I long for the day when all of those hockey teams in silly markets like North Carolina, Texas, Georgia, Florida, etc. just disappear.
No high profile players? So Chris Pronger and Rod Brind'Amour are nobodies? Of course the real punchline is that post season success is one of the keys to a player becoming high profile.
If you get the days you long for say goodbye to the NHL. The league needed to expand beyond the traditional market. Sure the old days of the league were nice if you lived in the snowbelt, but the population of the country is moving out of the snowbelt and the league needed to follow. And the Carolina and Texas teams make good money, better than Buffalo and some of the other teams in "traditional" NHL markets. Attendance was up league wide this year, revenue significantly better than projected, just gotta fix the TV situation.
Well, I long for the day that you pack up all your relatives and haul them back to New Jersey. Heck, their the ones buying all the season tickets down here.
Me too ... I'm old enough to remember the old NHL era ... Montreal, Toronto, Detroit, Chicago, New York, Boston (think I got'em all) ... of course in those days the teams traveled mostly by train or bus. In that era, before helmets and goalie's wearing face masks for protection, it was rare for a hockey player to make the NHL ranks until well seasoned in the minors. Typically a player was at least twenty-one, usually twenty-three or older before making it into the NHL.