BBTV

I'm not sure if you guys are using the word niche correctly. I mean the sport is a niche sport with a passionate following in Canada, the northeast and north-central US, and a few other markets, and then mostly apathy everywhere else in North America. I'm not saying that a team should consider moving to the mall in Hartford, but the league should go where it's wanted (like Quebec City and... well that's all I got right now) and abandon some other places. NHL doesn't need the footprint that the major leagues have. It was arguably at it's peak popularity well before moving teams to these places and expanding to places that weren't asking for it. I mean... is there a need for the Florida Panthers?

Unless teams already had throwbacks in their style guides, you won’t see them in ‘22 and will have to wait till ‘23. I think patriots do, but I wouldn’t get hopes up about too many others.

Market size can't be the only metric that's used in these decisions, as it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. The Tampa Bay Rays are a great example. On paper, MLB baseball should do OK there, but the area is very sprawled with little density, poor (if any) public transit to get people too/from games, and a pretty lousy pro sports culture in general. Phoenix isn't much different. It's market size is also spread out over a huge area made up of strip malls and parking lots. That's not conducive to sports that play more than once a week. I've been in the Phoenix area a bunch of times, albeit only in Phoenix proper once, but my observation of Phoenix proper was that nobody actually lives there and it's a ghost town after 5PM because everyone's going home to Scottsdale or one of the neighboring communities. A smaller market where the games are easily accessible and a higher percentage of the market actually cares should be what the NHL is going for since it's more gate driven than any of the other sports. For the other sports where revenues are driven so much by the markets that they're selling to the TV and radio partners, it might be another story, but the NHL should stop pretending it's anything but a niche league and go where people want it rather than try to force it for no reason other than to appear major league.

Wow - that's not insignificant. I'm assuming there's stats that prove that it was too easy to hit HRs to left there? I assume seats have to be removed and STHs (if there are any) relocated.

The players would absolutely be in favor of additional ad patches besides what's already there - as long as they get their fair cut. What I'd love to see is for the patches to be sold at a player level rather than at a team level. So maybe the star player on a team has a Draft Kings patch, while the other players have Stubhub or Crypto.com patches, and the backup catcher has a Jake's Windows and Siding patch.

No idea who that is.

The only thing that makes it stand out anymore is its backdrop with the warehouse in right field and "skyline" of Baltimore. It's been passed over many times since. That being said, baseball fans (and sports fans in general) should be eternally grateful that the Orioles challenged the thinking of the time that sport-specific stadiums were wasteful, downtown stadiums can't work, and that "classic" == "old" rather than... well, "classic". It was a complete paradigm shift, and even though the "neo-retro" era is over (Marlins Park, the Texas Costco, and other newer parks are obviously not retro), it really was the turning point for American stadiums. The flip side of that is that Camden Yards ended up costing American tax payers billions, since every team wanted its own version, and most - if not all - got public funds for them. It's also probably indirectly responsible for team moves, even if not in baseball.

I thought Camden Yards was a dump. A very attractive dump, but a dump nonetheless. Any stadium without open concourses is obsolete, and the lack of open concourses stifles airflow which makes certain sections of the stands like sitting in a sauna. Between missing parts of the game to grab food or a beer, and sweating my balls off, it was one of the more frustrating game-day experiences I've had in a while. Can't deny it's very pretty though, and the big open area with the high-tops is nice, but pretty much every park has something better now.

I guess maybe teams feel that it'd be a bad look and there could be some backlash if they unveil new uniforms to sell when they're fighting the players over money and technically there's a small chance that there won't be a season. I don't know how much jersey sales are as a proportion of overall merch sales so maybe as long as they have shirseys and other new stuff out there it doesn't matter too much.

My gods - that NOB is horrible. Just looking at it gives me a headache. If the bottoms of the A, M, R, etc were flat, maybe it wouldn't play so many tricks with my eyes, but as it is, I'll need an advil if I ever happen to see one of their games.

They absolutely 100% could not use players to model them. Since all player contracts are subject to the terms of the CBA, while there's a lockout, it's basically like they're not employees of the team (unless they withdrew from the union, which isn't happening.) I have no idea if they could use real player jerseys on mannequins or other models, but it's not likely that they'd even wade into those waters. You may see blanks unveiled by the team, and then let 3rd-party sites sell the player-lettered versions.

I thought that last year was going to be the first year for the new template, but everything got pushed back by a season because the world got sick, so this year would be it. What's weird is that I thought there were some photos taken that showed a couple one-offs of the new template (for some reason I'm thinking the Royals were one) but then when the Royals rolled out their updates, it was on the old (current) template. TL;DR, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

At this point you're just being a contrarian. Not even the helmet looks good, considering the white mask and white chinstraps ruin the look of the horns on the majority of the players.

If that's not evidence that uniform gods exist then I don't know what is.

Wow I had totally forgotten about those ridiculous Rams uniforms. Pretty much anything involving those is immediately in the conversation. WTF were they thinking changing the helmet when they passed on changing the rest of the uniform? Just a totally ridiculous move.

The dogs in Atlanta that continue to do the chop and their war cry would never let it go. It's one thing to get rid of questionable names in Washington and Cleveland (and neither of those were easy) but in the deep south? LOL.

Clearly the answer is to pull a Rays and have the first half of the season in Houston, then move them to Quebec for the end.

Maybe not militaristic or jingoistic, but this is pretty gross:

^that's the winner.

if you give my aunt balls, she becomes my uncle. Doesn’t change the fact that she’s my aunt.

Some of the color rush matchups were worse.

Monochrome hockey uniforms suck, and white should be the home color just to avoid monochrome at home. I can't think of a single team that looks better in their monochrome uniform than they do in their white sweater. The Flyers look fine in orange because they have black pants, but maybe it's just because of my age, but their white jersey is their "best" one to me, and I'd be 100% in favor of white at home again.

I'm sure this has been discussed before, but how is Milwaukee considered Chicago's territory?

They play in a Costco and wear silly softball uniforms. They had things so right in the early-mid 80s, and even in the early BPoA days, but once they started mixing and matching colors and then eras, then moved into the monstrosity that they now play in, it was over for them. Contract them and turn the warehouse into a parking lot. Or move them to montreal since they already use the same colors in weird combos, then move the Rays into the Costco, basically trading one warehouse home in churchville for another.