The Ongoing Saga of the Kamloops Blazers

What started as a feel good story about NHLers returning to their junior roots is beginning to look more like the hostile takeover of a community owned team, albeit a beleaguered one.

The entire story is too long to distill here properly, luckily Kamloops Daily News reporter Gregg Drinnan does a formidable job in his blog.

To make Drinnan's long story short even shorter, Jarome Iginla, Shane Doan, Darryl Sydor and Mark Recchi are part of an ownership group seeking to purchase the Kamloops Blazers. Rebuffed on their initial offer, the group has started to obtain voting shares of the non-profit Kamloops Blazers Society that runs the team. In the meantime, the group had a second offer rejected and has started waging a PR campaign to get the public on its side.

The Society isn't exactly an innocent victim in the whole ordeal. And now that at least one other offer is on the table and another one is the works, it's time the community takes a long look at what exactly is going on with their team.

The Blazers are in desperate need of a front office transformation in the same way they've recently turned around their on-ice fortunes. But the city of Kamloops and the Kamloops Blazers Sports Foundation deserves to be the beneficiary of the team's success, not another private venture.