In the wake of the sale of the Atlanta Thrashers to True North Sports & Entertainment Limited, which is moving the team to Winnipeg, TNSE's chairman gives an interview to Canada's National Post. In it, he reveals that Jim Balsillie wasn't the only Canadian trying to poach the Predators for a north-of-the-border run in 2007.

One of those dates back to mid-2007, when the True North chairman was introduced to then-Nashville Predators owner Craig Leopold.

A face-to-face meeting, with Bettman’s blessing, took place quietly in Nashville.

“It was just purely exploratory,” Chipman said. “Their ownership was looking to sell that team and they were in a position where the team could not only have been sold but moved. In the end, very quickly, a local ownership group emerged and as you have seen, that’s the NHL’s M.O. — they don’t like teams moving.

“When the ownership group emerged there, that was the end of the discussion.”

In the meantime, of course, that local ownership group has made serious strides towards stability.

FIFA — soccer's ruling body — finds itself in the midst of a wide-ranging, often bizzare bribery scandal (for example, England claims that a World Cup voter asked that the famed FA Cup be named for him).

Eyebrows from Geneva to Geelong went skyward when the tiny — but rich — Arabian nation of Qatar was awarded the 2022 World Cup over the candidacies of more, shall we say, traditional (and temperate) choices like England and the U.S. Nashville, of course, was one of the 18 cities in the running to host World Cup games had the U.S. won the bid.

At the time, Music City's booster-in-chief Butch Spyridon had this to say:

"Somebody ought to ask some questions," he said moments after the announcement aired.

That's clearly happening at the ongoing FIFA meetings — though FIFA chief Sepp Blatter kept his job for four more years, having to acquiesce to some sweeping changes (for example, from now on, every FIFA member will have a vote on the World Cup host). All this despite top level FIFA officials accusing one another of accepting bribes and Blatter's opponent for the presidency being suspended pending a bribery investigation — the potential usurper is from Qatar, by the way.

In any case, yesterday, respected German soccer executive Theo Zwanzinger said Qatar should be stripped of its host status pending an investigation and if any corruption is uncovered (which, frankly, is probably a foregone conclusion), a new vote held:

“There is a certain degree of suspicion that one cannot sweep aside,” Zwanziger told the BBC. “I must expect that awarding this World Cup under these conditions needs to be examined anew.”

Looking ahead to the Nashville Predators' first-ever second-round playoff home game, Yahoo! Sports' Nicholas Cotsonika penned a feel-good read about the impact of the team's series win over the Ducks. Included in the details are some financial nuggets from CEO Jeff Cogen, who says 90 percent of season-ticket holders already have renewed for the next campaign. As for the profitability that has eluded the franchise so often, Cogen says getting to the second round "should get us pretty close."

The politics and the money still need to be sorted out, but plenty of folks have been thinking for a good while about the future home of the Nashville Sounds. The Civic Design Center on Tuesday hosted a forum showcasing the work of University of Tennessee College of Architecture + Design graduate students who have been musing since the fall on how to integrate a potential Sounds stadium into Sulphur Dell or the North Gulch areas. The students also were asked to think of how multiple uses could in turn be built into the venue.

We hope to have more images from the event soon, but in the meantime, here's a taste of some of the designs Sushant Verma came up with. Want to go check out the designs in person? The Civic Design Center is displaying them all month.

“Until we get that done, all the talk about baseball stadiums and all that are really just kind of speculative,” Metro Finance Director Richard Riebeling said. “That seems to be the most concrete thing we should do to get things moving in the right direction.”