NCMountaineer

The franchise has been completely mismanaged since about 2000 when the team was sold to a group based around a Phoenix area developer and Gretzky as co-owners. Scottsdale was the preferred location for the team at that point, but that fell through and the arena was eventually built in Glendale. The belief there is that the developer was looking to develop the area around the arena in Glendale which he would not have had the opportunity to do in Scottsdale. Said development never happened and shortly after that ownership group sold the team again to Jerry Moyes. They were bleeding money at that point and the league was in talks with Jerry Reinsdorf to buy the team (no idea on if they were planning on keeping the team in the area or not at that point), however Moyes preferred to sell the team to Blackberry CEO Jim Balsillie, who would have moved the team to Hamilton, and declared bankruptcy to try to facilitate that instead. Bettman and the NHL were having none of that and stripped Moyes of ownership of the team with the courts agreeing with the NHL in the following suit. From there it just was chaos: Reinsdorf again tried to buy the team and had approval from the City of Glendale only for that to fall apart. Another group had essentially completed the process only for that to be cancelled after some lawsuits from the Goldwater Institute. They were actually the team that was initially supposed to move (back) to Winnipeg in 2011 until the situation in Atlanta became untenable and the league shifted the focus for that group to buy the Thrashers instead. Basically a few years after that shit show resolved itself the team was eventually sold to Alex Meruelo for about 300M, who then promptly started to refuse to pay the lease at the Glendale arena and the team moved into ASU's hockey arena temporarily, which only seats about 5K. There was a vote on some land in Tempe that would have been used for an arena district that was rejected after AM basically spurned some union labor for the job to save money and the mis-information campaign the union put out was successful enough to get the locals to vote it down, that space is still a landfill. That ended up being the last hope for the team and the league came to an agreement with Smith out of SLC to buy the team at what's essentially expansion team prices (1 Billion+). No idea how he ended up jumping Fertitta in Houston in priority for that other than the possibility that Fertitta was trying to nickel and dime the NHL and wasn't about to pay up expansion team prices for the frigin Coyotes. Meruelo is still actively involved in a bid for some land out by Scottsdale with the intention of turning it into an arena district but the league had enough at that point so essentially the Yotes are going "inactive" until that gets sorted out and an arena gets built, which no idea how long that will take. The assumption is that IF he wins that bid and they can get an arena project off the ground then he'll be granted an expansion team Cleveland Browns 2.0 style.

man having been around when the Charlotte Hornets 1.0 were ripped away from the area by some complete bullshit this gives me all the feels.

no idea but they're pushing hard for the '34 games from the sound of it.

yep. Sucks for Yotes fans but that well's been poisoned. They'll probably re-visit in a few years when the league does its next round of expansion. The fact that SLC is almost certainly getting a new arena if/when they get the Olympics doesn't hurt the optics of their bid.

Biggest issue I have with Nord is the occasional block when I am trying to catch a game (usually on ESPN+), and that's nothing that rebooting and reconnecting doesn't resolve 99% of the time. YTTV is a bit smarter about it in that they block most of my connections when I'm on VPN, but not always. No big deal when I'm trying to pull up something from the office when it's my weekend on-call since I can just pause the connection briefly and refresh, bigger deal when I'm traveling out of country and trying to watch something from whatever hotel.

basically if the Yotes don't win that land auction the move to SLC is happening.

It already happened and the conference successfully remade itself. None of the teams that are left aside from UConn even have an FBS program and they're the premier non P4 conference for BB already so there's no appeal for anyone to go anywhere else, other than maybe for UConn to end up in a remade ACC if things fall apart there.

Bitwarden seems to be the go-to right now for most people I know that use one. I've heard good things about Nordpass as well, though as far as the free versions go Bitwarden is more robust on features.

Nah, WV for a bit, I'm just from NC.

5'11.5 - down to 201 now after being up to 240 last year. Just 6 more lbs to hit my target goal of my swimming weight from college, hoping by the end of the month.

The weird thing to me with both MSP and Boston is that while CFB and college hoops are irrelevant, college hockey is a big fucking deal. Like completely baffles me that it doesn't carry over to other sports at the schools... at all. I grew up about 20 miles north of Boston and the guys I was around wouldn't know a damn thing about BC football outside of Doug Flutie, but they could talk all day about random players like Don Sweeney and Steve Heinze. And it's not like any of them had a hope in hell at getting accepted at BC or BU, yet alone Northeastern or Harvard. What college football fans there were in the area all tended to be Domers anyway.

now that it looks like he's OK, I'll say it. LOL, fucking Stroll, what a shock.

I may have gone just a bit hard on leg day this morning

Good stuff man, will be watching tonight.

Loving the home kit for Charlotte this season. Hopefully we don't suck this year unlike the first two, good start at least.

Man, 1-0 final but Canes-Panthers last night was one of the best games all year. You usually don't get that level of intensity between two teams until the playoffs anymore.

Have to think it's happening if/when Arizona's last ditch effort falls through. Could also be something to the smoke of the league eventually moving to 36. Either way Houston got screwed in the WHA-NHL merger and more than deserves this shot if it happens.

Can confirm on this. I've been focusing pretty hard on going more for more reps and fewer sets to hit the target number of reps rather than trying to push personal bests since I started back up and it's had some pretty solid results. Pure strength will come as well to an extent as we go but it's not going to be anything like the rapid progress we'd have seen when we were in our 20s, and that's not what we should be going for anyway. I started up getting serious about it rather than just dicking around on my rowing machine (which, TBH, is still pretty great) around the start of CFB season last year and went from ~240 to 208.5 as of my weigh-in earlier this week. That blew past what I had initially set as my target for the one year mark (215) in about 7 months, so debating if I should try to chase down my weight from when I swam this year, though I'll probably have a hell of a time hitting it (185).

More than a bit annoyed that I couldn't make it myself this year. A friend of mine won his 2nd in GTD, but I was stuck on-call in the office.

We did get to bust out our lyrics for Sweet Caroline during one of the TV timeouts at least, that's always fun. I don't get the horns down shit, you're not our rivals. I mean fuck, only time during my lifetime that we've played y'all in anything that matters before joining the conference was in a random NCAA tournament game. Classic of a game at that. Maybe I'm just officially an old now or something but I never got it. Our rivals are Pitt, VT, Louisville, Maryland and for those of us old enough add Cuse and the Pedos. Some of our fans need to act like it.

That fake FG was perfection. Love the balls on NB to make that call

I feel ya man but pretty sure that would just make shit even worse for me. I spent Christmas Eve puking my guts out. Quick way to be down another 5lbs at least, though not the preferred method for getting there.

Game has been sloppy as fuck but at least I have some damn good seats.

No fucking shock there. Can't dare to make the CFP selections look suspect. I still think Bama should have been the ones on the outside looking in and when the SECSECSEC choads like Finebaum whined about it the loss, at home, to a team that got in ahead of them can be thrown back in their face. Instead they took a "well actually the regular season doesn't mean shit, deal with it" approach against all logic.

Was pretty solid at WVU, mind you he also had Will Grier to work with at QB. Year before WVU was 50th in scoring / 17th in YPG. Those 2 years they were 22nd scoring / 20th YPG, and 10th scoring / 8th YPG.