Curtain Call - Atlanta Hockey

From 1966 to 1970, the NHL exploded in terms of league size, going from it’s “Original Six” teams to FOURTEEN in the space of just a half-decade. The plan was to remain that size for at least a couple years, but the emergence of a competitor in the form of the World Hockey Association or WHA complicated that. Now, if the league still wanted access to as-of-yet-untapped markets, they wouldn’t be able to sit idly by and let the dust settle before planting even more new franchises. One of those markets with which they were concerned was New York’s Long Island, which would receive the Islanders franchise; and the other was Atlanta, or more accurately the Southern United States in general.

If one accepts the Mason-Dixon line as an arbitrary boundary for the South (I know that’s already a massive can of worms but we need to make a cutoff somewhere), the only franchise prior to the 1970s that fell in “the South” was the Los Angeles Kings - and I’m guessing that if you’d balk at the Mason-Dixon line being part of the South, you’d probably balk at the Los Angeles being considered part of it too. Much as Atlanta’s baseball team would one day come to claim vast swaths of the southern regions of the United States, the hope was that the new franchise set to take the ice in 1972 would be able to capture that attention as much as the recent Kings, St. Louis Blues, and Minnesota North Stars had been able to in their new homes. Ice hockey and the Atlanta Flames in particular were sure to become the hottest ticket in town.

This proved to be incorrect.

Atlanta’s hockey team flamed out (sorry) in under a decade, having only once cracked 90 points in a season and managing wins in just two playoffs games during their 8-year run. While they were just a boring unimpressive on the ice rather than outright terrible, the fact that their home of Omni Coliseum had no luxury suites (and was one of the only such arenas for which that was true) also meant that gate receipts were even more important to their bottom line than the average team’s. And so, when it turned out that fans didn’t want to see the ice men cometh as much as the league had hoped, they up and moved to Calgary in western Canada before the start of the 1980/81 season.

Atlanta would go all of the ‘80s without any king hockey team at any level before welcoming an International Hockey League team called the Atlanta Knights in 1992 that served as a feeder for the Tampa Bay Lightning, another vanguard in the NHL’s ever southward march. Briefly a four-sport city again, Atlanta even got to celebrate a Turner Cup win as league champions in just their second season with the Knights.

Unfortunately it was just two years later that the Knights also decided to pack up and head to Canada, making their way to Quebec City.

The good news though is that part of the reason for the Knights being unable to agree to a deal to stay in town was the talk of even more NHL expansion on the horizon. The WHA was now gone, or at the very least absorbed into the NHL with only their best teams remaining under the umbrella of their former rival league. Meanwhile, seven more brand new franchises had come into existence with a continued focus on the sport in the south with different measures of success in cities like Tampa, Anaheim, Miami/Sunrise, and DC (we’re talking south of the Mason-Dixon Line please be gentle). If the times had sufficiently changed and the sport could indeed be sustained in this region, maybe it was time to give Atlanta another chance.

In 1997 the league announced another wave of expansion to take place over the next couple of years to bring them to a total of 30 teams, completing a five-fold period of growth over the previous three decades. First up in 1998 would be another southern presence with the Nashville Predators, followed in 1999 by the new Atlanta franchise owned by the man more responsible for the sports fortunes of the city than almost any other single person: Ted Turner.

Since the arrival of baseball Atlanta had served as the center of pro-sports in the American South, and the return of hockey to Atlanta added it to the ranks of up to ten US cities with a team in each of the major North American pro-sports leagues depending on your definition of cities vs. metropolitan areas (your mileage may vary on examples like the New England Patriots or San Jose Sharks counting for Boston or San Francisco). The Thrashers now made it so that the television mogul Turner owned three of the four teams in Atlanta between them, MLB’s Braves, and the NBA’s Hawks.

Turner, at the very least, was interested in hockey - interested enough to personally influence the use of the state bird as the mascot - but the thing that had doomed the Flames was an eventual lack of interest on the part of the fanbase. All of this was riding on the bet that this time things would be different, more like the teams that had successfully gotten off the ground in neighboring states. With that in mind it does feel a little darkly funny that the hype entering their inaugural season in the pitch to sell season tickets feels so reminiscent of those ultimately-doomed Flames twenty-seven years prior.

