Now Boarding: A Hockey Team

I'm not sure what else can be said or done for the Pederal Prospects Hockey League to save the league and its member teams from itself. The schedule was released on Friday to little fanfare despite the interest the league believes it has, and I went looking to see if the league was going to take baby steps forward with their newly-expanded map to help the financial situations of a number of teams. As stated, there are some massive distances between franchises this season that a bus ride simply won't cover based on time.

I went digging through the schedule, and one series jumped out at me almost immediately. The Danbury Hat Tricks, located in Danbury, Connecticut, host the Stockton Thunder on March 26 and 27 in a weekend series. Nothing about that should be surprising as it makes sense financially to have teams located 2930 miles apart play multiple games against one another in one trip. Crossing four time zones isn't easy, so you'd expect Stockton to get some "adjustment" time when it comes to bodies adjusting for the time difference, right?

Except you already know that's not the case with the FPHL.

Stockton inexplicably hosts the as-yet-unnamed Oceanside franchise on Wednesday, March 24 in what will be an evening-scheduled game, meaning they will likely need to charter a plane for the trip to Connecticut for the Friday contest against Danbury. There are no commercial flights that fly directly into Danbury that leave from Stockton, and the closest solution would be to Hartford. There is no direct flight from Stockton to Hartford, so the team will need to fly from San Francisco if a direct commercial flight is wanted.

Of course, it's possible that Stockton flies out to the east coast and spends a couple of weeks there playing against teams, but that's also not the case in looking at the schedule. Stockton is due back for April 2 when they host the Indiana Sentinels, and I doubt they're going to be taking a 43-hour bus trip back home after playing the Hat Tricks. The FPHL just went from a bus league to a national league that requires plane travel in one summer due to inexplicable decisions.

If you're thinking, "This is a mess," you're not alone on that.

If you're the Minnesota Northern Lights franchise, you have to hope that every game sells out with the number of California trips that the team will make. According to the schedule, Minnesota visits Oceanside on October 23 and 25. They do not visit either of Stockton or Fresno on that trip. Minnesota returns to California to play Stockton on November 25 before playing Fresno on November 27 and 28, but they don't visit Oceanside on that trip. The Northern Lights then go home to play Stockton on December 4 and 5 before going back to Fresno for games on December 11 and 12, but they don't visit Stockton or Oceanside in that visit. Who is designing this schedule?

Unless this league has a pile of new investors with deep pockets, the scheduling for the FPHL is ludicrous. Seemingly intelligent road trips are ignored and additional unnecessary travel is scheduled all over the place despite the FPHL specifically saying they'd do what they could to reduce unnecessary travel in a previous press release.

Just ignore that part of the press release because they really didn't mean it. They only published it for optics. Unnecessary travel is, apparently, necessary, especially for the Frontier Division teams.

We saw two teams leave the FPHL after the proposal of this California experiment, and I suspect there may be more teams who question the necessity of including California if it blows up their travel budgets. Minnesota makes three trips to California in three months to play seven road games, and Stockton flies across the continental US for two road games before coming home. Make it make sense.

There may be far less "unnecessary travel" next season if FPHL teams fold or abandon the league this season due to rising costs. Is that worth the cost of an expansion experiment? I guess we'll find out!

Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!

Priced Out Of The Market

As you likely know, I'm not a hockey executive. Frankly, with the state of economics in hockey right now, I'm not sure I'd want to be working in a front office at the moment because it seems like everyone is either delusional or insane. Or maybe both. Being that I'm not qualified to diagnose anyone as senile, though, it became somewhat hard to ignore that the new AHL team in Hamilton might be on a fast track to another relocation thanks to their ticket prices. Welcome to professional hockey, Hamilton! Bring your wallets!

I want you to remember that we're talking about an AHL team that finished in fourth-place in its division and lost to the fifth-place team in the qualification round. The Bridgeport Islanders were a 34-30-8 team last season, and only made the playoffs twice in the last five seasons where they didn't win a round. This will be important.

First, here's the seating map at TD Coliseum for Hammers games.

Feel free to click on the image to see it larger, but the season-ticket costs for 36 home games in Hamilton range from $875 up to $2238 per seat. If you're doing the calculations for a per-game cost, the cheapest seats are $24.31 per game while the most expensive will seat cost you $62.17 to watch the Hammers. While these prices aren't financially crippling at a per-game rate, $62 to watch a middle-of-the-road AHL team seems like the supply-and-demand pricing atrributed to hockey tickets may not be entirely true. At all.

If you go down the road to Toronto where the Calder Cup champions play, the Toronto Marlies have their season ticket prices posted.

How is it that the Calder Cup champions have less expensive tickets than an AHL who has done nothing except change its name and logo six times in its existence? One can argue that Toronto's saturated professional sports market forces the Marlies to keep their prices lower, but that doesn't explain why Hamilton's tickets cost more.

