Chipman talks Jets past, present and future at Pistons gala

Attendees at the Steinbach Pistons annual Fire and Ice Banquet got an inside look at the return of NHL hockey to Manitoba, as Winnipeg Jets owner Mark Chipman was the guest speaker at the event.

It was the first time the Pistons had hosted their banquet inside their home rink, with the Southeast Event Centre fully transformed with guests eating and drinking just above the actual ice surface.

“It’s unbelievable,” Chipman said when asked what he thought of the SEC.

He added the Jets are planning to use the same construction company the Pistons used to built their dressing room to refurbish their home team facilities.

“You should be really, really proud of this place… Honestly, that one’s nicer than ours,” Chipman said, gesturing to the Steinbach Pistons locker room.

“Dycker (Pistons head coach Paul Dyck) showed me that tonight, I’m like ‘you’ve got to be kidding me.’ I was going to take some pictures, but I was fearful that it would somehow show up in front of our players. Honestly, I’m not being patronizing, that is a nicer room than we have right now.”

Chipman cited the slogan put up on the wall during his time playing football of the University of North Dakota which read “much is given, much is expected,” and urged the Pistons players in attendance to follow that creed.

“That’s stuck with me my whole life,” he said.

“This team, and I know they’re a wonderful young group, and I know they know this, but from that kind of investment, much is expected and it should be that way.”

Chipman even teased what the future of the Jets could look like. His middle daughter Annie followed her parents to UND, playing as a walk-on hockey player, like her her father did with football, before joining True North Sports and Entertainment.

“It was kind of like when she decided she wanted to be a goaltender, I took her to the rink because I thought, ‘I’m going to get this out of her system real fast,’ and that blew up on me,” Chipman said, laughing.

“We gave her every garbage job we could find. In the American league, you have to do everything. The more we put on her the more she grew into it.”

Chipman said he was going to protect the Jets with everything he had, adding Manitoba would never be able to get an NHL team today. True North Sports and Entertainment bought the Thrashers for just $170 million in 2011. Seattle joined the NHL through expansion just seven years later, paying $650 million. If the league is to expand further, franchises might have to pay more than $1 billion.

“There are no struggling franchises in the NHL, it is on a significant ascent as an enterprise,” Chipman said, pointing out Tampa Bay and Dallas are no longer considered “non-traditional” hockey markets.

“We know how important it all is to the community. If this were to ever unravel, we’d never get it back again. We take it very, very seriously. I have a great deal of confidence that not only will we be around years from now, we are aspiring to be a preeminent team in the league.”

Stability in the relationship between the NHL Players Association and owners is key for the Jets. Chipman is even a part of the NHL Board of Governors executive committee.

“Those days of acrimony are long, long gone,” Chipman said.

“It really is a partnership now. It was the antithesis of that when the Jets left. It was falling apart… When they fixed that in 2004, that gave us our chance… I’m really, really optimistic. Believe me when I tell you we’re trying to win this. We’re not trying to be just another team.”

Paul Edmonds, who hosted the conversation acknowledged that Winnipeggers “can suffer from an acute case of Perimeter-itis,” when it comes to the province, but Chipman cited the team’s strong television numbers as evidence that’s not a winning strategy when it comes to running an NHL team.

He pointed to the many season ticket holders the Jets have living outside the city, adding they have the second-highest English language television numbers for Canadian NHL teams, only trailing Toronto.

“That surprises a lot of people,” Chipman said.

“We have almost twice the audience that the Calgary Flames have. While people might not think of that as direct support, it is… Our fanbase is far and wide, it’s not just concentrated in the city of Winnipeg.”

The International and American Hockey Leagues merging was a key moment in Jets 2.0 history, even as it happened 10 years to the month before the Atlanta Thrashers moved to Winnipeg. That merger, a Manitoba Moose affiliate agreement with the Vancouver Canucks and announcement of arena construction all happening within the same week.

“If we were ever going to imagine a new arena, we needed to have a league with stability in it,” Chipman said, adding with a chuckle that week also featured a Manitoba 3-1 series comeback win against Paul Dyck’s Houston Aeros.

“People think there was some grand plan, this big master plan, it was just one game at a time.”

Previous Pistons gala events were a big part of the funding for the dressing room, with a final price tag of roughly $1 million. The team is beginning to work on a new training centre now, with Chipman himself donating $5,000 during a fundraising auction which closed the night.