The NHL Thread

[sonnyboy11]

I think you'll like this one too!

[scenicworld]

I'll just leave this here...

[Grandma]

[Grandma]

[KungFuJoe]

[scenicworld]

great pic of the San Jose Stanley Cup banners:

[sonnyboy11]

great pic of the San Jose Stanley Cup banners:

LOL! Nice.

Maybe see you at some games, scenic? I'll let message you so you know where my seats are. Drop by and say hello sometime.

[Grandma]

I would gladly take our presidents cup and several pacific division titles over your 2 1/2 banners that are immediately drowned out by an eyesore of yellow and purple. You got to the cup by beating the COYOTES for christ sakes. Thats nearly tantamount to me being excited if the Sharks won the cup during a fucking truncated season, and i'll be the first to tell you that if we do take it all, it should be noted with an asterisk.


The Kings have been the Sharks fucking-pocket since 1994, cup or no cup so deal with it.

[scenicworld]

LOL! Nice.

Maybe see you at some games, scenic? I'll let message you so you know where my seats are. Drop by and say hello sometime.

I'm definitely planning to go to at least a game or two this season! hope to see ya there!

[ThatGirl]

Canada rejoices.

[bemerritt]

I would gladly take our presidents cup and several pacific division titles over your 2 1/2 banners that are immediately drowned out by an eyesore of yellow and purple. You got to the cup by beating the COYOTES for christ sakes. Thats nearly tantamount to me being excited if the Sharks won the cup during a fucking truncated season, and i'll be the first to tell you that if we do take it all, it should be noted with an asterisk.


The Kings have been the Sharks fucking-pocket since 1994, cup or no cup so deal with it.

Ask any player and I bet they would rather have a cup. No amount of division titles = the stanley fucking cup. period.

[Grandma]

I don't give 2 shits what the players think you fucking moron.

[TomAz]

I don't give 2 shits what Canada thinks you fucking moron.

[Grandma]

Maurice Richard and Celine Dion can chew on ice cubes of piss

[bemerritt]

I don't give 2 shits what the players think you fucking moron.

So you are happier having division titles than seeing your team lift the cup? I find that hard to believe. Being at game 6 this last year will be a lasting memory. Hopefully you can say the same about your division titles.

[Grandma]

This is a strictly cosmetic thing you blown colon. Get the banners on their own fucking catwalk and away from anything gaykers. The 92-93 Western Conference banner should've been worth of such space the day they opened that piece of shit multipurpose cafeteria you call an arena

[fiopadp7791]

the thing I'm kinda curious about- did their last CBA have a salary floor? This one does. And I think that's neato... well kinda... I think the salary floor (a minimum that the cheap teams have to spend on their players) is withing 15 million of the salalry cap. So it at least kinda motivates teams to try and compete, because they gotta spend the money anyway. The only problem with that- a lot of teams are really having trouble turning a profit. This probably won't help...

[sonnyboy11]

the thing I'm kinda curious about- did their last CBA have a salary floor? This one does. And I think that's neato... well kinda... I think the salary floor (a minimum that the cheap teams have to spend on their players) is withing 15 million of the salalry cap. So it at least kinda motivates teams to try and compete, because they gotta spend the money anyway. The only problem with that- a lot of teams are really having trouble turning a profit. This probably won't help...

I like the floor concept too but get what you're saying. Sounds like we need to save some money along with generating adequate revenue around the league. Would contraction maybe help do that? Like, maybe, getting rid of an unimportant team like San Jose?

[Grandma]

The Kings won't win the cup for another 40 years and they'll always be the worst major sports franchise in Southern California.

May Ron Hextall suffer a major seizure and start actively signing 'talent' from Japan, Fuck the Kings.

[ManImCool]

Sharks fanbase > Kings fanbase. Quality and quantity. I'd rather be a diehard fan of the Sharks franchise than a fan of the recent Cup champions franchise whose "fan"base is mostly bandwagoners. Walk down a random street in LA and ask 100 random pedestrians who the last Stanley Cup winner was, followed by even the year before that, the majority of the answers will be pathetic. Do the same in San Jose and you'll have very different answers. Not like this is concrete or anything but a quick Facebook check shows the Sharks page followers around 500,000. The Kings? 31,000. Fucking. Pathetic. Franchise/fanbase.

[bemerritt]

first of all, the kings have 328,000 not 31,000 on FB not that it matters. The sharks wouldn't even exist without the kings going to the finals in 93. I'm excited to see how many real sharks fans there are when they miss the playoffs 10 straight years. The diehard Kings fans never left, those are the ones filling the seats during the regular season. Ya, a bunch of band-wagoners bought seats during the playoffs for ridiculous prices, but none of that detracts from the team on the ice winning the cup. That is what ultimately matters, right? The Kings won the Stanley Cup and you better get used to it.

los_angeles_kings_captaan_dustin_brown_hoists_the__4fd6bbe59b.JPG

[ManImCool]

Re the facebook fan thing, my bad, I just typed Los Angeles Kings in the search bar and clicked the first top page which only had 30k fans. Apparently you have to do some deep searching to find the real page if you haven't already liked it.

