Yeah, it's cool to see Whalers stuff on the ice, it just sucks that Raleigh-based fans get to enjoy it.

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Boqvist and Zadorov specifically looked like shit. There is no saving zadorov. He is awful in every way possible and needs to go away. I am hoping Boqvist is just having a sophomore slump but he has developed some terrible tendencies. Thank god Mitchell and Beudin are the real deal. I really hope Boqvist is just being young and stupid with his decision making. Stop trying to score and stay the fuck back. He gets caught deep in the zone constantly. He should also consider never shoe string tackling a guy on a breakaway. I appreciate the effort but you just about took a blade to the face by your own doing. Stay home and that never would have been a breakaway. Those 2 should watch their ass as Regula is just a phone call and a short drive away.

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That's my purse! I don't know you!

I thought it was much earlier than 97 they switched. Seems like so long ago.

Dallas '93, Denver '95, Phoenix '96, Raleigh (first Greensboro) '97. League was on a mission to wipe out those small northern markets.

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Yeah I'd probably have flipped years for the Northstars and Whalers. I completely forgot about the Nordiques and I don't really notice the gap in the Jets much so I don't think of them.

Is there a story behind MN and Winnipeg getting teams back? More than what's googleable. I didn't pay much attention to hockey at that time other than huge stories or the year I spent invested in a boy that liked hockey during my youth.

Sure. Let's do storytime for all four:

North Stars: Despite being in the most hockey-loving state in America, the Stars didn't have the strong management out of the gate that the Blues and Flyers did, nor did they ever get a generational talent or two like the Penguins did, so they always struggled relative to their Expansion Six peers and didn't have the popularity of the U or various high school programs. They were on hard times by '78 and merged with the Cleveland Barons, nee Oakland Seals, d/b/a the Minnesota North Stars but under Barons' ownership. By the end of the '80s, the Gunds (as in Gund Arena) wanted to move the Barons-Stars franchise back to the Bay Area, but the league wasn't keen on losing the Twin Cities. The compromise was that the franchise would de-merge and split the roster in half for 91-92, with the Gund franchise continuing as the San Jose Sharks while local ownership kept the North Stars going. Local ownership never happened and it ended up being a guy from the Flames' consortium named Norm Green.

Green wanted to get out of the Met Center, which was a slapped-up '60s construction in the burbs (it was right by the Mall of America), but the government wouldn't build him a new place and he couldn't move to the then-new Target Center in Minneapolis because the Timberwolves controlled the building and all its ancillary revenue streams, down to being a Pepsi building instead of a Coke building or vice-versa. While the state and Stars were at this impasse, Norm was putting his dick where it wasn't supposed to be and his wife demanded he get out of town. The target (npi) was the new arena coming up in Anaheim, where they'd become the Los Angeles Stars. Problem was, the L.A. Kings were brokering an expansion deal whereby Disney would get an expansion team and then immediately pay a encroachment fee to the Kings, so the league's power brokers basically told Green to go anywhere else and let them get their Disney money, so Dallas it was. As they feared all along, leaving Minnesota was a p.r. disaster for the National Hockey League, so the wheels immediately started turning on shutting up the T-Wolves and moving the Winnipeg Jets to Minneapolis (more on that later). The state got to work on building a new arena in St. Paul, bypassing the T-Wolves issues, and the league quickly approved expansion in '97 for 2000.

Nordiques: While the Stars underachieved relative to the popularity of the sport itself in the market, Quebec City always did great at the gate. They had legendary players and the rivalry with the Habs got everyone worked into a froth. Even when they put out an all-time bad team in '90, attendance was good. The problem was that the Habs, through Molson, controlled a lot of the NHL's broadcasting contracts, and pretty much kept the Nords, owned by a competing brewery, off Hockey Night in Canada out of spite. Quebec City is a lot smaller than Montreal, and while the Nords made some inroads in the Maritimes as the easternmost team in the league, they never really had a huge English-speaking fanbase.

