Who cares if a team moved or folded? Bigger things to worry about.
I am not going to go looking for some sports articles concerning minor league hockey teams to find something that says they folded. The Ice Cats do not exist. The Phantoms do not exist. The Riverment do not exist. The Iowa Hogs do not exist. The AHL Utah Grizzlies do not exist. The legal entities that owned those teams do not exist. What happened to them? Legal entities cannot just disappear? The get dissolved, folded, go out of business, whatever you want to call it.
The franchise license, the AHL's permission to operate a franchise, NEVER goes away, they just move who has control of it. The only ones that can increase and decrease the license amount is the AHL BOG and technically they folded the Texas Stars. They deleted the license under which they were operating when they acquired the Iowa Hogs license.
I am not going to rely on some sports writers to understand business terms.
210...not looking for a fight or the such but i will say this in tommy's defense.....he may not be the "grand poobah" of business etc....but I do personally know the guy and can tell you that his "real job" is to travel the world...not city or state or country....as a business consultant on job projects to assist companies in the start-up of their business and the building of their buildings etc. Truth is he has a degree in business finance and truthfully probably makes more in 1 month than you and i do in a year combined. Now having said that... I understand making money isn't knowledge, but his business degree and all the other is only a result of knowledge. That's why when it comes to business i usually just be quite since he knows vastly more than I ever could.
That's all great, but that doesn't change the fact those teams are considered to have moved and not folded.
I am not talking the license. I am talking the legal entity that owned the team and the team itself. There is no Ice Cats. There is no Peoria Rivermen. You can sit there and say they moved but if McDonalds in your town moved to California and called themselves Mickey D's, you wouldn't say "they moved". You would say the McDonalds in my town is no longer in business. They closed up shop and left.
Closing up shop and leaving is folding. This is what the Ice Cats did. Rivermen, etc.
This is what GF is going to do. They will close up shop and leave.
Moving involves moving employee as well as the team without a legal entity change.
Look, this conversation is much ado about nothing. 210's right. Fold means a franchise is entirely dead, like the Chicago Express. The team wasn't sold to another group or relocated to another market, it just closed shop entirely and no longer exists in any sort of form.
Relocation is a different thing even if the end result in the former market is still the same, i.e. no longer having a team.
What happened to the parent entity that formerly owned it is inconsequential. Them going belly up doesn't mean that the franchise is no more if they were sold and relocated.
Valid points, but the problem is that you're making an argument that folding no longer happens, not that a number of the previously mentioned franchises that relocated folded instead. The first point is debatable, but the second is not. The IceCats were sold and became the Rivermen who were then sold and are now the Comets. That franchise has a direct lineage from Quebec to Springfield to Syracuse back to Springfield to Worcester to Peoria to Utica, even if they changed hands and names a number of times. Just as the lineage from the Kansas City Scouts to the Colorado Rockies to the New Jersey Devils is intact as is the case from the Philadelphia Athletics to the Kansas City Athletics to the Oakland Athletics. If you want to say that the old ownership groups (that didn't retain ownership of teams after said moves) folded, then that's one thing, but the franchises themselves did not.
Plus, if the status of a former parent owner is supposedly a critical point, as there are plenty of examples of teams remaining in a market after an old ownership went belly up, notably the Phoenix Coyotes and the Dallas Stars. These teams were sold, just as other teams mentioned were sold, but they managed to find local buyers. Other teams just found out of market buyers.