The team tried to lean in hard to the Atlanta of it all, starting with their team colors of Atlanta midnight blue, Thrasher ice blue, Georgia bronze, Capitol copper, Peachtree gold, and white (the only shade to not get a fancy descriptor, but also, hockey in Georgia…). They tried to connect to the brief run of the IHL Knights by continuing the shouting of “Knight” during the national anthem’s “gave proof through the night” line. They kept the same radio announcer, Dan Kamal, as the Knights had employed during their brief but successful run. They and the Hawks as co-tenants opened the brand new Philips Arena on the site of Omni Coliseum. And they did all of this with the hope that they, like the other teams that had migrated south here from Milwaukee in the case of the Braves and St. Louis in the case of the Hawks, could nestle their way into this new home.

Based on all accounts I can find, the worst I can say about the Thrashers’ efforts to build a fanbase here is that they were at least more successful than the Flames had been. None other than the aforementioned Dan Kamal remarked that the city’s “hockey aficionados” seemed to have picked up a better knowledge and appreciation of the sport this time around. The fiercest of those fans even set up their own section from which they could ruffle the feathers of opponents: The Nasty Nest.

That was a quote from a superfan and season ticket holder Ted Fouriezos, and I think he’s right - if the team came to town and immediately lit the world on fire where the Flames had previously failed, things might have been different. One problem was that the team largely failed to provide the fans with that winner to love in the early goings. An atrocious three-year stretch to begin play in which they only won a combined 56 games overall did set them up well in the draft, but the team often squandered those opportunities early on with busts like Patrik Stefan and Luke Sellars. 

But the worm did eventually begin to turn as we moved through the ‘00s. The early picks in the draft would eventually yield a couple notable stars: Ilya Kovalchuk would become an eventual three-time All-Star with the team and lead the league in goals in 2003/04 with 41 as a portion of his 328 total with the Thrashers. With the team poised to host the All-Star game at Philips Arena the year following this Kovalchuk breakout, maybe we could have seen a different trajectory; but unfortunately, two key events out of the control of the team would contribute to their eventual downfall.

Kovalchuk wasn’t the only hot young thing for the team - he had actually finished behind teammate and rookie All-Star Dany Heatley for the Calder Trophy the year before, who had then gone on to grace the cover of the videogame NHL 04. Or rather, he graced the cover of some printings. In September, Heatley through a combination of reckless and mildly intoxicated (i.e. below the legal limit) driving caused a horrible wreck that sent both himself and teammate/passenger Dan Snyder to the hospital.

Heatley would eventually recover and return to the ice. Snyder would not, passing away in the hospital six days later.

While the loss of life was by far the worst outcome of this tragedy, it is also worth mentioning that Heatley’s brief career to this point had been the most national exposure the nascent team had received, and the NHL cover was a culmination of that which could have had the Atlanta Thrashers logo sliding into the disc drives of videogame consoles everywhere. Instead, Heatley was replaced by Colorado’s Joe Sakic for subsequent printings, though you can still find some of the Heatleys floating around on the internet.

Still, all of this might have been overcome had the team’s next shot at national attention gone any better. With the emotional roller coaster of 2003/04 behind them, the young core of the Thrashers was ready to build on their performance and the city of Atlanta was set to go even further into hockey madness by hosting the All-Star Game for the 2004/05 season. 

The 2004/05 season unfortunately did not happen.

So instead, after the end of the worst lockout in recent North American pro-sports history, Atlanta was awarded the next available All-Star game during the 2007/08 season. As with their previously planned game, Atlanta had one of their better seasons the year beforehand, with 2006/07 representing not just their first division championship in franchise history but the first postseason appearance by either of the tenants of the Philips Arena since the Hawks made the NBA playoffs in 1994 back in the Omni Coliseum.

Unfortunately, this coinciding of a bright spot on the ice and the shot at national attention was once again squandered due to goings-on taking place around the team. During All-Star weekend, Comissioner Gary Bettman was hounded by questions regarding the long-term stability of the team. Ted Turner had divested of both Philips Arena teams prior to the NHL lockout, and it would later come to light that the consortium of business interestes known as Atlanta Spirit, LLC that took control of both franchises had almost immediately if informally put the Thrashers out on the open market.

