Let's Buy The Whalers And Bring Them Back Home

Hartford Courant ^ | Friday, May 5, 2017 | JOHN Q. GALE

[Alberta's Child]

Carolina has definitely been to the playoffs more than twice. They made the playoffs in the following seasons:

1998-99
2000-01
2001-02 (lost in the Stanley Cup finals)
2005-06 (won the Stanley Cup)
2008-09

[riverdawg]

Didn’t Hartford just spend $60m on a stadium for a AA minor league baseball team? Sheer lunacy.

[NTHockey]

Saw a great game between Houston and Winnipeg that ended in a tie. The Howes were whisked out of the locker room but Bobby Hull stayed and signed autographs for an hour.

[rlmorel]

Here is the fight song: "Brass Bonanza" (Hartford Whalers Fight Song) Here is the fight song: Link: Whalers sucked against everyone else, but played the Bruins tough... (I had to go look up the song you referenced! I had never heard it before...gave me a feel for a better time...:)

[going hot]

Rasta Mon vibration, yeah,

Got to have a good time.

Ya Mon!

[Jim Noble]

Didn’t Hartford just spend $60m on a stadium for a AA minor league baseball team? Sheer lunacy

It's not really lunacy. It's more of a cargo cult.

After leftists destroy a downtown, or a whole city, through demographic transformation, welfare, passive law enforcement, etc., they notice that people don't go there any more.

"Well", they think to themselves, "Well, what do law-abiding people good manners and with money to spend, like? I know, they like baseball!", so, the city fathers build a minor league stadium, or a shopping plaza with an "upscale" store, or any other SWPL amenity.

Some of the more clever ones figure out that the local employed population who have fled can't be fooled, so they build a convention center, where upstanding citizens from out of town can be bussed from the airport right into the hood, without ever knowing where they are going.

Anyway, it always fails. Their heart's in the right place, but their devotion to false beliefs about human nature eventually turns their city into a hellhole.

One of my organizations recently invited me to a convention in St. Louis! Can you imagine?

[certrtwngnut]

These guys aren’t from Hartford. They are from Cos Cob and they support hockey 100%.

[The Pack Knight]

Unfortunately, Houston lost the Aeros a few years ago. Attendance was pretty good for an AHL team, but the Rockets, who hold the master lease at the Toyota Center, wanted a massive rent increase over the already ridiculous rent, and there weren’t any other suitable venues in Houston, so the Wild (who owned the Aeros) had to move the team.

Houston is a huge market, of course, and might be able to support an NHL franchise despite the fact that hockey isn’t really that popular down here. The problem is the Rockets—they control the only NHL-level venue in Houston, and they have the right to exclude any hockey team they don’t own from the arena. To date, they have shown no interest in either owning an NHL franchise or allowing one to use the Toyota Center.

I used to go to Hurricanes games all the time when I lived in Raleigh (and worked for them back in college), and I used to go to Aeros games here in Houston until they left. Now there is no hockey in Houston, and as this article highlights, there may be no hockey in Raleigh soon.