I've been following the news about Jim Balsillie wanting to buy the Predators and moving the team to Canada. I of course would love to see this happen, especially if the Preds go on to win the cup the following year, just like what Colorado did to Quebec City. My officemate is from Tennessee and he tells me that the Preds don't have much of a fanbase in Nashville (hell, he's a Pens fan), so I think this would be great. Living in California, I think I have a good understanding of how little hockey means to Californians and most other Americans I have met. It's like sticking a square peg into a round hole. It doesn't work. I imagine it's not much better in Tennessee.
Of course, it's easy to say that as an outsider. However, I was a Vancouver Grizzlies fan, and I still feel jilted by the NBA. I figure it could have worked in Vancouver had they not had inept management and had basketball players actually wanted to play in Vancouver. It would really have helped had the team won more than 22 games in any one season while they were in Vancouver.
Jim Balsillie, if you manage to move a really good hockey team like the Preds to Canada, I promise that I will try not to make jokes about your name ("Bals").
The only thing I have trouble imagining is where they would put the new hockey team. Having never been to Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge, or Hamilton, I shouldn't say, but I would never have thought of any of them being real major-league sport cities, much in the same way I wouldn't imagine a hockey team in Burnaby or Surrey; yet that is probably where the team would end up. Another team in Winnipeg might be nice, but they can probably afford to hold out until the Coyotes inevitably get tired of trying to keep ice frozen in Phoenix and move back.
- [table of women beside ours]:
- [office gossip and chatter]
- Jen:
- [leans over to me, conspiratorially] Large groups of women scare me.
- me:
- [thinks this over] ... I scare large groups of women.
Current Music: Wilco - The Thanks I Get
EDIT (12:46AM, June 4/07): fixed the spelling of Jim "Bals" Balsillie's last name
1 comment:
I've been following this story on the Hockey's Future message boards, and I'm getting sold on the idea of putting the arena in Cambridge, just outside Toronto's territorial limit. Cambridge itself isn't very big, but locating the arena near the 401 and Highway 8 (and near the railway) puts it within a reasonable commute of Kitchener/Waterloo, Guelph, Milton, Oakville, Mississauga, Hamilton, and even London. It's something like a market of 3 million people within an hour's drive.
I'm not sure what they'd actually call the team, though. Naming it after K-W or Cambridge seems a little silly. Ontario Predators, maybe? I'd actually kind of like to see it tied in with the old Hamilton Tigers franchise that was in the NHL from 1920 to 1925 (and was the Quebec Bulldogs before that, which is where the Hamilton AHL team gets its nickname). You could actually leave the current uniform substantially the same, maybe shifting the colours more toward Hamilton's traditional orange, black, and white. They should at least use the old Hamilton Tigers jersey as a throwback.
Congrats on the Vancouver Giants winning the Memorial Cup, by the way.
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