Despite Bettman’s insistences, the situation would only deteriorate from this point forward. After the 43-win and 97-point season in 2006/07, they never again exceeded 35 wins and found themselves squarely back in that mediocre middleground. Ownership withheld large extensions for stars and instead traded out players like Kovalchuk rather than lose them for nothing in free-agency; and disputes within the ownership group reportedly led to over $100m in losses, prompting serious talks about finding new buyers for the franchise. For the entirety of the 2010/11 season, the team and fans lived with a sword hanging over their head suspended only by the thin thread of hope that someone from the area would choose to use their wallet to keep the Thrashers in town.

That hope was for naught, but it persisted throughout that year as they whiled away to the end on April 10, 2011 in their home of Philips Arena. It was the end of yet another year that would not end in the playoffs. Making the playoffs only once in an eleven year existence is pretty impressive from a mathematical standpoint, given that more than half of the teams make the league every year in the tournament that has consisted of 16 teams since the 1979/80 season. Sure, the Thrashers would definitely be worse than average at the beginning given their expansion roots, but they’ve been a pretty middle-of-the-road squad for most of that decade’s worth of non-playoff seasons. If you gave them just even 16/30 odds every year (16/28 for their inaugural 1999 season), a team would only have about .05% of a chance to miss out every single year. But I digress.

By the time we get to April it seems as though Atlanta is doomed to lose a second NHL team and third pro-team overall to Canada, with Winnipeg emerging as one of the primary suitors. A vacuum had formed there when their previous NHL franchise, the first Winnipeg Jets, had taken part in the great southern migration to become the Coyotes, and here they were ready to inflict that pain against another city. If any one theme emerges from this series, it could probably be summed up by one of those Facebook panels of text on a color gradient that says “hurt people hurt people”. This April 10 matchup against the Penguins is likely to be the last Atlanta hockey game for a while.

On that day, 16,085 fans filed in to throw dirt on another ultimately losing season. This year wasn’t a total wash, there are some genuine players on this team that will go on to have solid and even All-Star careers in Winnipeg and elsewhere in the league like Dustin Byfuglien, Johnny Oduya, Evander Kane, Blake Wheeler. But none of those are our focus at the very end. Instead, that honor goes to one Nik Antropov.

Nik Antropov is part of the relatively small fraternity of Kazakhstani NHL players; but to be fair he is also technically a part of the much much larger fraternity fo Soviet NHL players, given that his hometown of Oskemen was still located in the Kazakh SSR when he was born in 1980. As he came of age as an amateur player amidst the fall of the Soviet Union, he played for the local Kazzinc-Torpedo in a series of Russia-based leagues that had come about to replace the defunct Soviet Hockey League.

Torpedo, the premier Kazakh club, and the regional stature of the Russian leagues earned Antropov enough international attention to warrant a 10th round pick by the Toronto Maple Leafs in the 1998 NHL Draft. Antropov stood at a relatively-massive 6’6” and as such suffered some injuries during his time with Toronto, but for the most part this was a fantastic value pick in the 10th round for the Leafs. In parts of 9 seasons (a full decade minus the lockout), he averaged about 39 points playing 15 minutes a night in roughly 58 games a year. He split that final season with the Rangers after a mid-season trade ahead of free-agency, and in that offseason Antropov became a Thrasher by way of a four-year deal worth $16.25m.

In both of his first two seasons with the Thrashers, the final ones spent in Atlanta, Antropov appeared in 76 games apiece with a total of 108 points between those two seasons - well above his career averages of 35.8 points in 60.6 games. Well, that was 106 points in his Atlanta tenure prior to this clash with the Penguins to close things out. But though the lowly Thrashers are trailing 5-2 hear at the very end, Antropov managed to get an assist on both of those Atlanta goals, including the one scored by Tim Stapleton 13:15 into the third period - the last goal scored by an Atlanta player to date.

That made the score 4-2 at a time, close enough to maintain tension until Pittsburgh’s Mike Comrie potted an empty-netter with 18:32 remaining to score the very last goal in Philips Arena history to date (and Mike Comrie’s first as a Penguin, and the last goal of his career - a third hip surgery would prompt his retirement the following February). But while there was some finality to these goals, they were not the final moment in Thrashers history. This would be the first time I attempted to do this with a hockey game, but thankfully ESPN once again had the play-by-play data as they had with basketball. Or so I thought.