If supply-and-demand is the factor for AHL tickets, the Belleville Senators are the only professional team in Belleville, Ontario which sits two hours east of Toronto. You'd expect them to follow Hamilton's idea of charging a little more to come and see them due to the demand for their tickets, yet, as you can see to the right, that's not the case. The cheapest ticket in Belleville is $4.31 less than Hamilton's cheapest ticket, yet the B-Sens have just as many Calder Cup playoff appearances and series wins as the Hammers. If you're scratching your head over these AHL ticket prices, you're not the only one.

I want to call your attention to the sections on Hamilton's seat map to emphasize just how insane this pricing model is that the Hammers conjured. Sections 105-107 are priced at $1808 for the season if you sit there ($50.22 per ticket). However, if you want to sit in an aisle seat, that's going to cost you more. In fact, $328 more ($9.11 per game more). An aisle seat in that section will set you back $2136 ($59.33/game) as opposed to the guy sitting next to you who paid $1808. Since when did sports teams adopt airline pricing for seats?

I like an aisle seat as much as the next person, but there is no way I'm paying more for an aisle seat when I'm already paying for the most expensive seats in the building. I get that's how the supply-and-demand model works, but this is taking it a step beyond acceptable. If I want to sit with my friends in seats 1-4 in row 12 in section 107, why am I paying more than my three friends? How is that fair?

NHL ticket prices are ridiculous to begin with, so I'm not making those comparisons. We have a total of one ECHL team in Canada, so comparing AHL and ECHL prices won't make much sense to Canadian hockey fans either. Comparing the AHL markets across this country to one another does make sense when it comes to supply-and-demand theories, and there are a total of zero AHL teams adjusting their pricing for tickets to see the Hamilton Hammers play. Belleville's home opener is against Hamilton, and they didn't raise their prices because tickets to see the Hammers simply aren't in demand.

Congratulations to the City of Hamilton on getting an AHL team whose ticket prices are higher than any other AHL team in the country including the defending Calder Cup champions. Enjoy your fourth-place team at premium prices while you can because I suspect there won't be many people in the stands at these prices. And I say that because the Hammers likely won't be in Hamilton long unless the team's profit-driven philosophy changes... which doesn't seem likely.

Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!

Benny, Mick E., and Icy?

Virtually every team on the planet has a mascot. They usually have the role of being an ambassador for the team while entertaining fans, but mascots are usually in a one-to-one relationship with a team. Rarely do we see mascots moving between teams, but there have been a handful who have made the transition from one team to another like Youppi! in Montreal and Sparky the Dragon on Long Island. There is one mascot in hockey, however, who has worked for a number of teams in his career, and one of those teams was the Winnipeg Jets despite him not being listed as an official mascot in the team's history nor being credited for his work!

The mascot pictured above is Icy D. Eagle who appears at the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum for every Fort Wayne Komets game. What's cool about Icy is that he didn't start out as the Komets' mascot, but moved to join the Komets after the Salt Lake Golden Eagles moved following the 1993-94 season to become the Detroit Vipers. It's reported that Icy made the trip to Fort Wayne for the 1994 IHL All-Star Game and fell in love with the Komets and the fans, but he officially became the Komets' mascot in the 1994-95 season!

I'll tip my cap to Friend of the Blog Fiona Quinn who is doing exemplary work in compiling the full history of the Fort Wayne Komets. Fiona's been working at this project for a few years now, and she reached out to me with an interesting question. It reads,

"Hi Teebz!!! I have a question. In 1994-95, Icy was in Winnipeg for a game and we were wondering if there was any way you could find a picture of him up in Winnipeg?"

At first, this question had me confused because the 1994-95 season would still be when the Winnipeg Jets were playing here before their move to Arizona. As we know, the Jets had a mascot in Benny, so having a second mascot in the arena who wasn't affiliated with the team didn't make much sense. However, I trust Fiona's research skills, so this sounded like something that needed a little investigating.

According to what she could find, she believed the games where Icy appeared in Winnipeg happened on March 10 and 11, 1995. After a quick check online, the Jets did indeed have back-to-back games that weekend against the Dallas Stars and the Los Angeles Kings, so the possibility of Icy being in Winnipeg became a little more real.

The next place I went to check for evidence of Icy's visit and appearance in Winnipeg was the newspaper archive. 1995 was long before the internet became what it is today, so the newspaper archive likely held the answer. As you can see to the right, Tim Campbell had documented Icy's visit to Winnipeg at the two games on Thursday, March 9, 1995, so we got one step closer to seeing some sort of visual evidence that Icy was at the Winnipeg Arena. 1995 was a tough era for images being online, so this is where I hit a wall.

