The Atlanta Thrashers are back! Kinda...

The Atlanta Thrasers are back, baby! Well... kinda...

The former NHL franchise which relocated to Winnipeg in 2011 and rebranded themselves as the Winnipeg Jets aren't coming back anytime soon, but the ECHL's Atlanta Gladiators will be taking on the "persona" of the Thrashers for one night only on December 16th against the Greenville Swamp Rabbits.

Check it out:

The Gladiators, of course, were purchased by former NHLer turned TNT broadcaster Anson Carter earlier this season and Carter made a point of saying that the team would embrace Atlanta's hockey history including both the Thrashers and the former Atlanta Flames (now in Calgary).

Thankfully though, it doesn't look like the REAL Thrashers will be back anytime soon.

I mean... this is a city that has twice had a NHL team and lost it. The Atlanta Flames, now the Calgary Flames of course, existed just eight years from 1972 until 1980 when they up and moved to Calgary. The Flames have been an absolute success since arriving in Calgary and, frankly, a lot of younger fans don't even know that the team had its beginnings in Atlanta. And why would they? The Atlanta Flames' history is pretty uneventful. The team never won a single playoff series in Atlanta and won only two playoff games total in six playoff appearances. Former longtime NHL GM Cliff Fletcher is the only member of the team to make it to the Hockey Hall of Fame. In short, the Atlanta Flames were mostly forgettable and the Flames history that most people know begins when the team arrived north of the border in 1980.

The lowly Thrashers, now the Winnipeg Jets 2.0, existed from 1999 until 2011 when they were eventually moved north of the border just as the Flames were. The Thrashers' playoff history is even worse than the Flames', they managed just to qualify for the Stanley Cup Playoffs just once and failed to win a game. They produced Hall of Famer Marian Hossa and, I guess, they had two other Hall of Famers with Chris Chelios and Mark Recchi... but no one in their right mind envisions Chelios and Recchi in Thrashers jerseys when they close their eyes. If nothing else the Thrashers proved that Atlanta could actually mess things up worse than they did the first time around with the Flames.

I'm all for hockey in non-traditional markets, but I'm not sure that Atlanta is fit for an NHL franchise and there's no shame in being a minor-league city.