Spaulding wrote:
I like the Lightining.
Granted I don't have the historical hockey knowledge of CH or most here but I don't get the love for the Jets right now. Til 7 or 8 years ago they were the Thrashers and 10 years previous they lost the team to the Coyotes. The Coyotes and the Thrashers are both stupid teams.
Okay, well, here's the historical hockey knowledge:
The WHA was started by the same carnies behind the ABA with roughly the same intention: to end-run the restrictive expansion policies of the NBA and NHL by competing with them and forcing a merger. The Winnipeg Jets would be one of the founding franchises of the WHA, poaching Bobby Hull from the Black Hawks by offering him a then-unheard-of million dollars a year. The Jets would go on to be the most successful team in that league, which shook up the status quo as those rival leagues tend to do: in the case of the Jets and the WHA, they extensively scouted Europe at a time when the NHL was almost exclusively North American, and Canadian at that, which brought over a lot of speed and puck possession that was lacking in the North American dump-and-chase orthodoxy.
Eventually, the WHA ran out of steam and reached its planned endgame of forcing a merger. But the crusty old NHL didn't want to add Canadian teams. What they didn't count on was Canada, led by Winnipeg, Quebec City, and Edmonton, boycotting Molson beer (owner of the Montreal Canadiens, along with the Hawks and Bruins a leading voice against admitting the WHA) until the Habs relented and let them (plus Hartford) in. Furthermore, the owner of the Oilers had Wayne Gretzky signed to a personal services contract and the only way they were getting Gretzky was with the Oilers attached. So by 1979, Winnipeg finally got in.
But once those teams finally got in, as punishment, they were fined and stripped of most of their rosters to the extent that NHL teams could claim the rights to their previous players. This knocked the shit out of the Jets, Nordiques, and Whalers -- the Oilers made it out okay because they didn't rely on veterans, I don't think -- and the Jets in their first or second NHL season would put up one of the worst records of all time. Through the '80s the Jets were a decent club, they had Dale Hawerchuk and Thomas Steen, fine players, but the playoff seeding system of the time was 1-4 by division, and the Smythe Division had THE Oilers and a loaded Flames team that was dominant in its own right. But every year, they would run headlong into the Oilers or Flames, and if they got past one (plus decent Canucks teams now and then), they never got past the other. Meanwhile, the Norris Division was a pile of shit where terrible plodding Wings/Hawks/Stars/Blues/Leafs teams would get a free pass to the third round based on who could get the fewest teeth knocked out. It was a real morale-killer, as was the old Winnipeg Arena, which by all accounts was a lousy place to go to a game.
By the '90s, player contracts were exploding, and as per NHL policy had to be paid out, then as now, in USD while revenue for the Jets was in CAD. This wouldn't be a huge problem if the Canadian dollar hadn't plummeted in the '90s, eventually down to like 63 cents. Enter the 1994-95 lockout: small-market owners (plus the large-market cheap-ass Bruins) couldn't negotiate any sort of sanity because then-new commissioner Gary Bettman was a huge fucking asshole whom no one wanted to speak to and almost killed the entire 1995 season by being such an insufferable prick. This was when Chris Chelios more or less
threatened to kill him and everyone more or less understood! Eventually, the big-market owners commandeered the negotiations and worked out a CBA that would get the league going again but fucked the small markets, and remember, they only took the WHA teams under protest, anyway. The Jets never had deep pockets; they were owned by a realtor who pretty much minded the store but never made any money on it, partly because a community organization (Manitoba Enterprises?) kept all the parking/concession money that really keeps any sort of attraction going. So to recap: salaries are going up, the Canadian dollar is going down, the arena's a dump, it makes no money, and they have no friends.
So with nothing to prevent escalating salaries and no guarantee of a new arena, the owner makes it known that he'll have to sell the team. Bettman's response is "OH NOOOOO, WHAT A SHAAAAAAME," and immediately starts brokering deals with his NBA friends to get Winnipeg out of the league once and for all. But the community stepped up to form a group that would buy the team and keep it in Winnipeg -- basically what the Packers have but with some big-money backing on top of the grassroots investors. They had big Save The Jets rallies and raised the money they needed to buy the team, but then Bettman moved the goalposts on them and said that an investment group rather than a single owner was not allowed to buy a team. The team was supposed to move to Minneapolis but the Timberwolves wouldn't let them use the Target Center (they did this to the North Stars, too), so Bettman called his old NBA friend Jerry Colangelo and had the team move to Phoenix instead, even though America West was not set up to fit a hockey rink. At least it wasn't Winnipeg.