Despite me looking for any and all newspapers who would have covered the Jets, Stars, and Kings, none of them seemingly had photographers who captured the work done by Icy in Winnipeg. I get that an opposing team's mascot wouldn't likely appeal to Stars fans or Kings fans, so I can understand why they wouldn't have made a big deal out of Icy being in Winnipeg. However, you'd think the Winnipeg newspapers would make some mention or grab a pciture of Icy being there outside of the small blurb above, right? Apparently not.

Not all hope was lost of finding an image of Icy, though, as I hit YouTube to see if the full games were posted to their site. The March 11 game against Los Angeles came up first, and it was produced by Prime Sports which covered the Los Angeles Kings. I had my doubts that a Kings-backed broadcast would show anything other than Kings content, and those doubts were confirmed as there was no mention nor video evidence of Icy on the Kings' broadcast that day.

My last hope was the January 10 game against the Dallas Stars, and this one gave me more hope as Winnipeg-based CKND produced this broadcast! I scrolled through the action as I watched for any sort of crowd shot that may include Icy, and my faith in local broadcasting was restored at the 19:06 mark as John Garrett was speaking!
We now have visual evidence that Icy D. Eagle was in Winnipeg for the Jets-Stars game on March 10, 1995 while wearing a Winnipeg Jets jersey with #0 on it and working as a Jets mascot! Fiona is correct!

Honestly, I didn't even know this happened. Benny was the only mascot I ever associated with the Jets, and Mick E. Moose only came about thanks to the Manitoba Moose who played in the IHL and AHL. At no point was I aware that Icy D. Eagle had a two-game stint as a Winnipeg Jets mascot if it wasn't for Fiona's dedication to the Fort Wayne Komets' history. I'm not sure if the Jets are even aware about Icy's appearance as I can't find any information that links Icy and Winnipeg outside of that Winnipeg Free Press blurb posted above.

Major stick-tap to Fiona Quinn and her outstanding work as the Fort Wayne Komets' team historian for sending me down this path. Not only would I have not looked for this piece of hockey history had it not been for Fiona's prompt, but I wouldn't even have associated Icy with the Winnipeg Jets. Her effort in researching this led me to Icy being a Winnipeg Jets mascot which has blown my mind because I had no idea this even happened! Was Icy the only mascot who got this opportunity? Where was Benny in all of this? How many other mascots got this kind of opportunity with the Jets? These questions may go unanswered thanks to time, but we can officially say, thanks to Fiona's relentless research on all things Komets, that Icy D. Eagle was a Jets mascot for at least one game!

Don't be fooled by other ornithological mascots like Gulliver in San Diego or Swoop in Philadelphia when it comes to which bird mascot is the best. Icy D. Eagle holds that title, and is a regular in the nominations for the annual ECHL Mascot of the Year award. He's beloved for his antics at Komets games, he's an outstanding ambassador for the Komets' brand, and he's clearly good enough for an NHL team as the Winnipeg Jets wanted him for two games in 1995!

Because she is entirely responsible for me doing a deep dive into Icy's time in Winnipeg, please check out the Komets all-time record book edited by Fiona and Komets' radio play-by-play broadcaster Shane Albahrani. And when I say edited, I really mean "did all the research and compiled all the information". These two are vitally important cogs in the Komets organization considering all they do for the team and Komets fans, and I'm forever grateful to call Fiona a friend!

Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!

The Hockey Show - Episode 722

The Hockey Show, Canada's only campus-produced radio show that strictly talks hockey, is back in the confines of the UMFM studios tonight for some chatter about the state of hockey once more! Usually, you expect the summer to be a little slower when it comes to news stories, but there seems to be significant news happening each and every week this summer so we're going to keep talking about it! We'll get into more stories tonight on The Hockey Show at 5:30pm CT!

Tonight, Teebz and Jason will attempt to make sense of a number of stories from the hockey world including the City of Ottawa potentially changing directions with respect to the Charge, the NHL taking over production of game broadcasts and why that's a terrible idea, the FPHL going completely insane, some new logos, the Aquilinis making more crazy demands, and anything else we can get into the hour. It's a busy show with lots to discuss, so make sure you're ready for The Hockey Show at 5:30pm CT on one of 101.5 FM, Channel 718 on MTS TV, or via UMFM.com!

If you live outside Winnipeg and want to listen, we have options! The UMFM website's streaming player works well if you want to listen online. We also recommend Radio Garden if you need an easy-to-use online stream. If you're more of an app person, we recommend you use the TuneIn app found on the App Store or Google Play Store.

If you have questions, you can email all show queries and comments to hockeyshow@umfm.com! Tweet me anytime with questions you may have by hitting me up at @TeebzHBIC on Twitter! I'm here to listen to you, so make your voice heard! And because both Teebz and Jason are on the butterfly app where things are less noisy, you can find Teebz here and Jason here on Bluesky!

