While I have been visiting and reading this group for a very long time, under a sequence of names as each iteration destroyed some accounts, my first several years here was originally for work. My law firm asked me to monitor the Baum bankruptcy and subsequent events and I was a daily visitor to all the Maricopa filings and rulings. Back then, the tone and tenor of the discussion was quite different. There was a small group of predators, largely Canadian, who wanted the Coyotes to die a thousand horrible deaths, largely because they felt Quebec deserved a team or hockey didn't belong in the desert. There was a small group of fanboys, many of them in Arizona, who quite rightly felt attacked and developed a deep paranoia for anyone who criticized their team. But for the most part, the overwhelming majority of folks on here discussed the BUSINESS of hockey and it was an interesting background to what I was researching.
Well, if you've been around as long as you say, then you
should know that I'm not a "defensive fanboy," and that I've spent almost all of my time on this board trying to be objective and provide a local perspective on things without descending into knee-jerk responses. I've been here 13 years, and only twice have I been censured outright by the moderators (back in 2009, when the Winnipeg folks launched their full-court press against the market).
I'm as interested in the business case around here as anyone else. When CasualFan and BarneyG and OthmarAmmann were here, that's what the discussion mostly was. But there are always tangents, and they aren't started by "fanboys" coming in here to derail the conversation. It's nearly always someone taking some business news and boomeranging it into disparaging the market. If you do a topic search, you'll find several posts from me pleading for the discussion to get back onto business topics rather than pressing some ridiculous culture war.
But you can't have a legitimate Coyotes business thread without any input from Coyotes fans. We are local, we live here, and in many cases we have input based on personal experience with some of the actors. I, for example, have worked with Mayor Weiers' office on several projects unrelated to the team; I've also dabbled some in the local youth and college hockey programs. So I have some perspective on the business case that I feel is valuable to the discussion, and with a couple of exceptions I think folks around here appreciate it.
I think the comments of Llama and his like are mostly nostalgia for the Golden Age when this megathread focussed on the business of hockey.
I think that's heavily revisionist, because over the years I've been here there's been a single underlying premise to Llama's contributions to the megathreads, and that is that the Coyotes are doomed to fail. It is the reverse of the scientific method, in that he takes his thesis and considers it proven, then works backward through evidence to bolster that conclusion. All sorts of other posters around here have come in with personal opinions and prejudices but have kept the discussion limited to business, and those posters are the ones with whom I enjoy the discourse. I don't begrudge people's opinions unless they prejudice their objectivity in the discussion.
I'm not perfectly objective in every opinion I proffer, but I try to admit that when I can, and if I'm proven wrong on an opinion I will politely eat crow. And that's all I want from other posters here. Above all, I just want to talk business, not fandom, not entitlement, not tradition and lack thereof. If that's what you're looking for from this forum, then we'll get along fine.
