NHL Anti-Thread: Bad Business Decision Aggregator

[spartacat_12]

15 hours ago, Dilbert said:

If the NHL wants to come back to Atlanta they will more than likely need to build a new arena.  State Farm Arena (former home of the Thrashers) was renovated and is now more basketball friendly. If its still possible for a sheet of ice it may end up like another Barclays Center situation. Gas South Arena, located in nearby Duluth, is home to the ECHL Atlanta Gladiators, however it only seats around 13,000

 

The rumour is that they'd be looking at playing somewhere in Alpharetta. I'm not exactly sure where the majority of Thrashers fans came from, but putting an expansion/relocated team in a suburban arena seems like a step back.  

[Walk-Off]

2 hours ago, Cosmic said:

Didn't the owners of the Hawks and arena basically leave the baby Thrashers at the door of the metaphorical fire station?

 

If the sale of the Thrashers excluded any ability to have the same percentage of control of then-Philips Arena as the Hawks, then, in hindsight, the lack of interest from anyone who would have wanted (or at least been willing) to keep the team in Atlanta is not surprising at all.  Thus, if anyone dares to campaign for a third NHL foray in the Atlanta market and gets asked repeatedly why the Thrashers were not pursued when the chance existed, I hope that the person or people behind such a quest will bring up any and all strings that Atlanta Spirit LLC had attached to the Thrashers.

[Walk-Off]

1 hour ago, spartacat_12 said:

The rumour is that they'd be looking at playing somewhere in Alpharetta. I'm not exactly sure where the majority of Thrashers fans came from, but putting an expansion/relocated team in a suburban arena seems like a step back.  

 

I can think of two upsides of a major-league professional sports venue in Alpharetta:

• Being just inside Fulton County, Alpharetta -- unlike either Cobb County (where the Braves play in an unincorporated area) or Gwinnett County (which contains Duluth and its Gas South Arena) -- is within the footprint of MARTA (albeit only with bus service, at least for now).
• Historically, both the per-capita wealthiest neighborhoods within the City of Atlanta and the per-capita wealthiest suburbs of Atlanta have tended to be north of Downtown Atlanta ... and Alpharetta is not only near the northern tip of Fulton County, but also close to the heart of the whole northern quadrant of the Metro Atlanta region.

Edited March 9, 2023 by Walk-Off

[Walk-Off]

accidental duplicate post

Edited March 9, 2023 by Walk-Off

[The_Admiral]

On 3/8/2023 at 2:45 PM, spartacat_12 said:

Another team sabotaging the league's inclusion efforts. Disappointing, but not surprising when you know the owner's political stances.

Interesting predicament here as it seems that the pride stuff has no constituency with ownership nor players. Change is not coming from the top down or the bottom up but from the middle out. Fans are used to picking one side or the other in league conflicts, but this represents a Third Way: the real heroes of the NHL are people with college degrees who work in marketing and HR, because unlike athletes, we can see ourselves in them.

[The_Admiral]

4 hours ago, spartacat_12 said:

I'm not exactly sure where the majority of Thrashers fans came from

The Northeast Corridor

[spartacat_12]

1 hour ago, the admiral said:

Interesting predicament here as it seems that the pride stuff has no constituency with ownership nor players. Change is not coming from the top down or the bottom up but from the middle out. Fans are used to picking one side or the other in league conflicts, but this represents a Third Way: the real heroes of the NHL are people with college degrees who work in marketing and HR, because unlike athletes, we can see ourselves in them.

 

There are plenty of players in the league who are more than happy to support the league's LGBTQ+ initiatives, so I wouldn't generalize them based on a few bad eggs. 

 

[GDAWG]

12 hours ago, Walk-Off said:

 

 

I wonder if Cobb County (another MARTA-shunning, heavily car-dependent, suburban part of the Metro Atlanta region) and/or Liberty Media Corporation (the MLB Braves' current parent company) would have both the money and the gall to try to lure the NHL back to the Atlanta market by building an NHL-specification arena near the Braves' Truist Park -- quite possibly through buying or otherwise grabbing a large enough swath of land next to The Battery Atlanta (the existing mixed-use development surrounding the Braves' ballpark) and then passing off the arena as, among other things, an expansion / extension of The Battery Atlanta.

 

Off the top of my head, I can think of one NHL team that has played at a suburban arena near a suburban MLB stadium.  The North Stars spent their whole bittersweet 26-season history in Minnesota at the Met Center -- a stone's throw north of where the Twins' first Minnesota home (and also the NFL Vikings' first home) happened to stand -- in Bloomington, a few miles south of both of the Twin Cities.

 

Ironically, not even half a decade had passed between the Minnesota North Stars becoming the Dallas Stars and an attempt to bring the Stars into a similar situation in their new market.  In the spring of 1996, shortly after both the Stars and the NBA's Dallas Mavericks had come under new (albeit separate) ownerships, Arlington -- one of the "Mid-Cities" between Dallas and Fort Worth -- began an effort to lure either or both of those teams to an arena that would have existed across the street from the MLB Rangers' then-nascent second Texas ballpark, had an exterior that would have emulated the neoclassical look of the Rangers' then-newish digs, and even been known initially as "The Arena in Arlington" so as to further complement "The Ballpark in Arlington" that was housing the Rangers.  Unfortunately for Arlington (but fortunately, IMO, for the principle of common sense), both the Stars and the Mavs chose instead to stay within the Dallas city limits for their second and current mutual home (the American Airlines Center).

