BeerGuyJordan
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Posts posted by BeerGuyJordan
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10 hours ago, Dilbert said:
So the Coyotes appear bound for Salt Lake, their farm club Tucson Roadrunners appear bound for Tempe. Anyone hear anything on the Utah Grizzlies? I know they are in a different arena in the suburbs but I cant imagine them staying to compete with the NHL. Should they go to Tucson to complete the circle of life?
The TCC management has already said they'd be interested in filling the vacancy, since they spent the money to get the space up to AHL standards from 2016 to 2018.
I don't know that the attendance numbers in Tucson are good enough to attract even the ECHL. The only reason it made sense was because the Coyotes owned them and wanted the proximity.
I live in Tucson. As much as I'd love to have a team, I'm not blind to the reality.
10 hours ago, GDAWG said:It's going to cause a domino effect in minor league hockey since the Grizzlies are the ECHL affiliate of the Avalanche.
I mean, dominoes in the minors is part of the lay of the land, especially when you consider SPHL and FPHL.
40 minutes ago, GDAWG said:Wasn't there a guy trying to bring the NHL to Hamilton a long time ago, only for the NHL to stop him?
Jim Balsillie came close to relocating the Predators to Hamilton back in like the early 2010's. He wasn't as close as he believed, and started operating as if it were a done deal. That passed off the league and killed the deal.
I'm not certain he would have gotten it done even if he hadn't shot himself in the foot, but given the fact that the Isles debacle seemed to teach the League almost nothing, who knows?
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Not sure about the veracity, but these are some interesting wrinkles, if true.
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14 hours ago, MDGP said:
Only real downside in all this will be losing the Kachina logo, though it would absolutely be in character for a Utah team to just keep it even though it's irrelevant to the area.
They can rebrand and still have a kachina in use. Their AHL affiliate, the Tucson Roadrunners, have a Kachina alternate. Move them to the Phoenix market, call them the Phoenix Roadrunners, and use that full-time. WHA nostalgia bros and kachina fans would both be happy.
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Well, it was nice having hockey in Tucson while it lasted, but as soon as the Tempe location fell through, I kind of expected this.
They'll move the Roadrunners to Phoenix, adopt the kachina full-time, and call it a day. There's no way they give the Knights time to poach the market. It's still attractive as an AHL location.
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38 minutes ago, spartacat_12 said:
From what I've heard it seems like the players have been the ones pushing for the league to start this season. I think if it were solely up to the people running the league, they'd have delayed it a year to get all the logistics ironed out without rushing.
Obviously the generic placeholder jerseys aren't great, but considering the team names that leaked it might be better for them to get back to the drawing board.
You mean the PWHPA players, who were actually the smaller pool, when compared to the PHF ones.
And they can push all they want. At the end of the day, business decisions are a league decision. They have the money, and it's their money on the line. The buck stops there.
Players don't always know what's best for the league or the sport, just their portion, which is significant but hardly the whole.
If this is the best this leadership can do, honestly the best, how is it in any way so far superior to the PHF?
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3 hours ago, officeglenn said:
The ECHL's Savannah Ghost Pirates are becoming the Savannah Golden Ghosts for one night only to honor their NHL affiliate, the Vegas Golden Knights, and their recent Stanley Cup championship. The black jerseys will be worn in warmups while the gold jersey will be worn in-game. Both are based on the Ghost Pirates' usual jerseys, with gold swapping for their usual neon green.
They've announced they're expanding it to all three games this weekend.
As grateful as I am for even having hockey in Tucson, I am so disappointed with the Roadrunners lack of fun specialty jerseys, especially when I see the Firebirds killing it.
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The Pride, Whitecaps, Riveters, and Force died to make way for these atrocities.
I really want to root for the PWHL, and hoped when they killed the PHF that it was to make way for a better vision for the women's game. It feels like this league is one step forward, two steps back for women's hockey.
If the PWHL wants to tout itself as a professional, top-tier product, it should really start acting like it.
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33 minutes ago, Dilbert said:
Why do I have the feeling that they are just gonna play with no team name or logos this season?