Yes, LA just won the cup. But if you're trying to argue that LA has a better and bigger (diehard or fair weather) fanbase you're completely wrong. LA is a baseball and basketball town. Not a hockey town. San Jose is. Hockey is an afterthought in LA where it's huge over here. And don't bother arguing there is only one sports team in San Jose, we also have the Giants/A's/49ers/Raiders/Warriors, yet the Sharks are hardly an afterthought here. We'll get our Cup eventually. Yes, the Cup is the ultimate prize, but it's hardly the only criteria for a quality franchise. There are many intangibles involved too beyond just winning the Cup that make the Kings a relatively shitty franchise.

[bemerritt]

Not going to argue fan bases with you, as I have lived in Campbell for a year and witnessed it first hand. Hell, I think i went to ~10 games (2 against the Kings) last year before I moved back down south this last May. I went because my roommate was a huge Sharks fan and I love watching hockey live. So while I think the fan bases are closer than you might think, I will not argue that.

This all stemmed from Grandma saying that a bunch of division titles > the cup. Which is just delusional.

[scenicworld]

wait, San Jose is a hockey town? um. ok.

[scenicworld]

The sharks fans are obviously upset because ESPN/EA Sports had some season simulation going on in which the Sharks were leading the western conference and now that the season was saved they have to try and do it for real.

[ManImCool]

Not going to argue fan bases with you, as I have lived in Campbell for a year and witnessed it first hand. Hell, I think i went to ~10 games (2 against the Kings) last year before I moved back down south this last May. I went because my roommate was a huge Sharks fan and I love watching hockey live. So while I think the fan bases are closer than you might think, I will not argue that.

They may be closer than I think, they may not be. I have little firsthand experience. Only real firsthand experience I can tell you of is when I went to LA with some fellow Sharks fans to go to games 3 and 4 of the first round of the playoffs 2 years ago. I noticed a HUGE Sharks presence at Staples Center. From the little interaction I had with some Kings fans it seemed that it was not easy selling out the Staples Center, even a playoff game, to Kings fans. A LOT of season-ticket holders and brokers had to sell tickets to traveling Sharks fans to create the illusion of a sold out game. And holy shit, I know this is a small sample size but what a bunch of classless disrespectful bunch of fans. I understand giving visiting team fans some shit when they are in your arena, but wow. After Game 3 had ended (Sharks won) some Kings fan (I placed him in his 50's) with his family and kids, no less, told me that if I didn't get the fuck out of the way he was going to throw me down the stairs. He was about to put his hands on me (I still hadn't uttered a single word nor provoked this douche in anyway) but a couple ushers took notice and put some distance in between me and my group of friends real quick. And apologized to me. Anyways, small sample size, but shit, harsh words towards visiting fans are normal but I don't see Sharks fans threatening visiting fans with actual violence, in front of their children no less.

wait, San Jose is a hockey town? um. ok.

The sharks fans are obviously upset because ESPN/EA Sports had some season simulation going on in which the Sharks were leading the western conference and now that the season was saved they have to try and do it for real.

My argument is that San Jose is much more a hockey town than LA is. Yes I know it's not even close to Detroit or any Canadian team, but we're still very much a hockey town. That is the obsession here.

And did you just admit to actually paying any sort of attention to that game simulation? I definitely did not. During this lockout I spent my time going to ECHL games (San Francisco Bulls) and watching the Sharks' AHL (Worcester Sharks) games online, to fill the void.

[bemerritt]

Bummer about your experience. I will say that I have had good experiences at Sharks games, even wearing my kings jersey.

[scenicworld]

I didn't pay attention to the simulation, but a friend of mine (Sharks fan, actually) said something similar so I stole it from him.

I disagree about SJ being a larger hockey town than LA. Besides having a legacy and being part of the "Next Six" the Kings have had one of the most loyal fan bases in all of hockey - including Detroit. Detroit was a useless team in the 80s and struggled to sell tickets to their games until they got better in the 90s. The Kings went through several cycles of being good, great, bad and even a stretch in the 90s that they were TERRIBLE and still managed to sell to about 90% of capacity every year both before, during and after Gretzky. The Sharks have yet to go through one of those periods and until your team can suck and still sell out games you really can't compare the 2 fan bases.

As for your Staples experience, are you sure you or someone in your group weren't being loud and belligerent? There's always a visiting team section at Staples center because that's just how LA is but the fans in LA are voted fairly regularly as being some of the friendliest and most knowledgeable around to opposing fans (source HFboards, THN). Besides, LA fans are actually rather cordial to SJ fans in general so you should be glad you aren't a *ucks fan!

[ManImCool]

I really hope that was just a small sample size.

Back to business, NHL confirms 48-game season (as opposed to 52). Camps not to open until Monday. Games set to start on the 19th, with the possibility of the 15th.

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1...art-in-january

There are also rumors of the NHL offering Gamecenter Live for free this year for the fans as one of many steps to try and rebuild its relationship with the fans. That would be fantastic. I pay for it normally anyhow, it'd be a nice gesture and small chunk of savings.

[ManImCool]

I'll agree that it's not fair to compare the franchises simply because the Sharks are relatively new (Kings have been around more than twice as long as us). That alone hasn't given us enough time to go through all the different phases that a franchise eventually goes through. I think the only thing we'll agree on as fellow diehard hockey fans is that we're glad our addiction is back and we can point and laugh at the fairweather fans running away from our sacred sport.