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Banner raising: now or later?

When a team wins a banner-worthy title, tradition has it that you raise that banner to the rafters at the home opener of the next season. But is there a valid thought, at least in junior hockey, that the tradition should be broken? (more…)

Examining WHL broadcasts on Root Sports

At this time no. The #WHL and Root Sports don’t have a deal this season. Disappointing. — Ian Furness (@IanFurnessSea) January 1, 2016 Update: This post was originally published on December 20th, 2014. As mentioned by Ian Furness on Twitter on December 31, 2015, the agreement between the WHL and Root Sports Northwest has not […]

Just tricks, no treats: games on Halloween

Earlier last week, the Thunderbirds office sent out an email to season ticket holders. Part of the letter explained why the TBirds were having a game on a Thursday this week: “This rare Thursday game was originally scheduled to be played on Friday, Halloween Night.  Prior experience has indicated that a Halloween Friday Night was not the […]

TBirds attendance trend for 2014-15

Much was made about the fact that there were two teams in the WHL who had attendance increases last season: Portland and Seattle. In fact, the Thunderbirds attendance numbers for last season probably went a long way to their marketing department winning an award from the WHL. It’s early but let’s take a look at […]

WHL website problems

(This post was written earlier in the day and all time references are to the original time of writing) If you’ve been following any WHL bloggers on Twitter over the late summer and the start of the season, you’ve no doubt read their tweets about how frustrating the WHL website has been this year. We’ll […]

Understanding the new WHL playoff format

If you listened to this year’s first edition of the US Division podcast with Scott Sepich, you heard a discussion about the new WHL playoff format. He and Larry Fisher of the Kelowna Daily Courier covered it fairly well.  We’ll take a little bit of a deeper dive and see how it would affect matchups. […]

What would you do?

This isn’t necessarily based on what has been seen so far at training camp. It’s more about what lineup gives the team the best chance of success. The only slot I’m not entirely sold on is Schuldhaus as the 7th defenseman. It’s not because of his skill, I think there is enough there to earn […]

Canadian birds of a feather flock together

Before we get too far into this, let it be known that we fully support the drive to bring the NHL to Seattle. As nearly lifelong NHL fans, nothing would be better than seeing our favorite teams playing our favorite sport in our own city. This post isn’t about whether or not the NHL should […]