Because they appear to be trying to out bad business the NHL, at this point?
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13 hours ago, GDAWG said:
It will be interesting to see how Ejections would be dealt with if there are robo umpires.
Unless I'm mistaken, it's just pitches that'd move away from human calls. They'd still have humans to do the rest.
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11 hours ago, Ridleylash said:
Hawks @ Yotes tonight in a nutshell;
They're my wife's team. After all the times I've seen them get mercilessly shellacked, I'm fine with it.
Especially when it's Chicago on the receiving end. They showed no mercy to anyone during their dominance in the early to mid 10's.
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8 minutes ago, the admiral said:
The old league was really good at branding and cultivating a Twitterati following. They didn't seem to excel at much else.
The one caveat to that stance I would offer is the home viewing. Their video quality the last season on ESPN+ was better than most AHL teams, and better that what the Coyotes have since Bally fell through and you have to watch them on Laff. Not sure how many other NHL teams are in that boat.
Them taking advantage of Arizona's arena mess and having their final there last season was inspired. They got access to NHL quality media infrastructure at an affordable price for their first nationally televised game.
Don't get me wrong, I really want this league to work, I just can't understand paying what they did to not take advantage of what they could. It's bad business, and setting my personal attachments aside doesn't instill confidence in their ability to not run this sport's umpteenth league into the ground.
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On 10/28/2023 at 7:19 AM, the admiral said:
These names are terrible, and they've gone way too far in salting the earth, but let's be honest, the PHF was just as bumbling and power-tripping as the new people. They should have kept what worked (New York Riveters) and gotten rid of what didn't (apparently, everything else).
I've been following since day one. The PHF was far from perfect, and had some really questionable moves: the Rivs playing in a mall, the Force being homeless their first season, communication between league management and the teams, etc.
That said, there are more than a couple big successes in their wins column. Their ESPN+ deal was a huge plus. And provided the first reliably watchable seasons yet for thise not able to get to games. Fan engagement was great, but that's not something the league itself should get credit for, as the teams were doing the heavy lifting.
They were making real headway in sponsorship and salary, and their inroads with Euro and Asian players could have been a major asset to the PWHL.
Their identities were beloved by the fanbases in most of their markets. The Rivs were just great. The Whitecaps weren't the best, but they had more than 20 years of tradition and brand recognition. Killing them feels idiotic. I wasn't a huge fan of the Pride identity, but the locals seemed to love it. The Six were a bad idea executed well, and the Force were serviceable, but I don't have strong feelings about letting them go.
ESPN was reportedly happy with their championship telecast numbers and the rumor was they had agreed to air a best of three series next season.
There are a lot of areas where the new league is zero sum compared to the old, but there are a lot of foundations already laid they could have built on as well. Womens sports have a hard enough time gaining traction. The PWHL wants to kill the PHF so badly that they're cutting off their nose to spite their face.
The sport, its players, and the fans deserve better.
On 10/28/2023 at 8:50 PM, Sodboy13 said:This is a fair point to make, and it is more than worth remembering that Reagan Carey and the other folks in charge of the league announced a huge boost to the salary cap and were signing players to contracts reflecting it, while quietly negotiating an acquisition deal that would void every single one of those contracts. Profoundly bad actors.
Salient point, but as I understand it, some level of discussion had been ongoing ever since the split and they always fell apart. Carey and the rest deserve the vitriol they are getting for blindsided everyone with the execution. Not explaining the negotiations every step of the way and planning on actually playing next season isn't where I'm upset.
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Fantastic design! I'd hate to see them pare Peyote down to just the head as a full-time look, but either of these as an alternate would be a solid move.
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1 hour ago, seasaltvanilla said:
Idea that came into my head last night. I'm pretending that the name has Hockey Club as a suffix to make it more palatable and less Wild.
