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Late afternoon, another day is nearly done. A darker grey is breaking through a lighter one. A thousand sharpened elbows in the Underground. That hollow hurried sound of feet on polished floor, and in the dollar store the clerk is closing up and counting Loonies, trying not to say "I hate Winnipeg." The driver checks the mirror seven minutes late. The crowded riders' restlessness enunciates: "the Guess Who suck, the Jets were lousy, anyway." The same route every day. And in the turning lane, someone's stalled again. He's talking to himself, and hears the price of gas repeat his phrase: "I hate Winnipeg." And up above us all, leaning into sky, our golden business boy will watch the North End die, and sing "I love this town," then let his arcing wrecking ball proclaim "I hate Winnipeg."
John K. Samson, folk-punk poet of the prairie, with my favorite song from my favorite Weakerthans album, and it pretty much sums this whole thing up.
Winnipeg fascinates me. It's a dense, multicultural city of about 750,000, surrounded by flat nothingness as far as the eye can see. Western Canada doesn't really have suburbia as we know it; Vancouver is largely hemmed in by mountains and water, while Calgary/Edmonton/Winnipeg/Saskatoon are just islands of people in seas of wheat. Winnipeg is sort of like Chicago, the great central trading post full of Germans and Eastern Europeans that grew into the Next Big City, only every time the city faced some critical juncture where things could have gone right or wrong, it always went wrong, leaving Vancouver to rise to #3 while Winnipeg jousts with Quebec City to be the nation's leading third-tier metropolis. I'd wager that this misfortune may have a little to do with the fact that their winters regularly reach negative double digits. In a sense, Winnipeg is also like Rockford writ large: everyone who's there seems to hate it and talk enormous shit about it, but if you, the outsider, dare to criticize it, they will circle the wagons and defend their humble city to the death. The people who make it out tend to come back anyway. If you've seen Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg, you know there's just a distinct weirdness about the place, somewhat akin to how the weirdness of Minneapolis-St. Paul fosters Garrison Keillor and Prince and the Coens and all their artsy types. That makes three comparisons, wow, so I guess Winnipeg is the midwestiest of the midwest.
The circumstances under which the original Jets moved are some real bullshit. In 1995, the Canadian dollar was at about 65 cents USD with no provisions in a perilously player-friendly CBA to account for the fact that Canadian teams took revenues in Canadian funds and paid expenses in American. The old Winnipeg Arena with the vertiginous upper decks and no seats in the corners was a jury-rigged cinderblock shitpile that the Jets didn't even own or operate, so they made no money on parking or concessions like the Hawks do (but claim they don't so that they "lose money"). Add to this that salaries were skyrocketing out of control, and so obviously the owner (never a rich one; I think he's a common real estate agent now) had to sell the team. But they're a hopeful bunch up there: if you're the kind of person who has tried to carve a life out of a dumpy industrial town on a freezing prairie, you probably don't give up on things easily. So in the face of certain doom, people across Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and North Dakota were able to string together a consortium that would buy the team and keep it in Winnipeg, one which spanned from captains of industry to little kids cracking open their piggy banks. This is true, I swear. But friend of the plutocracy Gary Bettman moved the goalposts on them and said they needed to have more money behind them to account for losses, and then even after seeing more money, said the NHL required one majority owner and not some misshapen patchwork of millionaires and kids. It looked like the Jets were moving to Minneapolis, but the new owners couldn't broker a deal to share the Timberwolves' building, so they got hustled off to Phoenix, where the arena floor didn't fit an ice rink, setting off a chain reaction of fuckups that continues to this day. This league sucks.
I think the Hawks came up for an exhibition or two between 2005-2011, but this is the first time since 1996 that the Hawks have been in Winnipeg to play the Jets -- or at least a franchise that does business as "the Winnipeg Jets." The Hawks played them on Chicago ice in October 2011 and defeated them soundly, but because the Jets were still playing Atlanta's schedule, there was only that one game that year, and with no interconference games on the lockout schedule, we missed them altogether last season. Realignment has the Jets "back" in the Central Division, despite the fact that they mostly used to be in the Smythe/Pacific with Los Angeles and the other three Western Canadian teams. I suppose they see Minnesota as their #2 rival, with their #1 rival being themselves.
