Gothamite

NHL completes sale of Phoenix Coyotes

Nah, act like you've been there before and you might get back there again.

Only amateurs need to flaunt it.

Do we think Glendale will give them an extension, if the NHL can't get the deal done by Monday's deadline?

No kidding.

Love that blue Tiffany box.

Here you go....

That's nicer than most championship rings. Certainly better than the last two Packer rings.

What happened to the Arizona Coyotes?

Deal isn't done yet.

Louisville just received their National Title rings.

what happened to the eye?

I had to venture a guess, I'd say he got a Red Ryder carbine-action, two hundred shot Range Model air rifle with a compass in the stock and the thing which tells time for Christmas.

College basket ball rings coming out, here's Marquette's

Like the two-tone jewel.

I won't give the Blasé a hit; what's the story with that Florida State ring?

What if I told you that once a Phoenix suburb built a horse racetrack only to understand reason after two years?

Except from what I can read in that article, that wasn't funded by "a Pheonix suburb" but a private developer. If it had been a local Arizona government behind it, they'd still be paying to keep it open...

Seems to me that Glendale has the suburb's inferiority complex.

What's the demographic makeup at play here? Is there a racial component like the one that drove the Orange Curtain back in the day?

Hell, if the NFL had the ability to force a sale into private hands, they'd do that in a minute.

Nobody wants public ownership of teams, least of all the NFL. We'll never see such an arrangement again.

The memorial patch on the championship ring? Seems in very bad taste.

Nm

Arena capacity doesn't have much to do with corporate support. Especially if the NHL considers all tickets allocated or given away towards attendance, as I believe they do.

Sure, selling those suites is nice. But ad revenue is nicer.

I'm not saying that Seattle's run as a home to major-pro, minor-pro, and major junior hockey entitles the city to an NHL franchise, but could we please retire the meme that holds that the city lacks in "hockey tradition".

I'm not sure that has a whole lot to do with it. At least not on these boards.

Seattle already has strong fanbases in three sports (even if the baseball one has taken a beating lately). The newest (and thus customarily weakest) is as crazy-devout as any in the country.

These are all important when you consider corporate support, which budgets its dollars annually. Teams in the same market aren't pals, they're competitors for finite resources. If you're Major Company A, and looking to spread your dollars around, you're probably already invested in the Mariners and Seahawks. Got to be, that's what you do. You've seen the ludicrous rise of the Sounders and have gotten in on that ride, and you're tossing a few bucks out Husky way. Now there's a new hand out, one that isn't coming from a very strong place.

The NHL is planning to enter a fairly crowded marketplace already. That is, I think, the real point. To the extent the city's hockey history has any bearing at all it's that we can't say there's already a strong culture there. Maybe there is, maybe there isn't - how do the Thunderbirds do? - but the odds start to look long when you add that to all the other factors.

They don't have a great arena. They don't have an untapped market in terms of sports franchises. They don't have a grateful municipality eager for the validation they would bring. They don't seem to have any special enthusiasm waiting for them in the marketplace. This is what the Coyotes will be facing.

the only winter sport in town

What's baffling is that a city whose first sports passion is hockey and has a ready arena with a brand-spanking new one to come (Quebec) is being put behind a North American city where football, baseball, and soccer come before hockey, while an arena in said city (Seattle) isn't such a sure thing.

I never used to believe that Bettman had an illogical anti-Canada bias, but it's becoming harder and harder to avoid that conclusion.

The NHL will, at best, start as the fourth most popular sport in Seattle. They love the Mariners, Seahawks and Sounders, and I don't see how the new NHL team is going to magically leapfrog any of those.

Not to mention that the NBA might still outrank hockey in fan interest, so long as this is taken as a sign that a new Sonics might be forthcoming.

I know that the NHL is used to being a secondary sport in every American market they're in, but this is the first I can think of where they're going to run well behind soccer.

They'd have been better off with an AHL club.

Was this because of the NHL?

According to Elliotte Friedman, the Vancouver Canucks, who announced on Friday that their AHL team was moving to Utica, N.Y., originally had planned to put it in Seattle in KeyArena. Turns out, they were told "it was not available for hockey," reported Friedman.

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nhl-puck-daddy/phoenix-coyotes-moving-seattle-roenick-reportedly-part-plan-143114434.html

And here I thought Arizona was a fiscally conservative state...

"Fiscal conservatism" started to mean something very different in the early 1980s.

I don't even think its about the language.

I think it's one-half bias towards Sun Belt cities as the future population centers (and away from the "dead end" northern past), and one-half stubborn inability to admit a mistake.

Face it, when the Coyotes move all the headlines will be about what a failure the market is. I really don't think his ego can take it, and he's willing to dump plenty of other people's money down the train to avoid the bloody obvious.

"Random stranger" indeed...

If this works my next move is to buy the Lipizzaner Stallions.

Aren't they from Portugal?

There have been buyers before.

Let's see if he can work out a deal with the new people in charge if the city. Until then, this is just another of Bettman's farcical charades.

this is a really good looking matchup

Sure is. I love Tampa Bay in that color scheme.

Okay, but at least they won a fair amount of games. They regularly made it to the playoffs.

They gave the fans plenty of reasons to come out and see them.