The Colisee de Quebec was a 50-year-old jury-rigging of expansions and renovations, yet still had no air conditioning, not that the fans minded much, since they still put about 15,000 in there a night. At the same time, the province was strapped for cash and the Canadian dollar was at ~$.63 USD, which was disastrous when all player salaries had to be paid in American funds. Also, there was the small matter of the province attempting to secede from Canada (it failed and they blamed it on the Jews). With no taxpayer money coming to replace the Colisee and Gary Bettman's failure to get a salary cap in Lockout 1, the owners sold to the Denver Nuggets and the NHL rubber-stamped it. The league never wanted to be in Quebec City in the first place and only got roped into it as a package deal with Edmonton. Quebec finally did replace the Colisee in 2015 and made a play to buy the Coyotes before that, but the league shut them down. They applied for expansion alongside Las Vegas but the league rejected their bid and held off on awarding it until Seattle got their shit together instead. I'd keep an eye on them anyway.

Jets: Second verse, same as the first: the Winnipeg Arena was a piece of shit, the Canadian dollar was weak, player salaries were skyrocketing, and other owners didn't like them. Unlike the Nordiques, the Jets didn't pack the joint night-in-night-out -- I suspect there was a sense of learned helplessness that set in from years of getting fed to Edmonton and Calgary every season. But when the owner, not even a major corporation but just A Guy, said he was selling the team to businessmen from Minneapolis, everyone in Winnipeg lost their shit about it and did everything they could to stop the team from moving south (even though I think the new owners said they'd play a game or two there each year). They had rallies. They raised money. Kids emptied out their piggy banks. They were a hairsbreadth from setting up a Green Bay Packers system whereby the community would own the team as a not-for-profit until Gary Bettman moved the goalposts and decided that wasn't permissible, again, because the league never wanted to be there anyway. They were supposed to move for '95 but all this commotion bought them an extra year, during which time the new owners found out they couldn't share the Target Center. Sensing a real problem where the Jets couldn't go to the Cities but no single benefactor could buy them and keep them in Winnipeg, NBA Guy Gary Bettman called in a favor with Jerry Colangelo and sent the Minneapolis guys to Phoenix to play as a tenant of the Suns for 96-97. The arena floor was too small to fit a 200'x85' rink, but hey, they'd make it work, right?

They didn't make it work. America West sucked for hockey and the team started looking for a new arena in the suburbs. The Minneapolis guys went broke on the Coyotes and were about ready to give up and sell to Paul Allen, where they'd move in with the Trail Blazers up in Portland, but then a developer bought the team to use as an anchor tenant for a new strip mall. Problem was, the strip mall would be in Glendale, opposite all the rich transplants east of Phoenix. The developer also went broke on the Coyotes and sold to a guy who owns a trucking company. He too went broke owning the Coyotes by 2009 and tried to sell them to the CEO of Blackberry, who would move the team to Hamilton. This guy had tried to move the Penguins and Predators up there and was smacked away both times, so the play was to declare bankruptcy and have Blackberry buy the team out of bankruptcy so that the league couldn't vote no on the sale. This put every North American league on DEFCON1 because it would set a precedent whereby the cartels could not determine their members anymore, so the league bought the Coyotes and ran them while trying to find new ownership. They couldn't, because every prospective owner (including JERRY) was basically asking to get the team for free because they were in so much debt. One group had the idea to outsource all their Nucks/Flames/Oilers home games to Saskatoon.

A group called True North Sports & Entertainment had since demolished and replaced the Winnipeg Arena and had been running an IHL/AHL team called the Moose as practice for getting Winnipeg back into the NHL. They were like the Wolves here, where they were not quite an NHL team but operated themselves a cut above most minor-league clubs. The money behind the group is a guy named David Thomson, as in Thomson-Reuters, a giant media conglomerate. As the Coyotes situation seemed to have no end in sight, they got in touch with the league to buy back the Coyotes and move them back to Winnipeg. This was not ideal, but they did have a billionaire backer, a new arena albeit on the small side, and it would be good for business north of the border, where the Canadian dollar was back around par. With all the documents just about drawn up, the NHL made one last-ditch offer to Glendale: the team will stay if you insure our risk by paying us $25 million.

