It hurt. Bad. I wasn’t a Jets fan, but the presence of the NHL was enough.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcReB_o7o_4

At the 7 second mark in that video, I believe that’s Alex Steen crying. There’s an episode for “Hockey: A People’s History” dedicated to the era of movement and expansion. It wasn’t exactly chalk full of insight, but it helps you understand how much the team meant to the city. The public raised millions of dollars to keep the team here, but it wasn’t enough.

I like John Loewen’s little paraphrasing of Reagan, “In the end, Winnipeg hasn’t changed. It is the NHL and professional hockey that has changed.”

Also, I love Eddie Olczyk complaing about the lack of nightlife in Winnipeg… I never hear anyone in the NFL complain in the same way about Green Bay.

From the video, Barry Shenkarow:

…we would move the team, so that we wouldn’t have ongoing losses…

How prescient.

From the “Related Videos,” you can also see the last ten seconds of the last game of the Winnipeg Jets and the send-off they got (as well as what must’ve been Kelly Hrudey’s first year as a broadcaster — dig the hair).

Phoenix is in worse than the Jets were.

Seriously.

Too many memories of a similar situation one year later in Hartford. Never completely goes away.

I understand James’s point about Winnipeg having trouble, but I just don’t think you can rule out the possibility. Winnipeg is a steady showing slow but steady growth and anyone who lives in the city can see the city expanding its building efforts a lot more than in the past. I can certainly see a NHL team in Winnipeg future and probably than many others would think.

I’m not convinced that Winnipeggers will consistently shell out the 60-70 dollars a ticket to make it go. I’d love to be wrong, but I’ve lived here a long time witnessing the contrary. One advantage Winnipeg might have is that the building is owned by the people behind the Moose. I can’t see an ownership group here that doesn’t include the True North people, so the revenues from concessions, suites and advertising would be available without going through a third party like Winnipeg Enterprises back in the bad old days.

The one other thing I sense is that whether through relocation or expansion, no Canadian city would get a team if there was the risk of drawing from the revenue sharing pool. A team here would definitely run that risk in bad times. It’s one thing to subsidize fledgling markets in the hopes of growth, but Canada’s not exactly an immature market for the NHL.

Ah, Filmon, Thompson and Loewen. Three complete stooges with zero achievements to speak of. The end game here was part of a scam to help the Tories win the 1995 election – ultimately, the NDP needed to pick up four more suburban seats, so the Tories ended up not needing to do it. There was very little support for corporate welfare in Winnipeg, and yes, it now appears to have been the right decision.

Interesting who had the right perspective in that piece: the one guy who says the provincial and federal governments knew what was going to happen all along; and the girl who’s high on glue who says the money should go elsewhere in the community.

The present CBA is designed to prevent teams from falling into the kind of financial hole that would result in relocations – the NHL could have done this at any time and protected hockey in Canada, but it has chosen to protect teams in the Sun Belt…