Deadline Day – Deal 4: Aaron Ward to Anaheim

Trade:

Carolina trades defenseman Aaron Ward to Anaheim for goalie Justin Pogge and a 4th Round Pick

Analysis:

Anaheim gets a tough defenseman with tons of playoff experience.  Carolina gets a minor league journeyman goaltender with unfulfilled potential and a draft pick for their trouble.

This trade could be more important for Anaheim if they make another move later today as is rumored they might do.

Deadline Day – Deal 3: Boston & Florida

Trade:

Florida gets: Forwards Craig Weller, Byron Bitz, 2nd Round Pick

Boston gets: Defensemen Dennis Seidenberg, Matt Bartkowski (sophomore – Ohio State)

Analysis:

Boston gets a better defensive defenseman in Seidenberg as he’s a shot blocking freak. So they’ve got that going for them.  They hand off a bunch of blue collar spare parts in Weller and Bitz and the Bruins have draft picks to throw away and they do that here handing off a 2nd rounder to the Panthers.

Seidenberg will help out from a defensive stand point but the Bruins main issue is goal scoring and Seidenberg isn’t helping there. Expect another move or two still for Boston.

Deadline Day – Deal 2: Martin Skoula to New Jersey

Trade:

Toronto sends Martin Skoula to New Jersey for a 2010 5th round pick.

Analysis:

Toronto acquired Skoula from Pittsburgh last night as part of the Alexei Ponikarovsky deal, a salary dump player for the Penguins. Toronto had no room for Skoula as it was and they weren’t going to hang on to him anyways.  New Jersey gets a puck moving defenseman that head coach Jacques Lemaire knows very well and likes a lot. New Jersey could use some NHL-experienced depth at defense so the deal makes perfect sense for both sides.

Nothing really to see here, move along.

Deadline Day – Deal 1: Derek Morris to Phoenix

Trade:

Boston sends Derek Morris to Phoenix for a 2011 4th round pick.

Analysis:

This deal clears out salary space for Boston to make more moves later today.  Depending on how the rest of the day and season goes for Boston, the signing of Morris at the beginning of the year will call into question the wisdom of Bruins GM Peter Chiarelli signing Morris (and others) to such fat contracts while letting the team’s only goal scorer twist in the wind and eventually get traded.

We’ll see how this pans out the rest of the day for Boston, clearly they’re angling to just get into the playoffs and hope to get hot. Of course they could be setting up to face either Pittsburgh or Washington so picking one’s poison might not be so awesome here.

NHL Trade Deadline – A Hockey Fan’s Internet Keg Party

It’s March 3rd and it’s NHL Trade Deadline Day.  Come 3pm Eastern time, everyone in the NHL will have decided whether they’re going all in or selling off and cashing in until next year or figuring they’ve got the horses to keep going through the playoffs… Or they just don’t want to bone over their own future.

So many possibilities.  So many opportunities.  So many futures with the potential to be vastly improved or irreparably destroyed.  If anything else, I’d say it’s like sitting around watching and waiting to see if a tsunami was going to hit a major metropolitan area and wipe it off the face of the map.

Too soon?

Who is in and who is out? Those are the questions today and all morning and afternoon it’s going to be talked about over at Hockey Independent starting at 9 AM, bright and early with a live chat show.  XM Home Ice personalities are jumping in, assorted sports writers are jumping in, blogger psychos like Face Off Hockey Show’s Scotty Wazz are jumping in… It’s just enough to bring a tear to my eye if I wasn’t a cold-hearted son of a bitch.

Come for the trade breakdowns and information, stay for the warm fuzzies your host B.D. Gallof will give you as he plays the part of ringmaster to this hockey circus.

As for what’s going on here, as deals come down, I’ll post them and give my instant snap judgment on who wins and loses.  Yeah, I’ll be flying by the seat of my pants… If I opt to even wear pants that is.  See, things just got way more sexy.

ECAC Standings: So How’d I Do?

To show that I can do a little bit of follow up work, it’s time to check in and see how I did ranking out the ECAC.  As I let it known back in September, I was one of the media members asked to give my pre-season rankings on how I thought the ECAC would turn out.  For reflection’s sake, here’s how I had the twelve team league ranked out:

1. Yale
2. Princeton
3. Cornell
4. Harvard
5. St. Lawrence
6. Dartmouth
7. RPI
8. Clarkson
9. Union
10. Quinnipiac
11. Colgate
12. Brown

I stood by those rankings then with the qualifier being that the ECAC is so tight in the middle of the pack that places in the standings could flip or flop in any way possible. I even toyed with the idea of drawing those teams from a hat and letting fate decide things for me. While that may have been “reckless” of a journalist to do, I’m just some hoser on the Internet with a website.