If the Minnesota PWHL team is leaning into the Lake Superior imagery, probably the most famous landmark on the North Shore is Split Rock Lighthouse, which forms the basis for the main logo. The Little Dipper also hangs in the sky with Polaris serving double duty as the light bloom from the lighthouse. Purple has already been strongly hinted to be the primary color, which pairs well with sky blue to represent Lake Superior. Wavy striping also ties into the lake, as well as being a nod to the former Whitecaps. Putting even more waves on the breezers seemed like overkill, so I went with a slightly out there enlarged lighthouse instead.
Fun concept. Maybe it's because I'm in phone, but your purple looks a little more blue than the shade they teased.
I don't think it'd look bad with the one they released, but it might lose a tad of the cohesiveness.
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22 minutes ago, spartacat_12 said:
For Ottawa & Montreal I guess I can see it because they want to avoid issues with having a non-bilingual name. The Ottawa Alerts were a pro women's hockey team that played during the First World War, but I guess they were worried about the plural version not being French.
It's a shame they didn't already own the rights to a name in Montreal that already met that brief, and had a solid logo that tied into French-Canadian heritage.
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1 minute ago, OnWis97 said:
I recall when Wisconsin played at Arizona in football maybe 20 years ago they were in a flooding locker room waiting for a torrential downpour to end. I thought it was a huge anomaly. I'm actually going to Tucson for the first time ever in early December. I'm counting on some nice weather.
But that 7-12 degree difference would not do it for me. I don't think I could spend time in either place in the summer.Let's be clear, summers here suck too. Mid October to mid May are great, but June through August are brutal.
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15 hours ago, Sodboy13 said:
I remain at least partially convinced, as I have for years, that the people running the PWHPA and now PWHL want to run women's pro hockey into the ground.
I've been losing my mind all day at "Toronto Torch." Good thing there's not another pro hockey team in Canada with a storied history of torch imagery. And even better that such a theoretical team does not have some sort of blood rivalry with Toronto.
I don't think they're deliberately trying to run it into the ground. I think just so focused on doing it their way that they don't care about making bad decisions, so long as they're different decisions than the PHF.
They bought that league, all of it's assets, connections, identities, and contracts. In business, when you buy a more established brand, it's usually to use its successes. The PWHL bought the PHF so they could make sure it was killed in its entirety.
10 hours ago, monkeypower said:I don't think they truly want to run women's pro hockey into the ground, I think it's a symptom of larger issues.
Which makes killing the PHF all the more infuriating. They were making real strides for the women's game. We're there bad decisions? Yes, but they'd spent 8 years learning and building.
Throwing out the baby with the bath water just so your side could win killed a lot of trust and goodwill right out of the gate.
1 hour ago, Sodboy13 said:We're two months out from the start of the season and there's no schedule, no confirmed venues to go with the market assignments, and only (informed) speculation on (very bad) team identities. It feels like a "dog finally caught the car" scenario.
Yep. This league will have fewer players who are being paid less than last season in the PHF, all while increasing the player pool by about 75%.
They hung players out to dry. Killed brands with built-in fanbases for ego rather than make the business decision to build on them. All the branding info so far has been inferior to what came before.
I tried to give them the benefit of doubt initially, but every time I turn around they're making bad decisions.
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16 hours ago, monkeypower said:
Hypocrites?
The NHL having deals with sports betting sites doesn't mean players are allowed to bet. That's pretty much been a fundamental rule of playing a professional sport forever.
Yeah, I get that. When I made it, the statement was more of a "you're embracing sports betting to a large degree, let's be clear where your lines are as to how much you've embraced them. What is severe enough to warrant half a season, but not so bad to boot the kid entirely?" As far as I'm aware, there's been no real attempt to make this explicitly clear.
And "having deals" feels like a gross undercharacterization of the deluge of sports betting ads fans are hit with while watching games, at least here in the states.
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24 minutes ago, Ridleylash said:
Well, that's not a good thing for the Sens.
Given how much sports betting is being shoved down our throats, and how much the league benefits from it, I feel like we need them to explain what he did to avoid looking like hypocrites.
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1 hour ago, vtgco said:
Boston should've gone with @mcrosby's NWSL concept name & logo and still kept what, presumably, is a Salem witchcraft theme:
"New York Sound" is the only name that sounds at all usable as-is; is the implication that they'll play on Long Island?
