted against by the owners and the sale bid was withdrawn)

I think Ridley's got a decent point about Phoenix to Houston, I do think Houston would be more of an expansion candidate and not a relocation one. I also don't know how well the Rockets owner is doing financially right now.

I also think the Panthers have overtaken the Coyotes in the relocation race. There's supposedly a out clause in the lease after the 2023 season and there's not a lot of positives coming out of Sunrise recently, or I guess over their entire history too.