Anyhow, the ECAC wrapped up conference play this past weekend setting stage for the start of the conference playoffs on Friday.  Here’s how the standings wrapped up:

1. Yale
2. Cornell
3. Union
4. Colgate
5. St. Lawrence
6. RPI
7. Quinnipiac
8. Princeton
9. Harvard
10. Dartmouth
11. Brown
12. Clarkson

So let’s compare things and see where I went brutally wrong.  First up, the reasonably accurate assessments.

I had Yale set to win the ECAC, and they did. So did everyone else who was polled. Big deal. Yale was the defending conference champions and while they had (note: still have) questions in goal, they’re still a very good team but not one that is unbeatable by any means. They have a world of offensive talent and I sometimes believe that they’d rather get into a Firewagon hockey showdown with their opponent rather than try to play the chess match.

I had Cornell slated for third and they finished second, and for these purposes I’ll give a one place off proximity victory. Like I said on Puck Daddy weeks ago, you know what you’re going to get from Cornell and it’s going to frustrate the living hell out of you. Consistency like that is a rarity in the ECAC and it’s a good reason why Cornell always floats to the top of the conference. Missing them by a spot isn’t a big deal, although compared to who I had slated to finish second… Perhaps I deserve a slap in the back of the head.  We’ll get there soon enough, don’t worry.

For the 5-12 spots I managed to get St. Lawrence correctly at fifth and was one spot off with both RPI and Brown. Everyone else? Forget it. I missed terribly on Union College and really missed badly with Colgate. I overshot badly on Harvard, Clarkson and Dartmouth.  Screw it, I got more than half of these badly wrong. When you look at how the coaches ranked things out, I guess I don’t feel quite so bad. The coaches whiffed badly on St. Lawrence but all knew something was amiss with Clarkson, probably something to do with an off-ice scandal involving players set to provide depth for the Golden Knights.

So what do we gather from all this? A couple of things. One, the coaches will always know a little bit better about some of these things than the media (filed under: No shit, Sherlock).  Also, the ECAC is so close to being in full parity mode that the pre-season polls are rather meaningless and function solely as a dick-measuring contest. I don’t say that spitefully because I missed so horribly, it’s just how it goes.

Thankfully college hockey is a different beast than say… College football whose pre-season polls serve to set the bar (unfairly) for everyone else the rest of the season.  At least with college hockey you can hash things out a bit clearer over the course of a regular season and the methodology that goes into picking the NCAA Tournament field is a bit more mathematically centered so the amount of complaining at the end of the conference tournaments is kept to a minimum and the smokey room selection process is virtually non-existent.

As for the ECAC Playoffs, the matchups set up like this:

Yale, Cornell, Union and Colgate all get byes in the first round.

• #5 St. Lawrence vs. #12 Clarkson
• #6 RPI vs. #11 Brown
• #7 Quinnipiac v. #10 Dartmouth
• #8 Princeton v. #9 Harvard

The First Round and subsequent Quarterfinal round are played in the Best of Three format. When action shifts to the Times Union Center for the semis and finals, it’s single elimination time. The Best of Three rounds also mean games can go to overtime and take as many overtimes as needed to get a winner, just like the NHL Playoffs, and can create fascinating scenarios because the games are all played from Friday-Sunday. If you get a game with multiple overtimes, those teams could be back out on the ice the next night/later that day to play the next game.

As for predictions for how the playoffs will go, I’ll leave it up to a known movie expert to handle that for me.

Would you expect any better from me after I was able to guess two out of twelve teams in their spot in the standings correctly? I know when I’ve been beaten.

In truth though, each of these first round meetings set up interesting perspective. SLU and Clarkson are bitter rivals and that rivalry can’t be taken lightly as the series record between the two teams this season is 1-1-1. Brown and RPI split their two meetings this year. Quinnipiac and Dartmouth are equally schizophrenic. Princeton and Harvard each have boatloads of talent but lack on killer instinct and consistency.  Your guess is as good as mine, but if you want to use last year’s playoffs as a measuring stick, expect upsets.  Last year’s 11 and 12 seeds both won their first round playoff series after both of those teams (RPI and Brown) had miserable regular seasons but defeated their opponents (Dartmouth and Harvard) in two games.  Brown even managed to shutout Harvard in both games to pile on to the stunning results.