So by 1996 the NHL was finally rid of Winnipeg (and Quebec City, then Hartford a year later; they tried to bump off Edmo for Houston but failed), the hope being that they could turn these small northern markets into big southern markets and make lots of money. Meanwhile, a couple of the Save The Jets guys bought an IHL team called the Manitoba Moose and ran it as close to an NHL team as possible, the same thing the Chicago Wolves would do while the Blackhawks were in the shitter. They built a new downtown arena to NHL-minimum specifications in 2004, just in case. And when the Coyotes went bankrupt in 2009 and had to be bought by the NHL, they made a play to buy back the old Winnipeg Jets and bring them home for the summer of 2010. It didn't work, though, because the NHL got Glendale to pay the league $25MM in "arena management fees" to keep the team, their fear being that the team was the anchor tenant of an exurban strip mall that would fail without them. (You can't make this shit up.) They were 15 minutes away from signing the papers before Glendale said they'd pay up.
The same show would play out in 2011, Winnipeg owners try to buy the Jets-turned-Coyotes, Arizona wastes taxpayer money on sports, Winnipeg is told thanks but you're not needed here. Except this time, the owners of the Atlanta Hawks, also the owners of the Thrashers, had been suing each other for years over which partners in the ownership group had the right to sign Joe Johnson to a big contract (again, can't make this shit up!), and in depleting their funds on legal fees, realized that nobody went to Thrashers games and no one made any money on them, so they told the NHL fuck it, we're not scheduling Thrashers games here in 2011-12 and beyond, even if someone here buys them, they're not playing at Philips Arena, those dates will be for other attractions. Checkmate. With the Thrashers homeless and the NHL powerless, TNSE swept in and bought the team for the low price of $110MM, which the NHL amended to $170MM as a "relocation fee" that never existed from 1995-1997 when teams were relocating
out of cities they didn't like. To give you an idea of how the NHL felt about this, there's a famous clip of Bettman at a game getting the news on his phone that the Thrashers were doomed and going into Parkinsonian trembling and quaking.
So there's a press conference in Winnipeg to announce that the NHL is coming back (yet to be named but in our hearts we knew). Up steps Gary Bettman, who says that the team must sell 13,000 season tickets in two weeks or something or else the owners will not approve the relocation to Winnipeg. They sold out in like 10 seconds.
The team, which would be named the Winnipeg Jets (also floated: Manitoba Moose, Winnipeg Falcons, Winnipeg Gold, Manitoba Polar Bears) because the NHL inherited the trademarks when they bought the Coyotes out of bankruptcy and didn't mind giving back, was of course a complete mess as an organization because the Thrashers were understaffed, undercapitalized, under-everything. It wasn't like building a team from the ground up, it was more like tearing down a dilapidated building and then building on the lot. Mostly, the team was shit, as we all know, but as they finally put the money into scouting and coaching that the Thrashers never did, they quietly hoarded picks and prospects and turned a joke of an organization into a model franchise, like their Moose had been in the I and the A. They got lucky with the draft lottery and Patrik Laine, but for the most part drafted well across the board and had a roster this year that was almost all homegrown.
So why the love for the Jets? Because Wheeler, Scheifele, Laine, Byfuglien, Ehlers, and Connor are amazing talents. Because this is a hockey-obsessed fanbase that has been absolutely shit on by the NHL as they neglect their heartland for places like Nashville and Phoenix and fucking Las Vegas. It's their game far more than it's any of those places', and yet they're expected to be a captive market with no real seat at the table unless they can rip it away from someone else. And let's be real: Winnipeg is a dismal place. It's dirty and cold and sad. It's Rockford. This is just about all they have (not counting their surprisingly elite ballet company), but it's just about all they want. They've put up with nothing but disrespect and heartbreak in hockey, and everyone craps on their city, but they keep at it. They're without question the best fans in the entire league, far better than our own here and orders of magnitude superior to any johnny-come-lately fucks in Nashville or Vegas. People who don't know shit about the inner workings of this broken toilet of a league think Vegas is an underdog. This was the real underdog. The team did everything the way an NHL team is supposed to: draft well, trade smart, play right, and deserved to be rewarded the way the Blackhawks were. I wanted the good guys to win. I guess it's not meant to be.
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