NHL Anti-Thread: Bad Business Decision Aggregator

[VampyrRabbit]

3 minutes ago, mcj882000 said:

Do they have a plan to replace, and not just renovate, the building that the Whalers deemed too old in 1997? If not then zero chance, and I say that as a would-be Whalers fan.

Even if he does have that, those only slightly improve the odds, Bettman is almost certainly going to do all he can so the Coyotes can have another chance to make things work in the Sun Valley over taking the NHL back to Hartford.

[mcj882000]

58 minutes ago, VampyrRabbit said:

Even if he does have that, those only slightly improve the odds, Bettman is almost certainly going to do all he can so the Coyotes can have another chance to make things work in the Sun Valley over taking the NHL back to Hartford.

Oh, I'm... painfully aware. Phoenix gets to swing and miss a hundred times, everyone else whiffs once and they're out. 

[Cosmic]

3 hours ago, Gary said:

Funny thing is, it was the opposite, no one came out to vote because they didn’t care. The majority of the voters were 65 plus. It was the blue hairs that turned down the arena.

I don't doubt it was the blue hairs voting, but nobody had to come out- all voters were automatically sent a ballot. It's just that nobody cares about that Coyotes.

[Sodboy13]

3 hours ago, BrySmalls said:

Move the Yotes to Hartford?

 

I said upthread that we would see a lot of cities line up with cockamamie proposals between now and the end of the Coyotes' Mullett days in 2026. The week isn't even out and we're already into head injury territory.

 

Omaha or Des Moines would make more sense than Hartford. At least their venues are newer.

 

(please note that neither Omaha nor Des Moines would make sense, good God)

[SCMODS]

Bettman must be getting nightly visits from Jerry Colangelo's ghost threatening to possess the Damian Thorne wannabe if he doesn't keep the Yotes in Arizona. 

[Walk-Off]

12 hours ago, Gary said:

The majority of the voters were 65 plus. It was the blue hairs that turned down the arena.

 

9 hours ago, Cosmic said:

I don't doubt it was the blue hairs voting, but nobody had to come out- all voters were automatically sent a ballot. It's just that nobody cares about that Coyotes.

 

Maybe it is just me, but I think that, throughout both the Coyotes' history in Arizona and the history of the Florida Panthers, there has been surprisingly too little discussion about the extent to which the heavy concentrations of retired residents in the Phoenix and Miami-Fort Lauderdale metropolitan areas have hampered the respective attendance figures of the Coyotes and the Panthers and have thus caused the Yotes and, to a possibly lesser extent, the Panthers to have the most chronically fragile economic situations of any two current franchises in the NHL.

 

To me, at least, the negative impact of large populations of retirees on the bottom lines of the Yotes and the Panthers comes down to four basic factors:

• People (regardless of age) who move from areas with consistently cold winters to regions with milder winters tend to have less interest in activities requiring ice and/or snow than do the friends, neighbors, and relatives that they have left behind.
• Even if a transplant (regardless of age) from a traditional ice hockey market with heavy support for at least one established NHL team stays interested in hockey upon moving to a place that has an NHL club but a much shorter and more threadbare history of hockey fandom, the transplant is likely to remain loyal to whatever NHL team that person was supporting "back home."
• At the risk of my invoking a possibly unfair stereotype, older adults tend to be more rigid in their preferences in general and in their sports team allegiances in particular than are younger adults, adolescents, or children.
• Worst of all for the financial wellbeing of a major-league professional team in any sport, many (if not most) retirees have incomes that are too low and especially too fixed to enable regular purchases of tickets to such a team's games.

 

11 hours ago, VampyrRabbit said:

Bettman is almost certainly going to do all he can so the Coyotes can have another chance to make things work in the Sun Valley over taking the NHL back to Hartford.

 

8 hours ago, SCMODS said:

Bettman must be getting nightly visits from Jerry Colangelo's ghost threatening to possess the Damian Thorne wannabe if he doesn't keep the Yotes in Arizona. 

 

As fun and as fashionable as it has been to criticize Gary Bettman for being the chief culprit behind the cockroach-like persistence of the Coyotes' presence in Arizona, I am of the opinion that, as time goes on, the confluence of current Yotes owner Alex Meruelo and the State of Arizona's sports betting license law will deserve a steadily greater share of the blame for all of the desperate measures being undertaken to have the Yotes stay in Arizona than will Bettman or any future NHL commissioner.

• Currently, Arizona law requires any broad-based sports betting license not held by an Indigenous community in Arizona to belong to a professional sports organization located within Arizona (or the owner of said organization).
• Alex Meruelo holds an Arizona sports betting license that he was allowed to obtain only once he bought the Coyotes.
• If Meruelo lets the Yotes move out of Arizona, he has not become the owner of any other pro sports entity in that state by then, and Arizona's government has not loosened its criteria for sports betting licenses, then he will lose that license.

[The_Admiral]

16 hours ago, Webhamster said:

Not to mention the francophone issue.  They had a huge problem attracting marquee players to Quebec City because the press and the locals wanted francophones or players who would learn and speak french.  They got unbearable towards english-speaking players who didn't try to learn or speak french.  So that's how you got the Nords tanking so hard and always getting high draft picks that ended up creating the Colorado juggernaut. With a larger pool of international and American-born players the language issue looms large.

Across leagues, the Nords had about 15 seasons' worth of decent teams on the strength of Quebecois, European, and New England players. They can get by without kids from Alberta named Jaxxsyn Gord and Crayben Glerp if they absolutely have to.

 

9 hours ago, Sodboy13 said:

Omaha or Des Moines would make more sense than Hartford. At least their venues are newer.

