The Prince George Cougars confirmed Wednesday what local residents have known for more than seven weeks.
The team has been sold.
The Citizen's Ted Clarke first broke the story on March 3 and some of the other local media finally followed up more than two weeks later. There's nothing more satisfying than history proving you right and Clarke's original story has stood the test of time. As originally reported, the ownership group is made up of Greg Pocock led a group of local investors and current NHL defenceman and former Cougars Eric Brewer and Dan Hamhuis. The Western Hockey League board of governors meets next Wednesday to approve the sale of the Cougars.
Back in March, the Cougars insisted the Citizen had it all wrong. Brandi Brodsky, the team's vice-president and marketing manager as well as the daughter of owner Rick, called up every media outlet in town, except the Citizen, to deny the sale.
Her adamant denials turned out to be as unreliable as those proclamations the team made every August heading into a new season that this was the year they would challenge the top teams and seriously compete for a league championship.
Most junior hockey fans and the community at large had given up on this organization years ago. They didn't make the playoffs again this past season for the third straight year and have only been in the playoffs once in the last five years. They have lost more games than they have won in the regular season for the last seven years in a row. Their worst season was the 2009-10 campaign when they managed to win just 12 times in 72 attempts.
Most nights this past season, the Cougars could barely fill a quarter of the seats in CN Centre, averaging just 1,688 spectators per game, the worst in the league.
The Brodskys and general manager Dallas Thompson have rightly borne the brunt of the community anger over the lack of success from the Cougars. Local fans don't expect their team to win every game but they'd like their boys to be competitive every night and not be the laughing stock of the league.
Although the Brodskys have no banners in the rafters at CN Centre to show for their 20 years of running a WHL franchise in Prince George, they still deserve the thanks of local hockey fans and the community at large.
They believed enough in Prince George to relocate their business here from Victoria in 1994 and they stuck it out for two decades, despite so few victories and several money-losing seasons at the end. They should also be commended for their generosity in the community since moving here, through the proceeds from the 50/50 raffles held at the games and through the outreach work by players to visit local schools, the hospital and seniors centres.
Perhaps most important of all, without the Brodskys, Pocock and his pals would likely not have had a WHL team to buy. The owners of the other teams would never have allowed that group to buy the Regina Pats, for example, and move the team to Prince George. It's also unlikely that the league would have approved an expansion team to come to Prince George. The local market is too small and the city is too geographically isolated.
The Cougars are the most remote team in the entire Canadian Hockey League and the travel time alone makes Prince George a poor choice on paper to locate a WHL team. Having a team here would the NHL equivalent of locating a team in Honolulu.
It's not just the Brodskys and now Pocock and his group but also the other league owners who have demonstrated their belief in a viable junior hockey market in Prince George. That belief now needs to be met by local residents.
To the Brodsky family, thank you for your efforts to support the community and to build a winning hockey team. To the Pocock group, best wishes for success in your new business venture, both on and off the ice.
And to local fans, if you truly value seeing the best young male hockey players in the world on a regular basis, it's time to support your team again with your dollars and your bums in a green seat.
