On Sunday night, the Atlanta Thrashers took the ice for their season opener, and began their year in the dismal fashion to which their fans must be accustomed: With a 5-1 loss at the hands of the Montreal Canadiens.
Goaltender Ondrej Pavelec had a forgettable night, allowing those five goals on 22 shots and defenseman Dustin Byfuglien was an unremarkable -2, while forward Nik Antropov notched the first goal of Atlanta's season.
But if you watched that game, of course, you know it wasn't the Thrashers who opened their season Sunday night.
It was the Winnipeg Jets, a Canadian franchise that became a victim of hockey's 1995 ""Southern Strategy,"" in which commissioner Gary Bettman helped move teams from more traditional markets to bigger metro areas in warmer parts of the U.S. that weren't what people thought of as hockey towns. As a result, cities like Winnipeg, Hartford, Conn., and Minneapolis, whose fans may have been more passionate but less numerous, lost their teams to cities like Phoenix, Raleigh, N.C., and Dallas. The fans there might not want a team as much, the strategy went, but with more people in the area it meant more TV revenue and more seats to sell.
This offseason, though, a group of Canadian investors bought the struggling Atlanta expansion franchise and moved it back to the city hockey abandoned 16 years ago. And so when the Jets took the ice in Winnipeg Sunday night, they did so in front of 15,000 fans who were ecstatic to have their team back.
Here's the thing about the Jets, though: A fresh coat of paint and a new location is all that separates them from the Thrashers. Winnipeg is going to be pretty bad this year, and its fans are going to see a lot more games like Sunday night's than they are impressive displays of hockey excellence.
A Stanley Cup parade is not going to wind its way through the streets of downtown Winnipeg this year, and it probably won't for a while.
But ask one of those 15,000 people who went to Sunday's game if the most important thing in the world to them is the Jets' record this year. Ask them if they care that the only difference between the team they cheered for and the team that went 34-36-12 and placed fourth from the bottom in the Eastern Conference is a new name.
They don't care that they're watching the Atlanta Thrashers, and, while they care about the team's record, for now what really matters is that the team exists at all right now. Jets fans must be handling cynicism and snark like they're coated in Teflon – we can say all we want about how dumb they are for getting excited over a low-level expansion team and we can criticize them for wildly cheering a 5-1 loss, but at the end of the day none of that matters as much as the simple truth that their team is back.
All they cared about Sunday night is that they saw their team, playing on their ice in their arena in their city.
The simple fact of having a sports team matters to fans much more than how successful that team is. It's easy to look past that fact because for so many franchises their existence is a given—they don't have to, and shouldn't have to, constantly wonder what would happen if their teams left them.
Think of someone who either saw their team leave, though, or got a franchise back. A Washington Nationals fan would almost definitely say they aren't happy with the way that franchise has performed in the past few years. But would they want to go back to the way things were a few years ago, when the Nationals didn't exist and there wasn't baseball in D.C.? Of course not.
The simple fact of having a team means a lot, and it's hard to understand that until someone takes it away or tries to take it away. Yeah, it's for civic pride and it's for the love of the game and it's for all that corny and uncool stuff that you're supposed to outgrow when you realize sports is just a business, and a dirty one at that.
But step out of the snark and cynicism that so often pervades sports fandom, and watch the highlights of the Winnipeg Jets' first game. Watch the build up to the puck drop, watch Nik Antropov's goal and watch and listen as they cheer the final horn.
Atlanta Thrashers or not, that's their team. Good for them.
