Please Loseapeg
Earlier this week, I decided I have never wanted a franchise to finish in that nebulous zone of mediocrity between making the playoffs and getting a lottery pick for more consecutive years than I do the Winnipeg Whatevers.
The way the ownership group has behaved since that presser a few weeks back has been positively abhorrent. That's their prerogative, one supposes, but the handling of the transfer of the team from Atlanta to Winnipeg has been completed with a stunning lack of tact and what seems to be an broad contempt.
They jerked around the team's employees in Atlanta; it was reported somewhere or another that many weren't officially told the team was moving to Winnipeg until the day before the Board of Governors approved the sale.
Then after gutting an admittedly moribund front office, the team told Craig Ramsay, their very good head coach who briefly performed alchemy to make a subaverage team relevant in the division, that he would be welcome to interview for his own job.
This, of course, meant that he would not be able to keep it, but hey, it was the decent thing to do. If "decent" means "really awful." He ended up getting the boot, despite having done nothing wrong or even poorly, just because the franchise wanted to do everything in its power to rid itself of all that American South stink the team had around it.
Further evidence? Go to the team's official website and look at the franchise's all-time roster. Why, no one is on there. It's as if the Thrashers never existed. How remarkably arrogant and profoundly nationalistic.
Plus, the team recently revealed that it would not even give the kids it drafts this weekend a jersey to wear, which is just stupid. But hey, it might say what it's actually going to be called, so hooray for that, right?
Seriously, finish with 87 points every year for the rest of time. Although at this point, getting that many seems hopelessly optimistic.
