Sports: Just Wild about Blue Jackets

Just Wild about Blue Jackets

Fans in Columbus, Ohio, and Minneapolis/St. Paul are celebrating their new hockey franchises. Do they know they'll be duking it out for 29th and 30th place - for a while?

By TOM JONES

MINNEAPOLIS -- So the land of Woody Hayes is getting a hockey team. And so, too, again, is the Land of 10,000 Lakes. Who woulda thunk it?

Back in 1993, the odds of the NHL ever returning to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul were about as likely as that state electing, say, a professional wrestler as governor. And hockey in Ohio? What, Ohio-native Pete Rose might run out of sports to bet on?

Yet, here we are, as the NHL expands yet again, adding two new teams, looking to two very different hockey markets. One team goes to Columbus, Ohio, a new territory on the NHL map, a place where Ohio State football is surpassed only by God, food and oxygen. And the other goes to Minnesota, where professional hockey always has taken a back seat to college and high school hockey.

But excitement in those two cities makes it appear as if the NHL made the right moves. The Minnesota Wild, led by former Montreal Canadiens Doug Risebrough (general manager) and Jacques Lemaire (coach), sold nearly 16,000 season tickets, and would've sold more if ownership hadn't decided to stop selling them. The home opener sold out in less than two minutes.

And Columbus, led by general manager Doug MacLean and coach Dave King, expects to be at or near 100 percent capacity all season. It sold out its first preseason game.

"It sounds like the people in Columbus are really excited, and as far as Minnesota goes," said Islanders star and Minnesota native Mark Parrish, "not having a team there just doesn't seem right."

If that's true, things haven't been right the past seven years, not since the Minnesota North Stars moved to Dallas in the spring of 1993. For years, Minnesota hockey fans, bitter about the move, turned their back on the NHL and further embraced college and prep hockey. Time has healed the pain, though, and excitement for the pay-for-play hockey players is back.

Now, for the slap in the face for all those excited fans in Minnesota and Columbus: Expansion teams stink. Not just some, mind you, not just those with dimwits for general managers. Every single one, at least in the latest wave of expansion in the 1990s, was awful, pitiful, pathetic and every other adjective similar to ones used to describe, oh say, the Lightning the past few years.

Some were a little better than others. Some a little worse. None, though, were really any good. The best expansion team of the '90s? That would be the Florida Panthers, whose overachieving ways shocked everyone and they still lost more games than they won. More often, expansion teams are like the 1992-93 Ottawa Senators, which won only 10 of 84 games. Or last season's Atlanta Thrashers, which lost 61 games.

The bottom line is the good folks of the Twin Cities or Columbus don't have to worry about mapping out a Stanley Cup parade route for at least a few years. Not when the stars of those teams are players such as Ron Tugnutt (Columbus) and Sergei Krivokrasov (Minnesota). Not that fans in either city should rush out and buy jerseys with names on the back anyway.

"There's always been and there certainly will be a lot of turnover the first two years," Nashville GM David Poile said. "It's just the beginning of the process."

For their starts, the teams are forming different plans. Columbus is going older, more experienced, looking for quick success. Minnesota is going young, building for the long haul.

"Our talent level is pretty high for an expansion team, you know?" Columbus' King told the Columbus Dispatch. "It's not like we don't have talent. We've got talent. We've got speed. We've got determined and gritty guys. So we have all the elements that you look for on a team."

Meantime, Minnesota's Risebrough said, "We want to build a foundation for a team that once it becomes successful, it stays successful. But we want do start that success now. The expectations, though, have to be realistic. But I expect to have a team of players who play with passion and character."

Two very different plans in two very different markets. They each have just one thing in common: an NHL team to call their own.

-- Former Times staff writer Tom Jones covers the Wild for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.