Those stupid motherfuckers gave the NHL $25 million! They were setting up the press conference in Winnipeg to announce the sale when they got word at the last minute (well, it was like 10 or 15) that the Coyotes would stay for 2010-11. Everyone was sad, but then the whole thing played out again the next season. Once again, the NHL was losing money on the Coyotes and no one would buy the team except for the people in Winnipeg. Once again, same offer: we can stay one more year, but you'll have to give us $25 million.

THOSE DUMB FUCKING RUBES GAVE THEM THE MONEY AGAIN!!! The state that gave us Barry Goldwater couldn't stop bailing out a frivolous and failing private enterprise. Once again, the NHL screwed Winnipeg to protect Phoenix and the Coyotes would stay put under league ownership for 11-12.

However, around the same time, things went tits-up with the Atlanta Thrashers. The Thrashers were a throw-in for the Atlanta Hawks and their arena when a bunch of basketball nerds bought the team from AOL Time Warner, which was getting out of the sports business. They never got along and were all suing each other over whether the Hawks should have signed Joe Johnson. It was stupid. Trying to make some money on this operation, they crunched the numbers and realized that as arena controllers, they'd come out ahead if they took 41+ Thrashers dates off the calendar and replaced them with concerts and stuff. So that's exactly what they did: Thrashers ownership essentially evicted itself. This was a serious problem for the league, because while they had the arena to manage the Phoenix situation, the Thrashers had nowhere in Atlanta to play. That was it. The Hawks weren't going to let them use the building anymore. After breathing a sigh of relief that the stupid Arizona hicks kept giving them money, they gave True North the go-ahead to buy the Thrashers and put that fire out nice and easy. The Thrashers weren't very popular and no one put up a fight. Winnipeg got a team, if not its original team, and had a huge party downtown. On-ice results have been mixed but they've been a financial success ever since and punched well above their weight as a market of ~750,000. Meanwhile, the Coyotes went through three more ownership groups and they're falling apart again. Houston? Austin? Quebec City?

I can do Hartford later, that one kinda got away from me

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Christ, the Wild have been around for 20 years already?!

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Yep. 21 (-1) unremarkable years. Their crowning achievement is making the conference final in their third season on a $30MM payroll only to get skulled by Giguere.

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tl;dr

Kidding!!!! Thanks a bunch. Very informative and fun to read. I really like knowing the history and hockey seems to have great stories. I've always loved your hawkey talk, even when you bagged on the Blackhawks. Funny you don't do that much anymore.

My dad has told me a lot up to about late 80s/early 90s then he got away from it so 90s-2010 isn't clear for me.

Thrashers always seemed dumb. Just made no sense.

You play? How are you/did you get so into it?

Blackhawks memorabilia (stick signed by Savard, Magnuson, et al) was the only kind we had in the house when I was a kid, and then I got into the video games. For some reason, we played a lot of floor hockey in grade school gym class, and a game where I could just run back and forth without having to think much was a lot of fun for me. (The other thing we did a lot in grade school gym class was do step aerobics to "Mr. Vain" by Culture Beat, but that's a story for another day.) I was a fourth-line grinder without even knowing it.

I lost interest when I moved to Wisconsin but picked it back up in the spring of '02, just in time to find out that my favorite player Chris Chelios was now a Red Wing. I lost interest again after Lockout 2 but perked back up when I heard that the Hawks named Denis Savard their coach.

Yeah, this league is a shitshow on the business side and always has been. Too many stubborn old guys with a staggering lack of foresight. For all the shit Bill Wirtz gets about TV, Canadian teams didn't figure out year-round local TV until like 1998. The Senators were running games on closed-circuit in movie theaters. Amateur hour.


Ted Turner wanted an NHL team, so he got one. That's about the long and short of it. Problem was Turner Broadcasting got the team just in time for Time Warner to start taking Ted out of the picture, and in a few years the Braves, Hawks, and Thrashers were all sold off. Fox was very insistent upon adding Atlanta to the league for national TV purposes (I'm pretty sure southern Fox affiliates were choosing not to clear the NHL), but Fox had lost the rights by '99.

