Nails in the Hockey Coffin

After months of positive reporting about the efforts to return minor league hockey to the country’s largest coliseum with a major tennant, a.k.a., the Greensboro Coliseum, the News and Record drives the nail into the 2007-2008 Season Hopes. In an article today, Robert Bell and the header-line writers call hockey dead for this year.

Making hockey affordable in Greensboro (or any city) requires that everything fail into place just right. The plan was to move a failing franchise to Greensboro. Unfortunately, even a failing franchise is worth some money and that value at this time was too high in the scheme of things to make hockey in Greensboro affordable.

The ECHL has several failing franchises as a result of expansion and has even used Hurricane Katrina as an excuse to keep some of these franchises technically active even though they have not played a game in two years.

The Greensboro Hockey Booster Club will be meeting January 31st at 7:00 PM at the Golden Corral off Wendover Avenue to discuss this and future plans.

Ice Hockey was one of the few regularly scheduled events that was ever profitable in the Greensboro Coliseum (89-96 Monarchs), where both the Coliseum and the owners were happy. It’s one of the reasons that the coliseum continues to find the right match to bring hockey back. We certainly have not heard the last of hockey in Greensboro.