Fortunately for the top four seeds, they’ve seen everyone in conference enough this season to have good scouting reports and if the seeds hold, it sets up well for some teams to have more than enough of a book on their potential quarterfinal opponent. For example, Union could face RPI in the next round, a team they’ve played four times already this year. That’s still a long way off though and, as the ECAC is getting to be well known for, nothing is guaranteed in the playoffs.

Dear Gary…

All right Gary, you and I have had it out. You’re probably blissfully unaware of this but it’s true. For the better part of over 15 years you’ve been trying to figure out a way to grow the popularity of hockey in America and you’ve been a brutal, miserable, egotistical maniac of a failure in doing so.

Eight years ago you had your two home countries in Canada and the United States facing off with your NHL talent in the Olympics for the gold medal in Salt Lake City.  Two years after that, after failing to seize attention of the masses in spite of having the games in the United States and basically getting your run of the schedule, you and the owners locked out the players looking to find a way to secure finances for your pack of rich idiots over those ever-greedy players.

Of course, you didn’t do a good enough job of that and people are already grumbling about future labor strife. You cut a cable deal after the lockout with a loser network while simultaneously giving the finger to ESPN for treating the lockout like a joke, spending every minute talking about it cutting jokes and laughing at how completely stupid you, the owners and the players all looked.

Fast forward to today.  The USA and Canada play in what was one of the greatest gold medal games of all time (no hyperbole here), an overtime thriller that saw Canada win 3-2, that featured your hand-picked golden calf score the game winner in overtime. I’m sure this left you twinged with strife because while Sidney Crosby is your boy and he plays for an American feel-good-story team in Pittsburgh… He’s Canadian. I’m sure that getting your new and gigantic NBC hockey watching audience instantly disliking the guy you want to be the face to the league is driving you mad but you don’t care because all you’re seeing now is dollar signs of opportunity.

I mean, hey why not? A balls-out crazy game featuring the United States tying the game with under 30 seconds to play is damn dramatic and any game that ends in overtime (you hear that, in overtime) is thrilling. Thankfully the IIHF does things the right way when it comes to overtime and allows the game to be settled on the ice and not in a shootout.  I know shootouts made Peter Forsberg a legend in Sweden and sunk Corey Hirsch’s career but let’s get real here.

I’m straying from the point here though. The point being that, once again, the NHL has a golden opportunity to seize the interest of the American mass audience they desire so much. They screwed the pooch in 2002, they screwed it even harder in the 1994-1995 season when the New York Rangers had won the cup in 1994 and got the attention of the entire country… Only to see the owners lock the players out the following season and play a shortened schedule in the 1994-1995 season.

People want to know when Gary Bettman’s moment is going to be and we’re all still waiting for it to happen (if it ever will) and while this tournament has provided thrills and excitement all over the place, Bettman was continually asked about what would happen in 2014 in Sochi, Russia which gave him a grand platform to play politics with the IOC, IIHF and the NHL Players Association.  He gave nothing away in his answers and essentially said, “We’ll get to that when we’re good and ready to.” Admit to nothing, never tip your hand, make everyone wait it out.  You know, that’s the whole thing in the NHL’s hand in the Versus/DirecTV dispute too (which is still unsettled) – play no favorites, say it’s not your fight (yet) and allow everyone to do what they need to do without really getting your hands dirty.

Of course when NBC is pulling the strings for what games they want to show you’re going to bow to their will since they’re such a tremendous broadcast partner for the NHL and hockey in general. Lord knows fans out in the mountain and pacific time zones are happy to have watched  Olympic games on tape delay.  Since, you know, people will always tune in when they already know what happened.  Then again, perhaps NBC is just setting us up for the future of the NHL where it’s like how the NBA was treated in the 1970s when the NBA Finals were televised… Whenever they felt like putting it on the air.  Maybe since NBC saw how great the ratings for the Olympics were regardless of whether events were actually live or not, they’ll apply this to all of their sports properties. Nevermind that games could be shifted to occur live, they can just have them happen whenever and if it turns out to be really good they’ll just hype the shit out of it and put it in prime time in a nice, convenient, commercial-friendly package.