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They miss Murphy a lot. If they had to play Delia at goalie they'd be getting torched even more.

Hopefully the players can do some self-scouting and get some rest.

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"When people want their version of the truth, they go find it, no matter how baseless their beliefs." -- Ken Rosenthal

Speaking of high school floor hockey, did you guy use those plastic sticks that would break? Sample image below. In any case, we would start the floor hockey module and play five on five and then a goalie on each side. By the end of the week, the sticks would be broken that it ended up being one on one with a goalie on each side.

My favorite goalie was this Japanese American kid named Takeake Fuji (first name rhymes with hockey). He used a stack the pads flop all over the place the style. He was fantastic.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

Kane now has 30 points in 20 games this season.

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Lay off that whiskey and let that cocaine be.

Game tonight but that's not why I called!

I haven't noticed any fans in the rinks yet but are some cities going to start doing that? Tickets on some sites are up for march and all I can find is "hoping" to have fans. Anybody heard anything or know anything?

Nationwide is opening on March 2 at 10% capacity (1900) for the Jacket.

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Not a mult.

Pens starting soon. Want to say I heard 25%.

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Elections have consequences.

I will probably have to go to away games for the next 3 or so years though.

Hawk don't play Pens this year.

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Elections have consequences.

There were a few down in Dallas I think.

Hawks win again!

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Subban with the shutout!

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"When people want their version of the truth, they go find it, no matter how baseless their beliefs." -- Ken Rosenthal

Even the fucking Leafs were only televised on Saturday nights by CBC into the 90's, right? I also remember hearing about other teams doing Hawkvision style pay per view then.

Wouldn't Quebec have gotten a taxpayer funded new arena if their bid for the 2002 Olympics went through? When the IOC awarded those games to Salt Lake City that was the end of that.

Only the NHL would have passed over Houston for Hartford when they picked which WHA teams to take in. They never had a chance being a small market that close to NYC and Boston. It'd be like if the NFL put a team in Toledo.

The Leafs had small packages of games on CHCH and Global, and TSN picked them up for national games a lot, but the Canadian teams didn't have anything approaching full local TV deals until 1998. 1998! Like Bill Wirtz, they all lived in fear that putting games on TV would hurt attendance. Unlike Bill Wirtz, they got over it.

Some teams had pay-per-view for a long time, with the Canadian teams holding on the longest, but the most common model stateside was to have the road games on free TV and the home games on premium-tier cable: NESN, PRISM in Philadelphia, PASS in Detroit, MSC in the Cities. Eventually, those teams split the difference and put all the games on basic cable.



They probably would have gotten a new arena, but given how grim the prospects of the NHL ever coming back north would have been at the go-go turn of the millennium, it probably would have been a smaller building more fit for major-junior than the NHL (which, given the way the NHL fucked Quebec over in 2015, may have been the better play). Quebec's best shot was probably in 2011: if Glendale hadn't approved the bailout for the Coyotes, Winnipeg would have scooped them back up and left the Thrashers with nowhere to go, but Quebecor didn't really have its shit together on a new arena at the time, and the NHL may have sooner played a season with 29 teams than let Quebec catch them in a pincer attack.

I disagree on the Whalers. Proximity should have worked in their favor -- I think having Boston, Hartford, New York, Long Island, New Jersey, and Philadelphia all in one cluster was some good familiarity-breeds-contempt stuff. Rivalries are better when teams are close, which is why, annoying as they are, it's forever hard to get too worked up about Nashville. The only catch is that it takes some work on the marketing side to really gin it up, and marketing has always been a problem for this league. The Devils under Lamoriello didn't even believe in having a marketing department -- maybe they had one in name, but their organizational philosophy was always that people would come out to watch a winning team and that was all that was necessary (SPOILER: it wasn't). But really cementing the NHL as a distinctly Northeast Corridor passion, not unlike Bruce Springsteen and Grateful Dead concerts, was something no one really wanted to do the heavy lifting on. Hockey is great, but it still doesn't sell itself. The NBA recognized that with basketball.


