Rockets owner speaks

There always is a lot of talk in Kamloops about the glory days, and, no, that wasn't the day Bruce Springsteen came to town. Rather, it was the period in the '90s when the Blazers won three Memorial Cups in four years. If you live in Kamloops, you quite often hear about Brownie and Hayzer and Hitch. Although the Blazers didn't win a Memorial Cup under Ken Hitchcock, that really was when the foundation for the Cup teams was put in place.
Anyway . . . hockey insiders know that no team will ever again win three MC's in four seasons. Why not? Because the playing field has been leveled by the creation of draft systems that now feed the major junior clubs. No one knows that better than Bruce Hamilton, the majority owner, governor, president and general manager of the Kelowna Rockets, who had a terrific run of success for four seasons prior to 2005-06.
If you flip over to Regan Bartel's blog (the address is over there, to the left), you will find the radio voice of the Rockets expounding regularly on his team. Today, he had a couple of interesting quotes from Hamilton on the sale of the Blazers that went down Thursday night.
"The common line out of there is getting it back to its glory days," Hamilton told Bartel on Friday. "but nobody is going to get back to its glory days simply because the rules today don't allow what they did, and the player pool is monitored by the draft and not by the list system anymore. They can say that all they want, but they ahve to get out there and work hard and find players. The key in Kamloops is getting the hockey operations running properly, and I think they have done a real good job there."
As for the Blazers selling for around $7 million -- if you're wondering the Kamloops Blazers Sports Society should net about $6.4 million once the sale closes -- and increasing the value of other WHL franchises, Hamilton said: "The big mix up on this is, teams are worth what someone will pay for them in your community. Is ours worth more than that? Probably. Is Red Deer worth more than that? Probably. Is Medicine Hat worth that? Probably not, but it's whoever will pay that. "
And, Bartel wondered, what of the other so-called community-owned teams -- like the Swift Current Broncos, Moose Jaw Warriors, Prince Albert Raiders and Lethbridge Hurricanes? Might we see them privatized?
"Centres like that are probably concerned," Hamilton said, "but Kamloops and Lethbridge are the only two that are/were in a position where someone would be interested in owning them. I don't think that in Moose Jaw, Swift Current or Prince Albert there is interest in anyone owning those teams and taking on the challenge. Those teams raise a lot of money away from the rink to keep them in business, and the cost of doing business is nothing but going up. In Swift Current, you have a small population base (and you) need to grind every cent out of the community you can (just) to be there, and I think Prince Albert and Moose Jaw are both similar, just their population base is higher."

One WHL owner with whom I was in contact early Thursday was following the Kamloops situation as close as everyone else in the hockey community. Jokingly, I asked if he would be getting an offer in on the Blazers. He replied that he would like to talk to the runner-up and could do a deal at $6 million. I don't know if he was joking.