The last rumor I heard was them closing in on an agreement with the Bridgeport Islanders to play there.
1 hour ago, vtgco said:RIP Minnesota Whitecaps and NY Riveters branding. Why must you die for this
Those were two great identities. To be fair, other than Toronto, I thought the PHF's team identitioes were all decent or better.
Montreal had a great logo and I liked their jerseys.
The most recent Boston logo would have been good if they'd just fixed the centering. Last season's jerseys were the best they had.
Connecticut was a fun branding that had some great wave features on their sets.
Buffalo's logos could have used a glow up, but their uniforms were sharp.
I want this to succeed, as a supporter of the NWHL/PHF from day one. This new league's insistence on "winning" and destroying all traces of their former competitor has long since crossed the line into bad business territory.
As a fan. The PWHL so far has been a big step back for the game and its fans. As a Rivs fan, I don't know if I'll ever be able to fully get past abandoning that identity.
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15 hours ago, Dynasty said:
There's a temperature difference between the two cities?
For the bulk of the year it's usually in the 7 to 12 degree Farenheit difference range, if both have similar weather. Tucson is currently 10 degrees cooler.
You do see more monsoon activity in Tucson, and on those days the difference can get close to 20 sometimes. That's typically only about 3 months (July, Aug, Sep).
It's primarily because Tucson is about 1,600 feet higher in elevation.
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On 10/21/2023 at 4:14 PM, the admiral said:
When the Senators' attendance was dropping below five figures, you never saw me crowing about how this proves that Ottawa is a failure and their team needs to be moved to a southern Yankee Containment Zone with a surprisingly good craft beer scene.
It warms my heart to know that Admiral's contempt for sun belt markets continues. It's good to be back.
I agree with him that the League had a willingness in the 90's to let any bozo with half a plan and an unvetted bank statement buy a team. I also agree that it led to messes like Arizona and Atlanta, and for a time (and to varying degrees) Carolina, Florida, and Nashville.
I disagree that it is a flaw in the markets themselves. Las Vegas is a shining example that making sure you get the right ownership and a good product matter more than the market. If a market doesn't already have a culture for a sport, you have to create it. Just throwing a team down like the NHL used to do is bad business. The Knights and Kraken expansion terms were a formula for success.
If you put the past 20 years of team and ownership history from Toronto in any market south of DC, they'd be bleeding money.
Back to the greater point, pulling out of Winnipeg at this point would be dumb. More than a third of the league's attendance is significantly down. Is anyone saying they need to pull stakes in San Jose, whose attendance hit a lower point than even Winnipeg? How about Calgary or Washington? Their attendance is down as well.
Is there a problem right now? Yes, obviously. It isn't the Winnipeg metro's size. Admiral's underlying point there is spot on.
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4 hours ago, Sport said:
Two things: 1. The Reds also blew a 9-0 lead to the :censored:ing Pirates in the penultimate series. I can think of about six more games they lost that easily should’ve been wins. That’s our fault, not the Dbacks.
2. the Reds pitching was a mess in the last two months and like two starters were healthy. They wouldn’t have gotten out of the wildcard series.Salient points, but let's not pretend that the Dbacks didn't slide backwards into the post season on a four game losing streak. The battle for the final WC spot started to feel like it was coming down to a measure of how much the teams derailed in the 11th hour.
Arizona came into the playoffs pretty cold. I'm a fan, but my hopes were pretty low. I thought they had the pieces to get by Mikwaukee if they could find their footing, I wouldn't have been willing to put money on them getting past LA, and I never seriously considered them making the World Series. I've been happy to be wrong, and this is why we play the games.
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NHL Anti-Thread: Bad Business Decision Aggregator
in Sports In General
Posted
This is a league that was happy at 21 teams for a substantial run. I'm not sure if that factors into it much.
That said, in theory, 36 isn't that much more of a burden, when compared to 32. The NHL is a more gate-driven league than the others, and the past two expansions have been almost exclusively positive experiences for the existing owners.
I think they'll keep expanding until they are given what they see as a reason not to.