To be made official tomorrow afternoon. All four Detroit teams will now be within a 2,000-foot radius of Grand Circus Park, the center of downtown Detroit. That's a luxury you get when there's shit else downtown, I guess. The city and/or state had to pay for the Wings' new place, so at least having two anchor tenants should help them pay off their corporate welfare a little faster.
The Palace of Auburn Hills is interesting, or as interesting as an exurban indoor sports/music facility can be, because it had the same game-changing effect than Camden Yards did on baseball stadiums: suddenly, the old way of doing things wasn't enough, and now everyone had to have tons of luxury suites and seating up into the 19,000s to 21,000s (even if it was a bad idea: Ottawa's arena is also about 25 miles out of town and is almost the exact same building as the Palace, but Ottawa never grew into needing the giant suburban arena the way people thought it would, and now they're moving back downtown too). Because the Pistons owner paid for it out of pocket, they've always kept the joint in great condition while teams on the ol' master-lease-under-government-ownership scam let their buildings go to shit so they can ask for new ones. (You could say the same for the United Center.) It's only about 30 years old and could have lasted another 30, but the Pistons must be confident enough in Detroit's urban renewal that they'd rather be a tenant downtown than an owner in the burbs.
One last interesting note about the Palace: greater Detroit almost became a two-team NHL town in the late '90s when Peter Karmanos tried to move the Hartford Whalers to Auburn Hills to compete with the Red Wings. (The IHL's Detroit Vipers played in Auburn Hills at the time and had a cozy little Chicago Wolves thing going for themselves, by all accounts.) The Pistons were cool with bringing the Whalers in but Mike Ilitch lost his shit and made Gary Bettman block it. Once the Karmanos team wound up in Greensboro instead, they stuck it to Ilitch by offer-sheeting Sergei Fedorov with some ridiculous contract where whoever signed him would have to pay him $26MM up front. The Wings matched it and won two more Cups in five years with him. Would Detroit have been able to support two NHL teams? I'm guessing not. Would it have been an awesome mess? I think so.
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Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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