Punk in Finland

Pittsburgh tykkää palkata pakkeja, jotka ärsyttää kiekkofaneja internetsissä: Cody Ceci sai vuoden mittaisen sopparin Penguinsiin

SS Benning wrote: ↑

17 Oct 2020, 20:31

Pittsburgh tykkää palkata pakkeja, jotka ärsyttää kiekkofaneja internetsissä: Cody Ceci sai vuoden mittaisen sopparin Penguinsiin

Jim Rutherfordilla on joko jonkin sortin dementia, tai sitten vuosikymmenien kokaainin veto on vienyt Hall of Fame-mieheltä mielenterveyden. Käsittämätöntä touhua jo useamman vuoden.

Tää aivan paskojen "puolustavien" pakkien palkkaaminen on kyllä pitkälti koko liigaa koskeva ongelma.

Vähän yllätti tuo Nolan Patrickin minimisoppari, mutta jotenkin oli mennyt ohi tuo kauden skippaaminen migreenin takia. Kyseessä kuitenkin 2017 kakkosvaraus. Ikävää, jos ura loppuu lyhyeen.

Matt Grzelcyk seuraavat 4 vuotta Bostonissa. Toivottavasti vastuun myötä otteet paranee entisestään. Top 3 pakkia ja top 6 laituria sinne vielä kaivattaisi. Noi kaset ja vastaavat on turhan arpoja.

Jayce Hawryluk ja Adam Gaudette alle miljoonan sopimuksella vuodeksi Canucksiin. Hyvää mieltä!

Hyvästi Hawk. Kunnon hustle pelaaja mutta klesana harmittavan usein

Onnistuisiko joltain Athleticin tunnukset omaavalta kopsata tämä juttu tänne https://theathletic.com/1687492/2020/03 ... nhl-teams/

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Duhatschek: If you started from scratch, which 32 cities would get NHL teams?

Back around 1983 or ’84, when Bob Johnson was coaching the Calgary Flames, he had a fascination with the city of Phoenix. He liked it for the climate, the warmth and the geography. Once or twice a year, Badger Bob would come up to me and George Johnson, my writing counterpart at the Calgary Sun – and in that big, booming theatrical voice of his, would loudly predict that one day, there’d be an NHL team in Phoenix. Badger would then lean in close and – in a much lower voice – predict that he would coach the team and that he intended to bring George and me along as his writers. Usually, that would be our cue. The three of us would howl like the witches at the start of Macbeth, before collectively bursting out in laughter at the absurdity of the notion.

An NHL team in Phoenix? Dream on. And then we’d go back to our regularly scheduled business, trudging through a cold northern winter in a traditional hockey city.

Well, you know the rest of the story. Five years after Johnson’s death in 1991, Barry Shenkarow sold the Winnipeg Jets and – against all odds – they did relocate to Arizona.

For better, but mostly for worse, there has now been an NHL team in Phoenix for going on 25 years.

A handful of times during their stay in the Valley of The Sun, it looked as if the Coyotes might disappear – either into bankruptcy or via relocation to another market. So far, that hasn’t happened. In recent years, they’ve become far better capitalized and although attendance still isn’t what they need it to be to sustain the franchise long term, the hope is that an improving team operating in a new arena eventually might make the Coyotes a more viable franchise than they are today.

Because, right now, if you were to rank NHL franchises from 1-to-32 in terms of financial feasibility, the Coyotes would be near the bottom – one of the teams that rely on revenue sharing from the stronger teams to survive.

Accordingly, with the actual NHL on pause at the moment as a result of the coronavirus – and all of us diving down the rabbit hole of “what if” scenarios – the question came up here at The Athletic:

What if the NHL were to start from scratch right here and right now?

Where would you place the franchises to make the league as strong – and sound – as possible?

It’s an intriguing exercise, even if it means you’re going to become public enemy No. 1 in all markets that are – hypothetically – about to lose their franchises. Please remember, before you scroll down to the bottom and “meh” the story, this is a dream sequence only.

Real-world economics will ultimately decide which teams survive and which don’t, and as long as there is a well-heeled owner with a good financial plan who is willing to take advantage of the rules and regulations that support the so-called smaller markets, any team can survive.

And by the way, all of you soon-to-be-unhappy fans in Phoenix and Ottawa and New Jersey and Anaheim are going to have an unlikely ally to help you vent your collective displeasure at me: NHL commissioner Gary Bettman.

Let’s face it: No one has fought longer or harder than Bettman to sustain NHL businesses in their current markets – even if it’s meant a lot of investors have poured a lot of dollars down the drain, trying to make the numbers work in cities that annually feature too many empty seats. Watch to see if Gary B. offers a comment below (or if he doesn’t, try to guess which of the negative responses came from Bettman’s The Athletic burner account).

