2021-22 NHL Regular Season

[The_Admiral]

The exterior looks really cool. I love all the copper-patina green around.

 

 

I'm sure the inside looks pretty much like every NHL arena, but the outside is distinctive. It's closer to what I hoped the new Quebec arena would have looked like than how it turned out.

[LMU]

1 hour ago, the admiral said:

The exterior looks really cool. I love all the copper-patina green around.

 

 

I'm sure the inside looks pretty much like every NHL arena, but the outside is distinctive. It's closer to what I hoped the new Quebec arena would have looked like than how it turned out.

Pretty much.

 

[Ridleylash]

I mean, being fair, there's really only so many ways one can make a hockey arena's seating setup without getting really screwy with layouts. Why change what works and chase after Variety(tm) when what works is good?

 

I'd rather something basic but highly functional over having a chunk of seating cut out for a useless car.

[The_Admiral]

Even Madison Square Garden just looks a lot like any other arena after the renovations. The Saddledome is the only weird building left, and the Flames are trying to get rid of that too.

[DEAD!]

An arena is also built to accommodate other events.  It is not the same as building a baseball stadium.

I take the Olbermann comment with a grain of salt. Is he a Rangers fan?

[DEAD!]

11 minutes ago, the admiral said:

Even Madison Square Garden just looks a lot like any other arena after the renovations. The Saddledome is the only weird building left, and the Flames are trying to get rid of that too.

Ah yes, the Western Canadian version of the Capital Centre. 

[habsfan1]

 

[Ridleylash]

[The_Admiral]

The non-Lemieux owner was on the Epstein plane.

[Digby]

Getting jewel box ballpark vibes from that new Isles arena. I don’t know what they’re supposed to do on the inside? Arena sports don’t lend themselves to “quirks” the way a baseball stadium does. At least not if you want an arena that functions well for the people watching the game.

[The_Admiral]

It blends in with the arched windows at Belmont Park. 

 

The facade of the stately-yet-shabby Hippodrome that they tore down to build the Centre Videotron would have been a nice influence for the new arena, but instead they landed a spaceship igloo.

 

[RyanMcD29]

On my commute home every day I see UBS Arena on the Grand Central going over the Clearview, and it does look really in place with the Belmont Park campus. Only issue is about 2 or 3 weeks ago they added an LED banner on the outside promoting upcoming events and it sticks out like a sore thumb.

 

But yeah, I'd definitely say it's on the unique end for arenas. Can't say there's been much in terms of arenas going for a retro facade like there have been in baseball and they certainly got that going with UBS Arena, though I guess Little Caesars Arena fits the bill (EDIT: okay one end looks like it did, but then I actually looked at a photo of other sides of it and although it's not super duper future like other arenas, a lot of it screams "2010s luxury downtown apartment complex"). Also the lower roof certainly makes it stand out a bit. Tonight's game at least sounded like the Coliseum so I'll have to see how the acoustics are when I go there in person sometime this winter. Other cool tidbit is they made Section 329 a safe standing room section a la Tottenham Hotspur Stadium which is perfect for that group.

[SFGiants58]

I just keep calling it the USB Arena.

[Chromatic]

22 hours ago, IceCap said:

Self-loathing on a cultural level never much did anything for me, so I'll just point out that the Thrashers-turned-Jets have been more successful financially in Winnipeg than they were in Atlanta. And Winnipeg is 12.8% Atlanta's size (using metro areas for both).

Does every medium Canadian prairie town deserve a NHL team? Of course not, and no one who knows what they're talking about is saying that (and you know that).

 

But it's hard to ignore that a place like Winnipeg does punch above its weight while a place like Atlanta punched way below when it comes to pro hockey. Which makes the NHL's desire to keep a team out of Quebec City a bit odd and condescending to a country that provides the NHL with some of its most loyal fans (and sizable tv deals). QC is about on par with Winnipeg in terms of metro area population after all.

 

 

Maybe that comes from being told for decades by southern fans that the northern markets are lame for the snow and taxes and that the New South was the Future of the Game, all with the tacit support of the NHL's commissioner?

Chromatic's right, it's a two way street. I'm just not sure he's right about who lobbed the first shots. That the Jets 1.0 and Whalers were moved just adds to the frustration from fans up north.

That's fine, and maybe this is a cultural/geographic thing, but as somebody who lives in Canada, I see an endless amount of people complaining about teams in places like Nashville, Dallas, Tampa, Arizona, basically anywhere that isn't frozen 8 months of the year, and QC, Saskatoon, Hamilton, etc all "deserve" teams more. And I have never seen somebody advocate that some sunbelt city deserves one because thats where "the future of hockey is". Maybe if I lived in the Southern US I'd see the opposite. 

 

If you're going by the "support" metric thats a two way street as well. I can go back to the years where "traditional" hockey markets like Chicago, Boston, Pittsburgh, Minnesota and New York have worse support than bad markets like like Arizona and Florida. Of course they have the built in excuse of the team being bad/we don't like the owner etc. But then you can use your example of a team like Atlanta that never won a single playoff game in their entire history in Georgia and they don't deserve a team because the fans are bad people and don't deserve hockey. It seems a bit hypocritical. Teams need time to really embed themselves into their home. Its really hard to do that with a decade of ineptitude.

