Cosmic

I wonder how many players have moved twice with a team under a single contract?

Not this London... THIS London... What about this one? How about this London: Or this one: ...with Robert Englund as co-owner

So let's talk about the fun part... logos and jerseys. Would we have a year of the Seattle Coyotes? Would there even be enough time at this point to develop an identity, get merchandise out, etc.? We're already a couple of weeks past when Les Thrash was sold to True North, and there's not even anything definite out there yet.

I think Miami could support a second team.

So.... the purchase price is supposed to be $170M? $120M loan from Fortress Investment Group $85M loan from the NHL $45M from the ownership group =$250M???

Yeah, I may have laid the foundation for that tangent...my bad. It was bound to happen after so many years of league ownership and umpteen charlatan ownership groups. Don't feel bad.

2162-63 Season Sounds about right. The "Star Wars" future could happen, Tattoine could have been blown up, Naboo and Hoth could be under siege by imperial fighters, Cloud City could be the only livable city left in the galaxy, the Death Star could be the most powerful battle station in all mankind... ...and yet, throughout all this, there will still be a Phoenix Coyotes franchise. Star Wars is a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

But...... but...... well..... I..... it's just........ OITGDNHL. This is insane.

If there's any real proof, wouldn't Glendale have a serious lawsuit to bring against the NHL? Dereliction of duty?

Holy bleep! You know it's bad when your company has to release a commercial like that!

Or, IMHO, a company that was successful, but screwed up so royally at the end that it taints their entire history would belong here even if they didn't change logos. I'm thinking of something like Enron here.

Maybe when Blockbuster comes out with a lower case Arial logo in a month to show how cool they are and then declares bankruptcy next year...

What's the alternative?

And I'll take Rose Marie to block, Peter. Seriously, what intelligent Canadian businessman wouldn't buy a hockey team to keep it in Arizona when it was on the verge of moving to Canada? I love a good conspiracy theory, so bear with me. If Gosbee buys the team right now to keep it in Glendale, he's the only one in line. He buys the team for maybe $100M or so? Say he absorbs $150M in losses over the next 5-6 years; that brings you to $250M invested, and then he can do the whole song and dance about how he tried to make it work and blah blah blah and move the team then (maybe by then Gary Bettman will have accidentally exposed himself to the Sun and vaporized). Now imagine if the NHL put the Coyotes up for auction and said, "Quebec, Saskatoon, Seattle, Vegas... wherever you want to move 'em, go crazy." I think you'd get at least $250M-$300M for the team in that situation and there'd obviously be multiple bidders... you're not guaranteed to come out of it with a team. Gosbee is only in his mid-40's, so he has plenty of time to see this plan through.

If I'm doing my NHL math correctly, the city without an owner waiting needs someone to buy a team on the cheap (Coyotes); the city with an owner, an arena coming and fans waiting will pony up a big expansion fee.

This chain opened its first store in my area in November a couple of years ago... and filed for bankruptcy three months later. They were completely shut down and liquidated by that April.

If the league did some kind of no-conference, 1-16 type playoffs, what do you guys think about teams choosing their opponents in the first round? #1 seed picks their opponent first and so on. If you are on the East Coast and you don't want to travel to the West Coast, choose a different team if it's really important to you. I think it would add an interesting new level of drama. Would teams really pick around the hot team that "nobody wants to play"? Plus, we'd get to blame our GM/coach for picking the wrong team.

My joke about the Cubs was better since the Leafs have actually won a title in the last 100 years. Not with that logo.

You must've not seen the PSU/Iowa game when I was a freshman at Penn State in 2004.Iowa 6, Penn State 4. No joke. Yeah, but you walked across campus to attend that game. I drove all night from Atlanta to Memphis to watch that joke of a game. Can I join the club? I flew from Toronto to San Juan to watch Toronto FC draw 0-0 with the Puerto Rico Islanders meaning we were knocked out of the Champions League. That was lame. My son's first NHL game a couple of years ago was a 1-0 OT loss. No goal celebrations, nothing really to cheer about. Eventually, the puck that he probably couldn't see went into our net on the far side of the arena and everyone just got up and left.

Sabres fans in Hong Kong!

Wouldn't it make more sense to base something like this off of how many goals the team scores, not how many they allow? This way, the team sucks for a game and you're cut off. So not only did the game you saw likely suck, but you made a bad "investment". That equals a happy fan? If your ticket lasted until the Coyotes scored five goals, you're balancing out "team doing well" versus "seeing more games".

I do remember Jack FM. We're going to play all the Bon Jovi and U2 we want no matter how offended people get by it because we're anti-establishment. Think that lasted about six months. We still have a Jack station here in Buffalo. For those that don't know, the idea behind the Jack format was to emulate the variety of music people might carry around with them on their iPods... with the idea that most people don't just listen to rock or just country, etc. I loved that station when it first came out, but now it's 90% bad 80's music with some other decent stuff sprinkled in.

So you're saying Gary Bettman has a switch on his back set to "evil"? And if we reset it, he'll act logically when it comes to the Coyotes?

Well, buying a fake jersey is less like downloading and MP3 and more like holding a tape recorder to the radio. I will never flame someone for buying a jersey second hand. The licencing fees (which lets face it, is the real cost-factor) for MLB/NFL jerseys prices them out of any semblance of a reasonable price range. Besides, I'd rather buy an actual jersey from the Marlins 1993 season on eBay than hope that M&N or Majestic will eventually make a throwback (and probably botch, it too). There's a line between buying smart and buying knock-offs. Holding a tape recorder to the radio is like buying fabric and sewing your own jersey: making your own product from the raw materials. I think the illegal download to jersey comparison is pretty apt. The only difference is that a digital file can be nearly identical to the real thing. Does the quality of the fake really make it right or wrong?

Note that the prices for music didn't come down until the recording industry started feeling the heat on their absurd prices with the rise of file sharing ($22 for a 25 cent CD? Really?). Hopefully the same thing will happen with the absurd prices for jerseys soon enough as the jersey makers feel the heat on their own absurd prices with the rise of offshore counterfeit manufacturing. But the illegal file sharing was a headache for the music industry. Us high schoolers and college students did it like crazy, but we were a small minority. What really brought change was iTunes, with their legal downloads at reasonable prices and freeing consumers from buying a whole CD to get two good songs. I'm not sure there's a jersey equivalent.