Thanks, UConn: Hartford No Longer Stuck To New York Rangers

Mandatory Credit: David Butler II-USA TODAY Sports

Over the past few decades Hartford, Connecticut has been the piñata of the professional sports world. Now, thanks to UConn hockey, the large portion of Hartford’s hockey fan base who’ve been avoiding games downtown for years due to its AHL team’s unending nightmare affiliation with the New York Rangers can at long last come in from the cold.

Let’s back up a bit first though, shall we? We shall.

After forming in Boston, the WHA’s New England Whalers moved to Hartford. In 1979, they became the Hartford Whalers and joined the NHL along with Quebec, Winnipeg and Edmonton.

For 18 NHL seasons they played here and, except for 1985-87 and 1992, they were mostly average-to-awful. They were stuck in a division with Montreal and Boston. (Let’s just say that there were more than a few games, playoffs and non, in which Whalers’ fans could’ve sworn the preferred attire of both the fabled Forum and Garden Ghosts were black and white striped shirts with a splash of orange)

Their front office pulled off some of the worst trades in NHL history. (Perhaps names like Mark Howe, Kevin Dineen, Ron Francis, Ulf Samuelsson and Ray Ferraro ring a bell.)

But despite this, the Whalers were beloved and supported. The fact is throughout the 1980’s they garnered far more support than UConn basketball or the New England Patriots, whose “fan bases” for years could be best described as ‘nonexistent’. Indeed, should you ever visit New England and come away wondering why there are so many people who root for both the Boston Red Sox and New York Giants, well, now you know.

Then one day an NHL team-scavenging carpetbagger named Peter Karmanos bought the Whalers for a song and moved them to the hallowed hockey grounds of North Carolina. Because when one thinks of North Carolina, after that Wright Brothers airplane testing thing at Kittyhawk, one’s mind quickly then jumps to ice hockey. But I digress.

To make a long story slightly longer, around this time Patriots’ owner Robert Kraft pulled the rug out on a nearly-sealed deal to bring the Patriots to Hartford, and remained in Foxboro, MA. These two events contributed greatly to the abandonment of long-awaited plans for a Hartford Renaissance. I’ll refrain from giving an opinion on the Patriots here; just know that there are many in Hartford who will be forever grateful for the Giants’ performances in Super Bowls 42 and 46. But I digress again.

The previous paragraphs were the set-up for the main part of the story. Thanks for hanging in there with me. Ready? Let’s go.

After the Whalers left and the Patriots didn’t come, the powers-that-be in Hartford decided to completely ignore the wishes of the Hartford hockey fan base and-immediately-allow one of the Whalers’ biggest rivals, the New York Rangers, to plant an AHL team on the same ice the Whalers just vacated.

It would be hard to imagine the Rangers then doing more to alienate their affiliate’s new market. And after what clearly seemed to be multiple efforts to shovel dirt over Hartford’s hockey heritage while annexing its existing fan base to add to its own failed time and again, here they still remained.

The Rangers have been both disrespectful and divisive to Hartford, and while the AHL is a league in which affiliations are changed more often than the direction of Ping-Pong balls, they’ve amazingly managed to stay here for 17 years.

By contrast, right up the road the Springfield Falcons have had more affiliates switches during the Rangers tenure in Hartford than my paperclip holder has paperclips.

The irony, of course, is that there are more than half a dozen cities that would happily roll out the red carpet for the Broadway Blueshirts. But yet they remain in the one city that overwhelmingly doesn’t want them. It’s obvious the Rangers don’t care about the divisiveness they’ve created, nor do they at present have any motivation to leave. They are in the very rare business situation in which a company, should it choose to, can continually ignore and its customers requests with little-to-no negative financial impact to itself.

The upshot of all this is that, since 1997, many Hartford hockey fans couldn’t stomach watching games in their own town. So instead some went to nearby AHL venues, (of which there are several) some adopted other NHL teams, and some stopped going to hockey games altogether.

And while many still hold on to the dream of Hartford’s return to the NHL, it would be nice if Hartford hockey fans whose state has produced numerous NHL players and US Olympians, and who is also home to both of the 2013 NCAA Championship Game participants Yale and Quinnipiac were able to catch some pro hockey they could support within their own state. Or at least within their half of it.

Enter UConn.

This year, UConn hockey joins Hockey East and will play several games at Hartford’s XL Center, which until now was inhabited for hockey solely by the Rangers’ aforementioned AHL Wolf*Pack. So in 2014, finally, Hartford hockey fans will have a choice.

When the Rangers first got here, they were asked by fans to respect the Whalers color scheme, for an appropriate nickname and a return to pro hockey’s (to this day) most recognized goal song, the Brass Bonanza. They responded by giving fans an absurd name, dressed them in identical Rangers colors and kept the song on the shelf. Ridiculously, Whalers banners have come down from the rafters more than once, but after fan protests have been restored.

UConn, by contrast, has already announced they would be employing the Brass Bonanza after goals. And while they can understandably do little with their team colors, they’re a true home team. They once saw their own Todd Krygier drafted by the Whalers; they represent Connecticut and they’re never going anywhere. They haven’t even played a Hockey East home game in Hartford yet, and they already seem to understand the market better than the team that’s been here for two decades does.

It’s no secret the competition in Hockey East will likely not bode well for the initial success of the league’s newly-minted member. But that’s okay. Connecticut fans have been through this before with both the University’s football and basketball programs. They’ll get there.

And the Hartford fan base will have a chance to watch them do so.

Everyone in Hartford wants the Whalers back. We know they would be supported. They’re beloved everywhere now; their merchandise is a top seller and has been flying off of shelves across North America for years. But we still need patience, luck, and most of all a new arena. And until that day comes, or even if it doesn’t, at least now after 17 long years there’s a reason for Hartford hockey fans to return to our capital city to enjoy hockey; the greatest sport the world has yet to come up with.

It’ll also give these fans, after an entire generation, the chance to once again do something that is taken for granted by every other professional sports teams’ fans, at any level, everywhere else in the country: root for the home team.

And really, that should not have been too much to ask.