Charlestown Chiefs.

_________________

This is Hispanic Heritage Night, by the way. The team that fled Miami because it didn't want to market hockey to brown people held a Hispanic Heritage Night and it looked like this.

_________________

Unreal. Great idea putting the NHL in Florida...or any southern state for that matter. If they all folded tomorrow, the league would be better for it.

_________________
CSFMB 2014 Nascar Pick 'em Champion

We don’t have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven’t taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much. — Ronald Reagan

....and yet it is somehow 100 percent impossible to put a team in milwaukee for some reason.

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

Racist much?

They "fled" the old arena in Miami for a newer stadium, with a better lease deal, in a different location from the one that wasn't working before. The new stadium isn't working either, but still....bad premise

They were hardly fleeing from "brown people". It's south FL, not sure you've been there before, but even the affluent people are "brown" in the sense that you are saying. The team fled the downtown area for the same reason that most teams "flee" the downtown area. Nobody is downtown at night, you know, when the games are played.

_________________

I'm in South Florida for a couple months out of the year, thanks.

Wayne Huizenga, the old Panthers/Dolphins/Marlins owner, hates Miami. Loves Fort Lauderdale, loves suburban Broward, hates Miami. It's like the people who say they hate Los Angeles but love Orange County: yeah, sure, there are affluent non-whites in the latter, too, but it's still a pretty obvious dog whistle. He wanted to move all three of his teams out of Dade eventually, hence the "Florida" Marlins and not the Miami Marlins, which at least two baseball teams had called themselves before. Obviously, he cashed out of the two outdoor teams, but did manage to move the Panthers to the middle of nowhere. And the location that "wasn't working" only didn't work insofar as it was a decrepit piece of crap: the Panthers had better attendance per capita at the old Miami Arena than they ever did in Broward. And Miami as an early-to-bed town doesn't exactly check out.

Most teams don't flee downtown. That's the thing. They move as close to downtown as they can. I can only think of two teams that have moved outward recently: the 49ers because there's nowhere to build a stadium in San Francisco, and the Braves, whose move, and here I go again, does have a racial component to it as all things in Atlanta seem to. Obviously, because South Florida is the biggest bunch of bandwagoners who ever bandwagoned, the Panthers could turn it around if they started winning, but alienating themselves from Miami to get more people from Boca has bitten them in the ass as they've been not only bad, but inconvenient, too. The arena isn't even that easy to get to from Palm Beach County because you have to jut off 95 and go all the way west.

Would have been cool if they could have played at the AAA with the Heat. Players taking their talents to South Beach, not players retiring but still getting paid. Hi, Dave Bolland.

_________________

Milwaukee was up for expansion in the early '90s (Lloyd Pettit married into Allen-Bradley money and spearheaded the bid) but Bill Wirtz shut them down for being too close to Chicago. The same thing happened with Hamilton, which the league said was too close to both Toronto and Buffalo, despite a 17,000-seat arena and Tim Hortons money behind the bid. We wound up with Tampa, Ottawa, Anaheim, and Miami instead. I guess at least the first two are okay.

EDIT: and yeah, notice that the Lightning's arena is smack-dab in downtown Tampa, right on the waterfront. Their attendance has never been as scary bad as the Panthers' has. Yeah, they won a championship, but they also spent some years way at the bottom of the league whereas the Panthers have generally just finished 9th or 10th.

_________________

Coyotes-Hurricanes in Raleigh tonight.

_________________

Isn't Carolina still winless?

_________________

Like I have said...people in the south don't give a shit about hockey. The NHL screwed up big time when they decided to go to Tampa, Raleigh, Miami & Phoenix.

_________________
CSFMB 2014 Nascar Pick 'em Champion

We don’t have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven’t taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much. — Ronald Reagan

Tampa has traditionally done well for itself except for those years that they were owned by the guy who made the Saw movies, where they hired Barry Melrose to coach the team because he sounded smart on TV and then fired him after ten games. That downturn got them Stamkos and Hedman, though.

Raleigh has always been a bomb scare except for when they'd go deep in the playoffs, which has happened three times, and what, do you want a fucking cookie.

_________________

What a mess

Wouldn't it be better to make all of the game free and just gouge on parking and concessions?

They play at an outlet mall. The parking is already free.

_________________

Does the team in Nashville do any better?

_________________
2018
#ExtendLafleur

They probably get about 14,000 to 15,000 a night in a 17,000-seat barn, but they don't report their television ratings, which leads me to believe they're shit. I'm also guessing tickets aren't too pricey.

They had one foot out the door for Hamilton back in 2007 but the league intervened to keep them in place, as they did when the Coyotes were bound for Hamilton in 2009. The NHL would sooner dig a hole for itself and die than put a team in Hamilton. Also, Nashville/the county pays them about $10 million a year to stay and lets the Perds control concert revenues on the publicly owned arena; my guess is that if they weren't allowed to fuck the taxpayers up the ass like that, they'd be long gone. Actually, if you think about it as taking the concert money and getting paid to rent, it's more like a DP.

_________________

welp

_________________

With packed houses like the above there should be no concerns regarding the validity of the commissioned study.

What? This doesn't even make any sense.

_________________