Tonight, Teebz and Jason talk big mistakes, bad broadcasts, league madness, new looks, bad teams, and much more exclusively on 101.5 UMFM and on the UMFM.com web stream!

Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!

The Final Day

The HBIC Music Festival comes to a close today on this third day of looking at musicians wearing or holding hockey jerseys, and it's a day where every other league outside of the NHL gets to shine. Honestly, if I were a touring musician, I'd want more of these lesser-known teams in my closet because that's the sign of a true hockey fan. In saying that, though, these musicians seen today are doing their part in supporting the lesser-seen teams! Of course, if you know of a band or artist I've missed, please send the image(s) through to me via email! Don't forget to check out all the jerseys over at the HBIC Musicians in Jerseys database, but let's get into the final day of music fun at this summer's HBIC Music Festival!

We'll start on the international stage where we find two Canadian artists sporting the maple leaf! Simple Plan's Chuck Comeau looks like he's ready to take the ice in his Team Canada jersey, and Our Lady Peace's Raine Maida shows his support for Team Canada at the 4 Nations Face-Off! Hands up for those good ol' Canadian boys!

We move to the EIHL who has a couple of acts at the festival. The Sheffield Steelers gifted Def Leppard with personalized jerseys for each band member while Rod Stewart shows his support for the Coventry Blaze! For those that are unaware, Liam Stewart, Rod's son from his marriage with model Rachel Hunter, played as a forward for the Blaze in the 2016-17 season and has represented Great Britain internationally! In that 2017 season with Coventry, Liam scored nine goals and 20 points in 49 games before moving to Guildford in 2018!

We'll move to the AHL who sent two musicians to the festival as well. Rapper Trippie Redd might be the only musician I've seen in a Bridgeport Islanders jersey while Dan Campbell of rock band The Wonder Years shows off another AHL team who no longer exists in his Philadelphia Phantoms jersey! Two former teams for one league!

We'll get to see the PWHL debut their first acts at the HBIC Music Festival as well this year! PVRIS vocalist Lynn Gunn took the stage in a Boston Fleet jersey, guitarist and keyboardist Leandra Earl of Beaches was spotted in a PWHL Toronto jersey from the Sceptres' first season, and Jonathan Cain of Journey took the stage and played the keyboard in an Emma Greco Vancouver Goldeneyes jersey!

Of course, there were some musicians sporting jerseys from CHL and USHL teams this year. Simple Plan's Chuck Comeau was on the ice in an autographed Quebec Remparts jersey while also sporting a black Quebec Remparts jersey, Shockwire wore a Peterborough Petes jersey in a video, Cape Breton's own Sunsetto took the stage in a Cape Breton Screaming Eagles jersey, Mitchell Tenpenny took the stage in a Calgary Hitmen jersey, Bailey Zimmerman was on stage in a Sioux Falls Stampede jersey, and, in one of the most awesome photos ever, Jon Bon Jovi showed his support for the Sudbury Wolves by wearing one of their jerseys! How awesome is that last image?

We have a strange jersey that was seen at the festival as guitarist Greg Leskiw of The Guess Who was on stage beside Burton Cummings in what looks like a WHA Winnipeg Jets jersey, but the WHA Jets never wore that design! Further to this, the Johnstown Jets never wore a diagonal "Jets" sweater either. I have no idea whose jersey it is, but he's wearing #25 on the back as well. If you want to take a closer look, the footage of the concert can be seen here. If you know whose jersey Leskiw is wearing, drop the info in the comments!

We have a couple of SPHL jerseys making appearances at the HBIC Music Festival this year! Journey's Jonathan Cain sported an Evansville Thunderbolts jersey on stage as he played guitar, and Bailey Zimmerman was on stage in a Huntsville Havoc "Retro Rush" jersey! That Huntsville specialty jersey is awesome!

The ECHL had one act on the HBIC Music Festival stage as Journey's Jonathan Cain was on stage wearing a Worcester Railers jersey!

The BCHL makes a rare appearance on the HBIC Music Festival stage, but Shockwire was wearing a Chilliwack Chiefs jersey in a video!

And the final act for the HBIC Music Festival takes us to the NCAA world where Jonathan Cain of Journey was on stage in a University of South Carolina Gamecocks jersey! For those unaware, the Gamecocks are the defending AAU College Hockey Division 1 Champions after being ranked fourth in the nation last season! Winning the national championship and having Journey on your side? That's a great season!

That officially clears out the folder on my desktop of all the musicians in jerseys! I'll start looking for and collecting new images once again, but that's a big job off the checklist. Again, if you want to send in a band or musician for the database, please send the image(s) through to me via email! Just be sure you check the HBIC Musicians in Jerseys database first so we're not duplicating work!

Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!