 

 

If nothing else, I think that if anyone with enough financial clout were to make a serious push to have Metro Atlanta enjoy a third chance with the NHL, then a lot of people will feel compelled to ask why that person or group did not try to buy the Thrashers while they were still in Atlanta and were up for sale.

 

Mark Cuban has been open to a new arena for the Mavericks to be the centerpiece of a potential DFW based casino if Texas ever legalizes gambling (outside of the current Texas Lottery).

[VampyrRabbit]

Wasn't one of the issues with the Thrashers that they had a rotten team when they started due to an awful draft? And the Coyotes are a  a s***e team that will very likely continue to be s***e for quite a while.

If the NHL are going to give Atlanta a third shot, wouldn't it make more sense to disband the Coyotes then give Atlanta an expansion slot and hold a draft rather than just straight up moving that dumpster fire to Atlanta?

 

[The_Admiral]

1 hour ago, spartacat_12 said:

There are plenty of players in the league who are more than happy to support the league's LGBTQ+ initiatives, so I wouldn't generalize them based on a few bad eggs. 

 

Yeah, some players are in favor of it, other players aren't. I would guess that most guys are neutral leaning positive. But I think my point stands that this isn't getting the broad-based support on par with NBA players' social activism, or NFL ownership's dry-humping of the military-industrial complex. And I think that's interesting because it's kind of a sign of what's ahead for the NHL's next work stoppage: we know that NFL fans will largely side with owners, and NBA fans with players. This new breed of NHL fan doesn't seem to hold either side in much esteem. Who they really adore are themselves.

[habsfan1]

1 hour ago, VampyrRabbit said:

Wasn't one of the issues with the Thrashers that they had a rotten team when they started due to an awful draft? And the Coyotes are a  a s***e team that will very likely continue to be s***e for quite a while.

 

They failed to build a better team around Dany Heatley and Ilya Kovalchuk. Also, the car accident that killed Dan Snyder had a negative affect on Heatley.

[The_Admiral]

Yeah. had a negative effect on him continuing to live in Atlanta, he put up #50in07 in Ottawa and they got back Marian Hossa in his prime. The crash was not that disastrous for the team, not nearly as disastrous as the Atlanta Hawks signing Joe Johnson.

[BBTV]

"Hockey is about inclusion" - if your parents were rich enough to pay for ice time and equipment so you could play for your high school club team.  I loved ice hockey when I was a kid, but never had a chance to play it because (at least where I grew up) you had to be rich.  It didn't matter if you were gay, non-white, or of any other marginalized or discriminated-against group, it was all about the $$$.

 

I know it's different in other areas (I think we had a whole thread about this, where I was surprised that even in Canada it's not as accessible as something like basketball is) but "hockey is inclusive" is a joke, even outside of DEI.

[who do you think]

On 3/6/2023 at 1:36 AM, ninersdd said:

https://twitter.com/KevinWeekes/status/1632493085958578178

 

Owners short on cash again, huh?

 

15 hours ago, Cosmic said:

Didn't the owners of the Hawks and arena basically leave the baby Thrashers at the door of the metaphorical fire station? Like Glendale with the Coyotes, helping new owners would have meant another, newer arena to compete for other events.

 

Atlanta Spirit figured out that could just have their events without the hockey-team-for-nobody clogging up arena availability and turned in the keys. You'd think that someone with authority over BB&T/FLA Live Arena would have come to the same conclusion by now regarding the Panthers.

[GDAWG]

 

[TBGKon]

If anyone wants some details about what caused failure to the Atlanta Thrashers, this article is a good start.  Starts around halfway during the 2003-2007 section. 

 

https://allsportshistory.com/2021/08/27/what-happened-to-the-atlanta-thrashers/

[DTConcepts]

The Athletic is reporting that some of the teams aren't wearing pride jerseys because of increasingly strict anti-LGBTQ laws in Russia.

[VampyrRabbit]

5 hours ago, DTConcepts said:

The Athletic is reporting that some of the teams aren't wearing pride jerseys because of increasingly strict anti-LGBTQ laws in Russia.

https://www.prosportsdaily.com/articles/the-nhls-russiapride-jersey-problem-explained-why-wild-became-latest-to-scrap-plans-771916.html
 

Non paywalled version of the article. The reason given for not wearing the jerseys was out of concern for the Russian players.

[IceCap]

I remember back in the day a few old timers here consistently said Winnipeg, Quebec City, and Hartford shouldn't get teams again because those cities failed to hold onto their teams. 

 

But here we are after two failed Atlanta runs and the league wants to go back before Quebec City? 

 

Maybe the people who advocate for this idiocy should just come out and admit their own biases/issues and stop pretending there's anything high minded about their stances. 

[Ferdinand Cesarano]

5 minutes ago, IceCap said:

I remember back in the day a few old timers here consistently said Winnipeg, Quebec City, and Hartford shouldn't get teams again because those cities failed to hold onto their teams. 

 

But here we are after two failed Atlanta runs and the league wants to go back before Quebec City? 

 

Maybe the people who advocate for this idiocy should just come out and admit their own biases/issues and stop pretending there's anything high minded about their stances. 

 

My bias is that Canada should have priority in the NHL.  So a team in Atlanta or anywhere else in the southern U.S. should not even be considered until there are teams in Quebec City, Hamilton, Atlantic Canada, Saskatoon, and any other viable Canadian locale that I am not thinking of right now.