The Whalers, with savvy marketing, could have functioned not as inconveniently located between New York and Boston but rather as New England's second team, kind of an offbeat, White Sox-y Team For The Rest Of Us given how many people were constantly aggrieved with the bumbling management of the Rangers and Bruins (to say nothing of the Isles). Their games aired throughout New England on SportsChannel, which they shared with the Celtics, but they never seemed to try to make inroads beyond Hartford, New Haven, and Springfield Mass. (I will say that the one thing that hurt them in this respect is that Fairfield County CT has always been marked down as New York RSN territory, which took Connecticut's most populous county off the board for Connecticut's team, unless they could pull down over-the-air games from the station in New Haven.) By the time Karmanos got his grubby hands on the Whalers, there was never any intent to ambitiously market the team -- if anything, he was trying to tank the market so that he could move the team to the Palace of Auburn Hills and continue his feud with Mike Ilitch. Obviously, this was the one relocation the '90s NHL would stand in the way of. To prove my point, the Carolina Hurricanes today have become what I always thought the Whalers could be: the quirky Meme Team for pretentious little shits who think they know more about hockey than anyone else, except that in New England, there would have been half a chance that the pretentious little shits were actually right. They also needed a new arena: the Civic Center was a dump from day one, and Hartford by the '90s was pretty bombed out. As it did in Columbus, a new Whalers/UConn arena on the riverfront would have been a rare case of a sports development actually helping downtown, but the state had a pipe dream of luring the Patriots and let the Whalers go partly in service of that.

As for the Aeros, I think they were out of business by the time the merger came around. The league got burned bad on Oakland and Atlanta and probably didn't want strike three. If I remember correctly, the only WHA team the league really wanted was Edmonton, and it was only because Canadians organized a boycott of Molson (owner of the Canadiens, who were gumming it up) that all three Canadian teams got in, and Hartford had enough star power to be tolerated. I'm not bullish on Houston as an NHL market today. Take everything that made Atlanta fool's gold for the NHL -- the high transplant population, poor public transit to the arena, a large non-white population, hockey fans who live in low-density sprawl far, far away from the arena -- and multiply it by three.

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Yeah, I remember reading about the Molson boycott and other stuff surrounding that round of expansion in Gil Stein's book, which is worth a read even if you have to take everything he says with 6000 grains of salt. He also covered Ralston Purina attempting to sell the Blues to Saskatoon interests in 1983 and then abandoning the franchise and suing the shit out of the NHL when the league blocked the sale and move.

You're probably right about Houston now, although Houston is a better sports town than Atlanta generally. Then again, so is Kabul.

The Blues just took the '83 draft off. Skipped the whole thing. This league has always been such a shitshow on the business end.

Houston almost got the Oilers (funny coincidence) in '98, which would have made a WHA relocation superfecta, but that was finally the point where the league let like 20 guys pool up money and buy the team. Definitely the right move, even if it took a while to replace the Northlands.

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CH, have you ever read Terry Pluto's book about the ABA called Loose Balls? it's a fun, interesting read. I could see you writing a similar book about the NHL, which sounds like has been and still is almost as crazily run as the ABA was.

400 for Kane, in a blowout. Red Wings suck ass.

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"When people want their version of the truth, they go find it, no matter how baseless their beliefs." -- Ken Rosenthal

I'm familiar with it, but I've never tracked it down! I'd love to. Interestingly, the investors who started the ABA also started the WHA (and for both, the business model was always not to compete with but to be absorbed by the senior circuit). How damning of the NHL that they're the ones so close to the ABA.

I think Down Goes Brown already wrote a book about the NHL's ownership capers. And someone actually wrote a book about the '96 Islanders and how the Fishsticks logo sent the entire organization into disarray. It's so frustrating how much bigger and better the NHL could have been if the league had ever seen itself as true stewards of the game and not just guys selling marked-up beer.

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