Before we go any further, I also want to first address – and then dismiss – the idea that if you could pick 32 cities to build an NHL, they wouldn’t all necessarily have to be in Canada and the United States.

Or to put it another way, if it’s a blue-sky exercise anyway, is this the time to ruthlessly pare down the North American content of the league and put half-a-dozen teams in some of the great cities of Europe or Asia?

Last year, I did explore that option in greater detail, trying to imagine that the NHL might look like in 2067. Logically, by then, the NHL will be a worldwide brand and there could be three separate but linked entities operating under the NHL brand – NHL North America, NHL Europe and NHL Asia. Each could play mostly within its own geographic region, but every year, make a swing through a different continent – in much the same way as teams play exhibition games in China or regular season games in selected European markets. Globalization is probably coming to the NHL eventually but in 2020? No. The complications would be far too great.

One final caveat before we get underway:

The longer I weighed the pros and cons of every current NHL market, the more I realized that the process of natural selection hasn’t done too bad a job with the current incarnation of the league. Once I dismissed the European option and started to dig more deeply into NHL markets that would be workable options for the ones that are floundering today, I made fewer changes than I originally anticipated.

Let’s begin at an unexpected point, with a team – the Seattle something-or-others – that won’t even begin play until the start of the 2021-22 season. Officially, Seattle was added as an NHL expansion franchise in December 2018, after agreeing to pay a record $650 million fee to join as franchise No. 32.

When season tickets went on sale, they were snapped up instantly. Seattle’s going into a new building, has a long history with hockey and looks as if the new team will instantly become one of the strongest franchises in the league. So, Seattle stays. The same holds true for Vegas. The Golden Knights are only three years into their incarnation and even the naysayers who thought they had no shot at being a viable franchise must realize the error of their ways.

Instead, the Knights have been spectacular at the box office, they are well-financed and have been an overwhelming success story – finding traction in the community, in addition to becoming a popular vacation destination for hockey fans around North America.

Overall, I estimate roughly three-quarters of the league is solid and stable in the markets they’re in.

The Original Six would naturally stay.

Every Canadian market except Ottawa is strong, year after year. Several teams that went into non-traditional markets have done an excellent job of becoming part of the fabric of their communities – Nashville and Tampa Bay are two that really stand out.

But there are also problem spots. If you review attendance data over the past 10 years or so, a handful of teams are perpetually in the bottom third. Now, over time, teams have become far less reliant on box-office receipts than they once were, but ticket sales still make up a big part of the revenue stream that teams rely upon. Softness at the box office is one red flag. Perpetually siphoning dollars out of the revenue-sharing pot is another. Once I weighed the pros and cons of each team individually, I identified eight that I considered on the bubble. They were: Ottawa, Arizona, Florida, the New York Islanders, New Jersey, Anaheim, Carolina and Columbus.

Over the years, what you find when parsing attendance data is that often, in the struggling markets, a team’s popularity tends to ebb and flow, depending upon results.

Carolina, for example, was having a decent year at the box office in 2019-20 because the so-called “bunch of jerks” had captured everyone’s imagination the season before, first, by qualifying for the playoffs and then by advancing to the conference final. Carolina’s been able to slowly rebuild its fan base in the community, largely because of that result. A deeper look back paints a different picture – and also explains why, for the longest time, Peter Karmanos Jr. was looking for an investor in his franchise. Then Tom Dundon came along and things are improving. But are they solved? The jury’s out.

Perhaps not coincidentally, three of the eight bubble teams are in markets where a more established team dominates. For example, the Rangers are bulletproof in New York, while the Islanders and Devils can see their attendance figures wax and wane. Both teams do have small and extremely loyal fan bases, but it hasn’t translated into full houses in either of their locations – and things have been far more complicated with the Islanders recently, as they’ve shuttled back and forth between a building in Brooklyn and one on Long Island.

It’s a similar story in the greater Los Angeles area, where the Kings are a well-established franchise operating out of Staples Center while the Ducks are out in Anaheim, playing to a smaller core group of fans in Orange County. In terms of performance in the standings, the Ducks have been surprisingly consistent – the No. 1 team in the Pacific for five consecutive seasons, beginning in 2012-13 and ending in 2016-17. Last year was the first year they missed the playoffs since the 2011-12 season. It wasn’t Detroit’s incredible streak of postseason appearances, or even San Jose’s, but it was pretty good. However, you have started to see more empty seats as the Ducks start down a rebuilding path.

One of the great conundrums in the current composition of the NHL is: Why does the metropolitan New York area have three teams, the metropolitan Los Angeles area have two teams and the metropolitan Toronto area just one? It makes no sense. And longtime readers will soon notice me jumping aboard a familiar soapbox here. Wikipedia will tell you that the urban area in southern Ontario known as the Golden Horseshoe (which circles the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario) has a core population of 7.8 million people and a total of 9.2 million people in its greater area. That’s a little more than 21 percent of the entire population of Canada.