I’m making myself dumber for just ranting off like this Gary because this is what you’ve done to the hardcore hockey fans.

You’ve abused and taken full advantage of them at all times. Whether it’s a shitty cable network, a shitty national broadcast partner, obnoxiously high ticket prices in many cities, a shitty jersey deal with a company that want to soak fans for more money or any host of other issues that have manifested themselves over your tenure.

The fans put up with a ton of garbage and while there’s been a host of new fans that have come to the game, it’s time to do something to pull it all together and become the overlord of the sportsman’s winter. Carpe diem Gary because this is your golden opportunity to pull it all together. Don’t sit around and wait and hope that the NFL and NBA all blow each other to hell with labor problems next year. Grab the reigns and ride this sucker for all it’s worth. By my count there were 40 superstars who put everything they had into this Olympic tournament fighting over what amounts to be a symbolic prize for a pack of millionaires.

If you can’t sell each and every one of those American and Canadian players for what they did on the ice then I’m at a complete loss and would ask you to step down from being the head of the sport.  As for myself and other keyboard jockeys who live to praise and complain all in one breath all because we love this game so damn much, it pains us to see things handled as badly as they have been.  I know people will always say that the fans care infinitely more than the players or owners ever will and while there’s a high potential for hyperbole there, I buy it.

If this moment in time, something that had nothing at all to do with the NHL (I know, that’s a sore sticking point isn’t it? Too fucking bad.), cannot be used to build the game and make it as great for all those casual sports fans who tuned in to see if their country could win or not… I’m cashing out.

Carpe fucking diem, Gary. Make it happen.

Pirates Setting Sail For Albany?

I am by no means an AHL blogger nor much of an AHL fan, but when stories about the local team come to rise, I can’t help it I get involved and have to write a little bit.  This time, rather than a team departing Albany and leaving fans out in the cold, it’s one coming in from elsewhere and attempting to do their part to fill up the Times Union Center.

While Times Union Center general manager Bob Belber has been playing coy about which team(s) he’s been in contact with about potentially moving to Albany to fill the void by the soon-to-be Charlotte Checkers, the Times Union has actually done something productive and asked some questions and gotten a few sources down to find out that it may be the Portland Pirates who will be bolting out of Maine to move a little bit closer to their parent club in Buffalo.

To quote the TU:

The Pirates managing owner, Brian Petrovek, attended a game at Times Union Center Friday. In an interview with staff writer Pete Dougherty, Petrovek would not directly discuss moving the team to Albany, but said the team is exploring options and addressed how hockey could work in the Capital Region.

At the moment, the Pirates are just one of a handful of teams who may or may not be looking to get the hell out of their current Dodge meanwhile others already have (from Springfield, MA and Albany respectively).  So what does this mean for Albany?  The TU is already asking folks for comments on their site about whether they should keep the name “River Rats” or not and that’s a logical progression given the circumstances.

The upside to this situation is that it helps out the Adirondack Phantoms who, without an Albany team to play rivals with, would’ve been left alone on a virtual island in the middle of the Adirondacks with no real rival to deal with.  Travis over at Broad Street Hockey looked into this a couple weeks ago and came up with some keen observations.

Long term, though, a strong rivalry with a team in Albany is a major player in hockey succeeding in Glens Falls. The current incarnation of hockey there isn’t expected to last longer than the next couple of years, as the ownership is on record saying that the ultimate goal is to get an arena built in Allentown, PA.

Obviously that sounds ominous but that’s been the goal all along when it’s come to the Phantoms in Glens Falls.  Don’t act shocked here folks.  As Travis states in his piece, there’s the possibility that there’ll be a boost for the Phantoms without a team in Albany, but when you look at the Phantoms attendance numbers this year, there’s not a whole lot more they can do, the team is doing great in Glens Falls.

If there’s no local rivalry to spice things up, you’d have to worry about the potential adverse effect it would have on the Phantoms.  If things go bad, Phantoms ownership wouldn’t wait a moment to just pull the plug and wait for their arena to materialize in Allentown, Pennsylvania so there’s certainly something at stake here for the people in Glens Falls.

As for the situation in Albany, the better way to look at things is how could this possibly seem like a great situation for the Pirates franchise.  Portland averages a little over 4,100 fans per game in Maine and the River Rats haven’t averaged that many fans in a few years (05-06 they averaged just over 4,000 per game).  Is Pirates management that unhappy with the situation in Maine or is it just a case of doing the bidding of the parent organization at play here?  I’d suspect the latter is the case here.