The Jets have an array of talented forwards in Andrew Ladd, Bryan Little, Blake Wheeler, Evander Kane, Devin Setoguchi, Michael Frolik, and Dustin Byfuglien, the last of whom is under the curious misconception that he is a defenseman. The problem, as I'm sure you can see for yourself, is that this is a solar system without a sun, complementary players with no one to complement. Kane comes the closest to a game-changer, but even he falls a bit short. Mark Schiefele could be that player in a few years, but he sure isn't right now. Olli Jokinen is a textbook example of a career second-liner, a free-agent acquisition who was just about the last thing in the world they needed. At defense, they're average to begin with, but have been hampered by injury: Paul Postma has a blood clot in his leg and is out indefinitely, while Jake Trouba, who just might wind up being the best player on the team, drilled himself into the boards and hurt his neck. He's out indefinitely, too. In goal, Ondrej Pavelec is in the conversation for the worst #1 goalie in the league (though Devan Dubnyk has really asserted himself this year), while Al Montoya is a just a journeyman who couldn't hack it on bad Isles teams. Even though they look good on paper, they've only scored 32 goals in 14 games and have only won three of those games outright. This is a flawed roster under a flawed coach who might not be long for this team.
A lot of people are quick to point out the Jets' many shortcomings over the last 2+ years, with the go-to snark being that they're "the same old Atlanta Thrashers." I submit that the problem is not that they're still the Atlanta Thrashers. The problem is that they're still the Manitoba Moose. The Moose were like the Wolves in that they were sort of a Quadruple-A team that, unlike AHL teams such as the Lowell--->Albany Devils or Rockford IceHogs, was out to sell tickets and win games. The other, greater purpose of the Moose was to prove to the NHL Board of Governors that Winnipeg had the corporate and populist revenue streams to once again host the NHL, and so in many respects they ran their AHL team as if it were an NHL team. When True North bought the Thrashers, they didn't so much relocate the Thrashers organization as they gutted it and refilled it with Manitoba Moose personnel or personnel who were familiar to the Moose, and then grafted an inherited NHL roster onto that. The coach, Claude Noel, was an old Moose coach. Kevin Cheveldayoff was the old Wolves GM. The rest of the front office is just the AHL team's old front office; the Atlanta people were left behind. End result: the same people are running the same operation that was the best in the AHL but far from the best in the NHL. Maybe they're not quite ready for the big time after all.
On a positive note, however, the Jets have the backing of the richest owner in the league, also one of the richest men on the planet, and so when the cap explodes in the coming years (in large part because Canadian TV networks are now bidding on a league that features a seventh Canadian team), it's possible that he could just say "fuck it" to this puttering excuse for a rebuild and straight-up Go For It.
My loyalties are not divided today. I like Ladd, I like Buff, and I appreciate Frolik more than ever now that our kill is worthless. I don't want the Jets to win today and I don't expect them to, but I really want to see this team succeed in the long run. I want them to prove the doubters wrong who said the future of the NHL wasn't in Canada but in Houston or Kansas City, and I want them to bring some joy to a city that just gets kicked in the nuts a lot.
Jets fans can be creatively brutal to visiting teams (the sil-ver-med-al chant against Ryan Miller was great, as was Jor-dan's-bett-er against Eric Staal), but I expect them to show some respect for the native son, and hey, maybe they might do a little pregame ceremony for erstwhile Jets Ed Olczyk and Troy Murray, Olczyk in particular having a spot in Winnipeg's heart for promising them he'd bring the Cup back after the Jets moved (which I guess he did by association with Toews?). The MTS Centre is actually smaller than the Winnipeg Arena by a few hundred or so, but it gets crazy loud, and all 15,000 seats are great ones. While the Hawks should win, home ice for the Jets could be an x-factor.
Hawks: 8-2-3, 6-3-4 adjusted, 15.491 expected
Jets: 5-7-2, 3-8-3 adjusted, 11.022 expected (considerable underachieving, so beware)
Hawks: 3.308 scored (5th), 2.769 allowed (16th), 0.538 differential (10th)
Jets: 2.286 scored (23rd), 2.786 allowed (17th), -0.500 differential (21st)
Hawks: 11/50 power play (22.0%, 10th), 29/40 penalty kill (72.5%, still dead last)
Jets: 6/54 power play (11.1%, 25th), 49/59 penalty kill (83.0%, 9th) oh look who we lost and they got
Early thread for an early game, 2 p.m. on channel 9 to accommodate the CBC, who must be having a tripleheader or something. NHL Network has it, too, probably picking up the national feed over ours.
_________________ Molly Lambert wrote: The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
Last edited by Curious Hair on Fri Nov 01, 2013 11:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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