People sometimes mockingly call Toronto the centre of the hockey universe, but there is no disputing the fact the city and its immediate environs boast the largest concentration of population in a hockey-mad country. Toronto has suffered through lots more bad times than good on the ice since last winning the Stanley Cup in 1967, but the Maple Leafs brand is extremely strong – and in terms of financial strength, the franchise is one of, if not the best, in the NHL.

In short, this is a market that’s vastly underserved and could easily sustain a second team.

Now, here’s the age-old question: Are people in the Greater Toronto Area hockey fans? Or simply Leafs fans? Asking that question always gets me in trouble – but it really would be the ultimate litmus test of whether a second team in the market would struggle or take off.

I believe it would take off – for a few different reasons. One: Not everybody in the Toronto area loves the Leafs. Some actually find their arrogance a little hard to swallow. In the same way that not every New Yorker is a fan of the Yankees – and that the Mets have built a pretty good brand as an option or alternative – the same could happen in Toronto. Now, where does this proposed second team play? In an arena on the edges of town – Mississauga or in Vaughan, which is west and north? No: Put them in Scotiabank Arena as a shared tenant with the Leafs, in the same way multiple professional teams (the NHL’s Kings, NBA’s Clippers and Lakers and the WNBA’s Sparks) operate successfully out of Staples Center in Los Angeles.

The location is too perfect to waste – downtown and great access via public transportation. And as busy as Scotiabank Arena is, 45 extra dates to go alongside the Leafs and NBA’s Raptors would be doable. Now I briefly considered putting that second Toronto team in Hamilton, which was an option back in the early 1990s, when Ottawa was originally admitted to the league.

In theory, Hamilton could draw from a variety of bedroom communities in the general area. But I wonder if a team there might also cannibalize some of the support that Buffalo as a border city enjoys, drawing Canadian supporters from the other side of the Peace Bridge. I’d be reluctant to damage a viable franchise in Buffalo and I cannot see putting four franchises – two in Toronto, one in Hamilton and one in Buffalo – in such a concentrated area. Instead, what I would do is shift Ottawa to Quebec and relocate one of the weaker U.S. franchises to Toronto. That would give Canada eight of the 32 teams.

Some of you suspicious sorts might believe that I’m making the case for Quebec only because I want to start dining at La Maison de Serge Bruyere again. You are so mistaken!

Remember, when the NHL started soliciting expansion bids in July 2015, it received 16 expressions of interest, but only two bona fide applications: One from Vegas and the other from Quebec City. The league accepted Vegas and rejected Quebec City. Officially, there was all kinds of blather about why they said no, but really it came down to money. Deep down, they didn’t think a franchise in Quebec City could be financially sustainable based on what the league was charging for entry – $500 million U.S., which translated into almost $700 million Canadian, with the currency exchange.

The Jets paid a fraction of that to get into the NHL after True North Sports & Entertainment purchased and then relocated the failing Thrashers from Atlanta to Winnipeg. The fan support has been remarkable – the Jets finally had a game this season which didn’t sell out. The building is small but it still fills up. By maximizing revenues, the Jets can provide a reasonable return on the investment there. But they are doing just OK on the ledger sheet – not wowing anyone.

If Quebec had to pay twice as much or more to get in, logically, they might struggle to operate in the black – even if the bidder, Quebecor Inc., was a media giant that spun off a lot of cash flow. Otherwise, though, Quebec checks all the same boxes as Winnipeg did. It probably has a better building and a similar history of fervent fan support, dating back to its previous NHL and WHA incarnations. If Quebec had been able to land a franchise via relocation at the same price and at the same time as Winnipeg did, it could easily have been just as successful. In my model, Quebec is back in.

Next step: Other than Seattle, which is on its way, is there another city or two in the United States where you’d put a franchise if you could? Houston is the easy obvious first answer. The fourth-largest city in the U.S., a major television market, with a history of minor-league hockey and a natural regional rival for Dallas. Minor hockey has had a remarkably successful run in tiny enclaves in Texas, so there is a reasonable argument to be made for giving Houston a franchise. The fact is, a lot of us believe if Arizona doesn’t get its building issue resolved, that’s where the Coyotes might end up anyway. For this model, rather than wait, let’s move them now.

Just four places down from Houston on the list of most populous U.S. cities, you find San Diego, home to the Ducks’ main minor-league affiliate, the Gulls of the AHL. The Gulls play at the Pechanga Arena, with a capacity of 12,920 for hockey. If we could wave a magic wand and solve the building issue, wouldn’t it make sense to flip the two? Put the NHL team in San Diego, which also has a rich minor-hockey history, and put the farm team in Orange County. It would certainly help fill in Bettman’s geographic footprint and there’s an opportunity for growth with the recent departure of the NFL from the market. Again – all you suspicious types – if you think I’m a fan of San Diego just because I want to sample the lobster roll at Tidal, you are mistaken!

