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(01-04-2017 02:22 PM)Cyniclone Wrote:  Hockey has evolved into a baseball-style minor-league system, and on top of those issues, the Admirals were stuck with an absentee owner some 2,000 miles away that couldn't divest of them fast enough and almost certainly will pull their affiliation at the first available opportunity. The ECHL they're in now bears little resemblance to the ECHL of the Hampton Roads Admirals' glory days — for starters, while they had a player agreement with the Capitals, player development for the next level was their only reason to exist, and the team was built for success at that level (and if an Olaf Kolzig or Patrick Lalime came out of it, hey, so much the better). Plus they had red-hot rivalries with a bunch of regional teams, and a blue-hot one with the Richmond Renegades. Now the Admirals are playing AA-level hockey with no natural rivals and for a parent club that tolerates their existence at best. It's a sad state of affairs, but when you consider that hockey in the Mid-Atlantic has eroded greatly in the past 20 years (only one minor-league team in Virginia, only two in North Carolina, and the Carolina Hurricanes are constantly subject to relocation chatter), maybe it's an inevitable close to this particular chapter of Hampton Roads sports.

The Ads may be better off next year when Edmonton rolls out of town and a new parent club comes in and the new owners having a full offseason to do things. The biggest error they made after the forced drop to the ECHL was not adjusting ticket prices to reflect the lower quality of play. My family had season tickets from 1990/90-2014/15. We dropped them after the move down to the ECHL due to the high ticket cost. My season tickets would have dropped $50. That reflected the reduced number of games at Scope rather than the drop in quality of play. The Ads are quick to beat their chests about how their ticket prices are in the lower third of the ECHL. While this is correct it is ludicrous to expect people to pay the same for ECHL hockey that they were paying for AHL hockey. Hampton Roads can be a successful hockey market if marketed properly. Sadly, it has not been marketed properly here in a while.