A few hundred fans does make a bit of a difference  but what is likely being banked on here is the allure of having an actual New York State team being the parent club. This move will bring a few more fans out to the arena in Albany so that effect can’t be discounted. After all, the River Rats were the farm team for the not-so local Devils for years and the really not local Hurricanes for the past few and if you can find a tried and true Hurricanes fan here in Albany I’d like to meet them. I know Devils fans exist in this area for sure now and that has everything to do with the success of the Rats early on as well as the excellent players who have at one time called Albany home. That’s the expected and natural effect of having a farm team in another area and that’s why this move would make 1,000 kinds of sense for the Sabres/Pirates.

The Sabres already have an established fanbase here and a lot of that is due to them having a sweet cable deal with the Madison Square Garden network that airs a hefty number of Sabres games in the Albany area, sometimes booting the Rangers (and Devils and Islanders as well) off of their own network in most of upstate New York.  For the Sabres it’s created a new set of fans across upstate New York mainly thanks to the inabilities of the Rangers and Islanders (and occasionally the Devils) to hold new fans interests. Moving the farm team of the Sabres to Albany, right in the heart of the newly created Sabres viewership, could provide an unexpected boon to the potential Albany franchise, something I’m sure Bob Belber at the Times Union Center has been sure to mention a few times to Pirates GM Brian Petrovek.

Potentially HUUUUGE Move For Albany AHL Hopes

A funny thing happened while reading the generally useless Troy Record, I found a nugget of information that’s truly fascinating.  The Troy Record generally covers only the high school beat and RPI hockey, but they posted a story on the sale and move of the Albany River Rats and had something far more interesting contained within.

The emergence of another AHL team calling Albany home, possibly owned by automobile mogul Billy Fuccillo, is merely speculation at this point. Sources said Fuccillo had high interest in own a team, but has since cooled if he doesn’t have full control of the franchise.

For those of you not familiar with Billy Fuccillo, some might say you can be considered fortunate as his television ads for his numerous car dealerships across upstate New York are plentiful and catch-phrase-tastic.  A lot of folks find him to be terribly annoying, but after seeing his ads follow me back home from my college days in Oswego, NY he’s grown on me for how classically old school he is as a car dealer/TV pitchman.

Since the Record says that any and all talk of Fuccillo’s wants for a team are speculative, I did a bit more research and found this item on Albany TV station WTEN’s site.

Furthermore, local car dealer Billy Fuccillo’s Chief Financial Officer reports he is in initial discussions with the Bridgeport Sound Tigers, a Connecticut AHL team affiliated with the New York Islanders.

Well that amps up things quite a bit.  The site also adds this heartwarming note:

Fuccillo’s CFO says he wants the people of Albany to have a hockey team.

Well isn’t that nice. I’m sure those of you not in Upstate New York are wondering who the heck he is.  Well, he’s huge up here. Literally.

After all, a guy that does commercials like this has to have an idea on how to market and sell a team, not to mention a seemingly endless flow of cash to advertise the hell out of the team.  If there’s anything any Albany-area professional sports team fails at miserably it’s keeping a high profile in the media and selling the hell out of it to make people want to go.

Of course, if Fuccillo does go through with it and gets the Sound Tigers, that would make the Islanders organization two for two with wacky owners.  In case you’ve forgotten, Charles Wang is the owner of the New York Islanders and some of his decisions are already part of mocking folk lore in the NHL.  More importantly for the city of Albany, it would provide them a team that is actually affiliated with a pro team that’s based in New York State. It would be fitting that the state capital be associated with a team from its own state, right?  Before anyone asks, yes there are Islanders fans here upstate, although not as many as say Rangers fans.

If you’re curious, as the Record story stated, there is a bit of a history in the area with the Islanders as the Capital District Islanders once called Troy home and played home games at the Houston Field House on the RPI campus.  That team then became the Albany River Rats.  The minor league circle of life continues on.

If Fuccillo’s interest is true and he does want to buy the Sound Tigers and bring them to Albany, then this is a huge coup for the AHL. They’d be keeping a team in Albany and adding an owner who, while seemingly wacky and insane, is a dogged and tenacious businessman and a guy that hates to lose a buck as much as anyone and demands optimum performance from everyone in his organization.  He’s shrewd, he’s smart, he’s tough as hell and he knows what it takes to succeed.

