Hi everyone, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted here but I got a few new responsibilities at work and it’s been tough to sit down and write something but yesterday’s hockey news got me so fired up that I just had to post about it.

On Thursday, the Carolina Hurricanes unveiled their ‘Heritage’ uniforms for the upcoming 2018/19 hockey season. The uniforms are that of the defunct Hartford Whalers, a franchise that spent 25 years in Hartford, Connecticut before relocating to Raleigh, North Carolina and becoming the Carolina Hurricanes.

No doubt these are absolutely beautiful uniforms, but it really feels like the Hurricanes are simply exploiting the memory of the Whalers for cheap profit. While the Hurricanes franchise owns the rights to the iconography of the Hartford Whalers it is simply not the same club. Just because a team is technically the same corporate entity as the previous one does not make it the same. The Hurricanes and Whalers are simply not the same team, Hartford owns the memories of the Whalers and Carolina owns the memories, present and future of the Hurricanes, and when Carolina announced these uniforms they elected to tap-dance on the grave of the Whalers.

However, just because I’m annoyed at this does not mean that the situation cannot be remedied. There is a way that the Hurricanes can honor their Whalers heritage appropriately, and that’s for the Hurricanes to play a game in Hartford. Not just a preseason game, one regular season game a year in Hartford as the Whalers. The Whalers old arena, now called the XL Center, is still a functional professional hockey arena with 14,000 seats that can host an NHL game no problem. If the NHL can schedule games in Finland, Switzerland or England there’s no reason why they can’t schedule a game in a former NHL city with a functional arena. Also, do the same thing with the Nordiques.

For more ranting follow me on Twitter @KedgeOnline.