That is what you find now if you access the ESPN archives for this game - all of the events in the game be they shots, hits, goals, penalties, whatever you can imagine. After all, you have to imagine, because all of the text is just gone. One can tell that the event taking place at 18:32 is a goal with the bolded font and change in score, but we already knew that from the boxscore. With no way to know exactly what these events were, I had to broaden the search and was pleasantly surprised to find the entirety of the game uploaded to YouTube by an account called All About Hockey. The only thing was play-by-play commentary dubbed over it in what appeared to be either Russian or some other eastern European language - but imagine my delight that I would be able to not just settle for what was decided as a play. I’d be able to see the very last Thrasher to ever touch the puck in any capacity.

Following that goal by Comrie, the outcome of the game is all-but-determined. The two teams feint attacks against one another until inevitably a defender deflects a lackadaisical pass to turn the action the other way. A final clear from the Atlanta zone with about 12 seconds sees the Penguins form up for a few final seconds of possession, until we finally find ourselves here.

Nik Antropov, in the “Atlanta midnight blue”, makes one last effort to push into his opponent’s blue line to break it up with a poke check, and the resulting deflection kills the final three seconds. The game is over, the Penguins have won, and the Atlanta Thrashers have come to a close.

As I wrap up I’m thinking about the quote from Thrashers season-ticket-holder Ted Fouriezos “Fans in Atlanta love a winner”. While I’m sure there’s some truth to that - the NL East dominance of Atlanta’s MLB dynasty was just wrapping up but had included 14 consecutive division champions - I disagree that a team needs to win to be loved by Atlanta. The Hawks playoff-less streak that began in 1994 ended up extending all the way to 2015, and with all due respect to the Atlanta Falcons, they are the Atlanta Falcons. It’s completely possible that a Thrashers squad could have stuck around without necessarily winning

Hockey in the Southern United States has only continued to flourish - the Stanley Cup has been won by the Dallas Stars, Tampa Bay Lightning, Carolina Hurricans, Anaheim Ducks, Los Angeles Kings, Washington Capitals, Vegas Golden Knights, and Florida Panthers more recently than it has been won by a Canadian team - but for all that success, Atlanta had now failed to be able to sustain two different NHL franchises. They are in fact one of only two seasons to ever lose two different NHL franchises alongside Quebec City. If you add the fact that the IHL Atlanta Knights actually moved to Quebec City to become the Quebec Rafales, you could argue Atlanta is in some ways the least successful pro-hockey team in NHL history at just managing to keep a team.

Antropov would help debut those brand new Jets jerseys and then remain with the franchise, even scoring the first goal in their new home on October 9 of the following season in a 5-1 loss to Montreal. After appearing in 69 (nice) games that season, he finished out his NHL career with 40 games in Winnipeg for the 2012/13 season. A couple more years back in the KHL and Antropov was done, his role with the brief existence of the Atlanta Thrashers little more than a footnote in a journeyman’s career. 

Except for one thing - if I had a nickel for every notable footnote in the history of the Atlanta Thrashers that Nik Antropov occupied, I would have at the very least two nickels.

What you are looking at is the totality of stats recorded in the overtime of a game between the Atlanta Thrashers and Toronto Maple Leafs from that 2006/07 season in which the Thrashers won their division and made their lone playoff appearance. It is specifically the game from March 29 which secured them their 91st point of the season. In all of the combined history of the Flames and Thrashers in Atlanta to that point, no team had ever exceeded 90 before, and even that plateau had only been reached twice. This was the moment that this officially became what would end up being the greatest NHL team in Atlanta history. The game-winning goal in overtime was scored on a power-play - a power-play that resulted from a hooking penalty call on none other than Toronto Maple Leaf Nik Antropov.

In the same arena where years later he would take the last gasp of breath for this failed attempt to plant a flag in the core of the South, Nik Antropov watched from the penalty box and paid witness to the closest this team ever came to success. Rather than settle for just life as a footnote at the end of a franchise-ending loss, he can maybe take some solace in the fact that at least he got to be a part of this larger tapestry and the few threads of victory the team managed to grasp as well. The Thrashers are dead. Long live the Thrashers.