OK, let’s pause here to do the arithmetic so far: We’ve moved Ottawa to Quebec, Arizona to Houston, Anaheim to San Diego and we’ve put the second team in Toronto, which means someone else is losing their franchise. But who? If you had to vote among the five remaining bubble teams – Devils, Islanders, Panthers, Blue Jackets and Hurricanes – which one draws the short straw?

It’s time now to think of it as “Survivor” in reverse and I’m awarding the Islanders a win in the first immunity challenge. They’re on their way back, I believe, and once they get the arena sorted out, they’ll be fine. Columbus? The Blue Jackets fans proved during last year’s playoff run – and the patience they’ve demonstrated with this year’s no-name, hard-working bunch – that hockey has a home in Columbus. They’re safe too.

It leaves three: Devils, Panthers and Hurricanes.

I briefly considered the possibility of putting one of the three in Kansas City because there is a building there, needing a tenant. Right at the moment, the hockey option in Kansas City is an ECHL team, the Kansas City Mavericks. Kansas City had a brief life as NHL franchise, joining the league in 1973-74, alongside the Washington Capitals.

But while the Caps survived, Kansas City moved to Denver to become the Colorado Rockies and then subsequently shifted to New Jersey to become the Devils. It’s been a rough ride for the Devils at the box office ever since. Can they survive? Any team, properly funded, can. But should they survive, at the expense of either Florida or Carolina?

Whenever there was talk of the Panthers possibly pulling up stakes – and maybe moving to Quebec – people would remind you that there’s a favourable lease deal in place in Sunrise, which helps mitigate some of the losses. For the purposes of this exercise, lease deals don’t matter.

But what I do believe is that if the Panthers were operating out of a downtown Miami arena, it would be a different story. I was actually in the building the day the ‘rat craze’ started – Oct. 8, 1995, a game in which Florida defeated the Calgary Flames 4-3 in their opening game of the 1995-96 season. That day, Panthers forward Scott Mellanby killed a rat with his stick prior to the game and then used the same stick to score two goals in the win. After the game, goaltender John Vanbiesbrouck dubbed it a “rat trick” – which started the tradition of plastic rats raining down on the ice whenever a Panthers player would score during their unexpected run to the 1996 Stanley Cup final.

The franchise hasn’t been able to duplicate that success since then, but the memory of that partisan fan support makes me believe that if the team was operating out of downtown again, it would have a far wider appeal than being stranded out in Sunrise.

So, Florida survives, but in Miami, not Sunrise. And I’m going to give Dundon the benefit of the doubt in Carolina because he is a disrupter and the world seems to favour that brand of entrepreneurship these days. Initially, when I started this exercise, I probably had Carolina losing its team. But once I started shuffling the pieces around, I ultimately decided to give them a reprieve. That means New Jersey moves north to become the second team in the Toronto area.

What the exercise demonstrated to me is that the NHL franchise base doesn’t actually need major surgery, even if you could start over from scratch – and that natural selection has mostly put the teams in the markets where they belong.

The one thing that I would change for sure is the division names.

In our new NHL world, we would either go back to historical names of the past (Adams, Patrick, Norris, Smythe) or switch to iconic names of a more recent era, in which case the Adams would become the Orr (for Bobby) the Patrick the Lemieux (for Mario) the Smythe the Gretzky (for Wayne) and the Norris the Howe (for Gordie – and as a nod to our new entry from Houston, where Howe played for the WHA Aeros). I could also be coaxed into renaming the Norris for the Hull (because Bobby was the face of the Blackhawks franchise for so long and Brett was the face of the Blues. Ultimately, here’s what the 32-team NHL might look like it if started over today:

Helvetti, ehdit minuutin aikaisemmin ruokatauko meni nyt ihan hukkaan ja kaikki pilalla,,

Tietysti olen puolueellinen, mutta onpa tyhmä valinta olla siirtämässä Devilsiä ensimmäisenä pois vaikkapa Panthersin sijaan ja nuo perustelut ei vakuuta.

SS Benning wrote: ↑

21 Oct 2020, 12:54

Helvetti, ehdit minuutin aikaisemmin ruokatauko meni nyt ihan hukkaan ja kaikki pilalla,,

Ihan hauska ja mielenkiintoinen pähkäilyartikkeli, kiitos

Suht samoilla linjoilla olisin. Tosin Panthersin voisi siirtää ennemmin kuin Devilsin, vaikka se tuossa tarkoittaisikin sitä että siellä NYC metropolialueella olisi edelleen kolme joukkuetta.

Ontarioon mahtuisi kyllä hyvin kolmekin joukkuetta.