 

For the record I am not advocating the NHL go back to Atlanta or either. The entire point I'm making is that I really hate when some people advocate for one market to lose a team because they've arbitrarily decreed another place deserves it more. 

[DEAD!]

10 hours ago, SFGiants58 said:

I just keep calling it the USB Arena.

USB-A

[Digby]

10 hours ago, RyanMcD29 said:

Other cool tidbit is they made Section 329 a safe standing room section a la Tottenham Hotspur Stadium which is perfect for that group.

See that’s kind of cool and a nice quirk thing! Standing at sporting events is good, I have a lot of nervous energy.

[TBGKon]

On 11/18/2021 at 4:16 PM, tp49 said:

Tampa Bay enters the conversation.  They were doing shady things to Islander fans during the playoffs last season.  Many reports of them telling fans they couldn't wear Isles gear in the lower bowl and other reports of fans in Isles gear being moved from their seats.  Don't know if it was just for the Conference Finals or whether its extended to the regular season too.

 

On 11/18/2021 at 4:57 PM, Kramerica Industries said:

 

Regrettably, going back to at least 2015 the Lightning had a draconian policy like that not just about who could buy tickets (purchasing location-wise) but also about wearing opposing team gear in those more TV-visible parts of the arena. Probably because they were facing the Red Wings in the first round that year and feared a bunch of red being seen (I have no idea if similar policies were considered or in place facing the Penguins/Bruins in 2011 or Habs in 2014 or if the policy might've been inspired from those). I think after some Islanders fan made a big stink of it on social media, video and everything, the Lightning softened that policy, but that doesn't erase five postseasons of having it in place before that (including 2021). 

 

This was a playoff-exclusive policy. It didn't apply to regular season games.

These rules got blown way out of proportion, like the game of telephone.  From everything I've understood it wasn't the lower bowl, it was the first few rows around the ice.  These seats area special kind of club seats that have access to a lounge area in one of the tunnels, so that along with the level of visibility caused the rule to be enacted.  The rest of the arena is fair game.

[The_Admiral]

1 hour ago, Chromatic said:

And I have never seen somebody advocate that some sunbelt city deserves one because thats where "the future of hockey is".

The National Hockey League says it. Why would you have to hear it from anyone else?

[IceCap]

2 hours ago, Chromatic said:

Maybe if I lived in the Southern US I'd see the opposite. 

I lived in Canada my entire life up until five years ago and I saw both sides of it. I see the southern side of it now that I'm in Tampa. 

 

Yes, you have idiots who say Tampa and Dallas don't deserve teams, but what some people don't understand- or perhaps can't admit- is that the Sunbelt expansion/relocation spree was an experiment. These were cities with no history with a game that's regional by nature. There was no guarantee of success. 

Some of these markets worked. Others didn't. Why is it so hard to admit some didn't?

 

2 hours ago, Chromatic said:

I see an endless amount of people complaining about teams in places like...Arizona...and QC..."deserve" teams more.

Here's a perfect example. Teams like Tampa, Dallas, and yes even annoying Nashville, have proven NHL hockey works in those markets. There. There's your "it takes time" success stories. 

Arizona though? They've been a money pit every single day for twenty-five years. They've relied on long stretches of league ownership, had shaky ownership most of the other years, have needed to con local governments out of millions to stay put, and are now getting evicted because they can't pay rent on their arena. 

It shouldn't a controversial opinion to say a team like Tampa made it work but maybe it's time to move the Coyotes back up north to a city that will support them consistently. 

 

I get that in Canada the narrative is strongly one way and the contrarian desire can be strong, but come on. You can cite me all the years teams in "traditional" markets had bad attendance, no one in Canada or the northern US has been as much of a sure fire candidate for needing to move as the Coyotes have been. 

 

2 hours ago, Chromatic said:

For the record I am not advocating the NHL go back to Atlanta or either. The entire point I'm making is that I really hate when some people advocate for one market to lose a team because they've arbitrarily decreed another place deserves it more. 

See above. 

Winnipeg didn't deserve a team more than Atlanta because "it's cold lol." They deserve it because despite being only 12.8% as big as Atlanta they've proven to be a far more successful market for NHL hockey. 

 

So why not take a team that's been an abject failure in terms of drawing fans and making money in close to thirty years- Arizona- and try moving them to a city with many of the same upsides as Winnipeg- Quebec City-? 

 

23 hours ago, Sport said:

Willing to admit my bias, but like I said before, I've seen every team come through Columbus and I've never seen any fanbase behave as poorly in my arena as Penguins fans. I'm not even talking rivalry/hockey/sports stuff here - I'm talking poor behavior just in general for human beings. When I was an employee at Nationwide Arena we used to get pep talks from supervisors before the Penguins games about how to properly deal with the unruly Penguins fans. While I was there we never had one of those conversations for any other visiting team. I've seen better decorum at political rallies. The Bruins and Canadiens fans were never such disgusting wild baboons.

I mean I'm not trying to say any of this is wrong. That sucks, and  Penguins fans for sucking. 

 

My whole point about entering this convo was to say that Perds fans are self-defensive geeks who root for a team that's the self-defensive geek of the NHL. 

[mcj882000]

18 hours ago, SFGiants58 said:

I just keep calling it the USB Arena.

You and Jiggs McDonald during the opening ceremony last night.