 

(please note that neither Omaha nor Des Moines would make sense, good God)

 

Honestly, I'd want to kick the tires on Omaha before Kansas City or any of the one-team NBA towns. Would it work? Probably not, but I know Salt Lake City wouldn't.

[maz]

 

Forgive my ignorance (I was two years old when the Nordiques left Quebec and am a stupid American), but was the language issue that much of an thing? Is it still? I'm not familiar with Canadian politics, so I have no idea if Quebec is really that separatist or if it's just a meme at this point. It's 2023, though. They can just put an ad for Duolingo on their jerseys to promote learning French.

 

Maybe we should just bring back the Seals! I'm sure they'll be happy to have any major league team in Oakland at this point. 

(I  know, I know, that'll never work.)

 

[IceCap]

On 5/20/2023 at 8:47 AM, maz said:

Is it still? I'm not familiar with Canadian politics, so I have no idea if Quebec is really that separatist or if it's just a meme at this point.

Quebec City is actually less rabidly separatist than the French parts of Montreal are, historically. 

Quebec City is almost entirely Francophone which means the French Canadians there don't really feel like their culture is under siege that much. Meanwhile Montreal has a significant Anglophone population which means the separatists there tend to have to deal with English occasionally and that makes them upsetti spaghetti.

 

In fact during the 1995 independence referendum the pro independence side knew they were in trouble when their votes in Quebec City ended up being less than they needed to overcome the duelling voting blocs in Montreal. They needed to max out the independence votes in QC to overcome that and they didn't. 

 

Of course that was 1995 and the Parti Quebecois is a distant fourth in the provincial legislature today. Separatism as a whole isn't what it once was.  

[wildwing64]

14 hours ago, AJM said:

 

 

I don't ing believe it.

 

Spoiler

It's 2023 and I got Rickrolled by the Arizona Coyotes

 

[Burmy]

11 hours ago, SCMODS said:

Bettman must be getting nightly visits from Jerry Colangelo's ghost threatening to possess the Damian Thorne wannabe if he doesn't keep the Yotes in Arizona. 

Jerry Colangelo is still alive...

[IceCap]

4 minutes ago, Burmy said:

Jerry Colangelo is still alive...

 

 

[The_Admiral]

2 hours ago, maz said:

Forgive my ignorance (I was two years old when the Nordiques left Quebec and am a stupid American), but was the language issue that much of an thing? Is it still?

 

I think it may have been more of an issue to management than it was to players. It was a point of pride for the organization to employ as many French-Canadians as possible, unlike the Canadiens, who always had a lot of English in the office. For a long time, you could see vestiges of that in the Avalanche, who had a ton of guys named Claude Belanger and stuff as team psychologist and accountant and whatever.

 

I think everyone blows Eric Lindros out of proportion (which is appropriate, because he blew himself out of proportion), but then there have been stories that the problem as much as anything else was Marcel Aubut saying "hey, nice jugs" to Bonnie Lindros en francais without knowing she spoke the language. Plenty of players have spoken warmly of playing in Quebec City, usually Europeans who felt it was the closest thing to home. Of course, the hockey players of today are big stupid babies who just want to live on golf courses and skip out on paying income tax, but I remember some surveys that listed it as a place they'd like to play.

 

Here's the '95 referendum map. Obviously the Ottawa suburbs did not want to mess with the federal government, and Quebec City could go either way on it. The Eastern Townships didn't appear to be into it, either, and the Indians up north didn't mind screwing with their French oppressors. But the real heart of secession support (other than the Saguenay, not sure what their story is) was Laval and the rest of Greater Montreal, where it's predominantly French but in enough contact with English and multicultural people that they'd feel somehow besieged (as opposed to the West Island, who are the English and multicultural people).

 

But 1995 is l'ancien histoire as far as secession goes, now that Quebec nationalism has morphed into something different, staying in Canada while being allowed to be as annoying and/or French as they want, an arrangement that really works out for pretty much everyone except hijab enthusiasts.

[monkeypower]

From Larry Brooks:
 

Quote

Slap Shots has also learned that Coyotes players filed multiple complaints with the PA during the season about sub-standard travel, lodging and logistical issues that were in violation of the collective bargaining agreement.

 

[The_Admiral]

Can't believe anyone had a problem with this:

 

[IceCap]

2 hours ago, the admiral said:

Can't believe anyone had a problem with this:

 

Oh man. Remember those? 

 

"I'm sure the LAMESTREAM CANADIAN MEDIA will make fun of our sheets and pipes locker rooms but they're just haters." 

[BBTV]

Is that just a curtained off part of the arena?  Not even a separate-private room?

[IceCap]

Just now, BBTV said:

Is that just a curtained off part of the arena?  Not even a separate-private room?

Yep.

Here's a tip- if your locker room can be constructed by high schoolers something's gone amiss 

[Sodboy13]

5 minutes ago, BBTV said:

Is that just a curtained off part of the arena?  Not even a separate-private room?

Yeah, I think that was for the first couple of games because the NHL-grade facilities weren't going to be ready until like November/December. So they had massive road trips, but to keep things juuuuuuuust on this side of the insanity of a two-month road trip to open the the season, they dropped in a handful of home games with the Ikea setup you see pictured.

 

This was the plan all along from when they announced the move to Mullett, by the way. Which tells you a fair bit about the plan.

[BBTV]

I had no idea.  I mean...  wouldn't blame them if they went on strike.  Can the players on an individual team strike without the entire union?  Probably not, and I'm not sure if this violates the CBA enough to warrant a strike, but I wouldn't blame them for walking out.