In short, in a league that needs to have committed ownership and as many guys with deep pockets and an ability to market the hell out of their teams, Fuccillo could be the exact right kind of guy the AHL needs to help build up attendance in a city that has severely lagged behind.

Report: River Rats Sold – Next Stop: Charlotte

According to WSOC sports anchor Bill Voth, via Twitter, the Charlotte Checkers of the ECHL have called a 2:00 p.m. Wednesday press conference to announce that Checkers owner Michael Kahn is purchasing the Albany River Rats.  The plan for Kahn is to relocate the franchise to Charlotte where they will continue to be the farm team for the Carolina Hurricanes.

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago when this story broke, the River Rats got very hush-hush about things and made the standard company stand-by comment of, “Nothing to see here… Yet.”  While there’s no comment from the folks in Albany as of now (give it time), this ends the current tenure of the River Rats in Albany.  While there will be other teams looking to relocate or add affiliations, if one is going to move to Albany, it’ll have to be through new ownership.

What should prove interesting in this scenario is what will happen with the Adirondack Phantoms, who will be in Glens Falls again next year, should there not be a local rival to split a massive number of games against each other next season.  The Phantoms have outdrawn the River Rats so far this season even though the Glens Falls Civic Center is a much smaller venue than that of the Times Union Center in Albany.

The fun, Albany point of view on this now is what is the hockey world’s opinion of Albany now? The city has failed with the River Rats both under the “guidance” of the Devils and now with the Hurricanes and the city failed to retain the ECAC Tournament semifinals and finals getting beaten out by the hockey hotbed of Atlantic City, New Jersey in a deal that just managed to keep SMG’s pockets happy.

This year, the NCAA Hockey East Regionals again return to Albany and unless there’s some major local influence or a massive regional fanbase to help draw crowds, attendance is expected to be mediocre at the cavernous facility yet again.  While the folks running Times Union Center has its fingers crossed twice over hoping Cornell, Union and RPI can all make the ECAC final four, it’s likely, although not guaranteed, that only one of those schools could end up in Albany for the NCAAs.  Whether you want to point the finger at apathetic local interest or at terrible marketing on behalf of the ECAC and NCAA, you could win an argument in any way you wanted to as all of it has been piss-poor.

That’s not to say that sports fans in Albany are that fickle, it’s just we’ve all been down that road before and been jerked around for it in Albany and the Rats failure is yet another example of that.  Albany fans have often been blessed with great teams to root for at a low professional or minor league level only to find screwball owners get a little too excited over a good thing.  Take a look at this awful sports history off the top of my head:

It happened in minor league baseball with the Albany-Colonie Yankees who bolted the decrepit Heritage Park for the new confines in Norwich, Connecticut.

It happened in the CBA with the Albany Patroons who thought that moving over to the Knickerbocker Arena out of the Washington Avenue Armory would bring bigger crowds and then overshot their estimates and then caved into local money naming the team after local car dealerships. Yes, the Capital Region Pontiacs are a name that should long live in infamy for how not to win fans over or influence anyone.

It happened in Arena Football as owners Glen Mazula and Joe O’Hara couldn’t find a way to make a championship winning team into a profitable item in spite of drawing great crowds and then giving into the AFL’s demands to fill out NFL markets with AFL teams and settling for an af2 booby prize that failed miserably because fans knew they were getting an inferior product to an already inferior product.

And you can believe it that professional hockey has been down this road already many times before.  Look back at the illustrious history of the Adirondack Red Wings who were chased out of business by the River Rats in the 90s as well as the short-lived tenures Capital District Islanders and Albany Choppers.

These are all teams that have been around in just the past 25 years in Albany, and people wonder why fans of the Capital District are just burnt out and sick of getting jerked around.  What’s even more amazing through all this is that the last man standing is the single-A Tri-City ValleyCats and they play in a stadium named after a convicted local political felon.  Un-friggin-real.

Would I like to see a better run AHL team in Albany?  Sure, but buyer better beware because the fans of this area are wise to all the tricks and gimmicks meant to sell people on anything.  Folks are burned out and fed up of being treated like a marketing class pet project.  Besides, what the college teams at RPI and Union are doing this year in hockey (and Siena in basketball) is proving that long-standing local ties and a damn good product can pay off and be exciting – just don’t shoot for the moon to make a few more bucks or treat the fans like suckers.