Judgement Day for Atlanta, Winnipeg

Frank Doyle tries to separate truth from fiction in the will they/won’t they breaking news of Winnipeg being the new home of the Atlanta Thrashers.

The people of Winnipeg have taken to the streets. Revellers spilled out into the night to celebrate the return of big time hockey to Manitoba. They gathered at the corner of Portage and Main, the heart of Winnipeg, a heart that was broken when the Winnipeg Jets packed up and left for Phoenix fifteen years ago where they whooped and cheered and hollered.

The question is: are those celebrations premature, or his hockey really returning to Winnipeg?

The story began last night when the highly respected Toronto Globe and Mail Who claimed that “sources in Winnipeg suggest that the Thrashers had in fact been the primary target of potential owners Mark Chipman and David Thomson all along, and that some months back, the NHL board of governors quietly approved the sale and transfer of the team, pending the negotiation of a purchase agreement between Atlanta Spirit LLC, the Thrashers’ owners, and True North [owners of the MTS Center, where a transferred team will play its home games].”

The NHL responded quickly, but not definitively. ESPN reported NHL commissioner Gary Bettman as saying “”there’s no deal. I can tell you that with certainty that there is no deal for this team to move. Am I predicting that there will never be or that there won’t be at some point in time? No, I’m not saying there is or there isn’t.”

Not saying there is or there isn’t doesn’t really do much to clear it up. But it’s instructive to look at the story on the NHL site itself, and what they say on the matter.

The link reads “Report: Thrashers Sold to Winnipeg Group.” The story describes the Globe and Mail report as “unconfirmed and to this point unsubstantiated” (my italics). And it’s also interesting to note that story doesn’t read “Bettman Denies Report.” It doesn’t say that at all.

NHL betting is what we do here, and my dollar says the Globe and Mail knows what’s going on. A CBC report from earlier in the week sounded a note of caution about the Manitoban economy’s ability to support an NHL franchise, but the nexus between the US and Canadian currencies have changed since the hockey flight from Canada in the 1990s. Our dollar says it’s about to get a whole lot warmer at Portage and Main. Hockey’s coming back to Winnipeg.