Begininning with the letter "R"

Today's word of the day is "relocation", which can be defined as: (1) the transportation of something to a new settlement after an upheaval of some kind; (2) vacating fixed location (such as a residence or business) and settling in a different one. A move can be to a nearby location within the same neighborhood, a much farther location in a different city, or sometimes a different country.

This word alone seems to be one of the major controversies surrounding the subject of my blog. Now it has since been tied in with other questionable words, which will be, discussed in future entries but let’s start here. Relocation of a business happens frequently due to economic benefits. Why not move something that isn’t working where it is to some other place that will see it grow and do well? If a NHL Hockey team is losing scads of money in one city because the people in that city don’t support it, shouldn't the owner of that team be able to just sell it to someone else and the new owner move it to somewhere that really wants it? The necessary upheaval as already happened, we’ll call that bankruptcy, so why enforce the so-called “seven year rule"? This would now mean that a new owner who just paid millions of dollars to buy a non-profitable team would be forced to stay in the same city that made it that way for another seven years. Hello, am I the only one that thinks this does not make good business sense?

Is the relocation really more about Jim Balsillie’s choice of location? His plan has always been to move the Phoenix Coyotes out of the US and into a Canadian City. Since only six of the current NHL’s thirty teams are Canadian franchises, it is not like the NHL is at risk of seeming pro Canadian in this one. It would take another ten teams to move to have that happen. While Balsillie’s initial choice in The City of Hamilton has flared additional controversy, it is interesting to note that this city lies in between Toronto and Buffalo which both have long standing NHL teams. Are the present owners of these teams afraid of a little friendly competition in revenue? In the end, maybe this is the projected upheaval that is the underlying controversy in this purposed “relocation”.