It looks like the Winnipeg Jets are cleared for landing.

Oh ho, I see what you did there, TSN.

The team, which is expected to officially announce their name before making the 7th overall pick in tonight’s NHL Entry Draft, is reportedly going to go with the very popular Jets nickname. You can watch the Draft live on TSN at 7pm et/4pm pt.

“Et” is French (possibly French-Canadian) for “and”, so you can watch the draft live at both 7 and 4 PM. I think “pt.” means pint. Actually, PM might stand for Prime Minister. I don’t know how hockey announcements work.

But here we are, watching the Atlanta Thrashers officially become the Winnipeg Jets, and watching the Winnipeg Jets officially become the NHL’s Cleveland Browns. I feel like public outcry backed Winnipeg into a corner, and they couldn’t announce their team was going to be called the “Klondikes” or some sort of bird without having tomatoes thrown at them. The original title of this post was going to be “PEER PRESSURE WORKS”, because hey, I wouldn’t have ever started drinking without it.

It’s official: the Atlanta Thrashers are moving to Winnipeg.

True North Sports and Entertainment, the Canadian group that has been negotiating to buy the team since mid-May, made formal announcement of the move at news conference in Winnipeg at 12:20 p.m.

“Sometimes, we simply don’t have a choice,” [Commissioner Gary Bettman] said.

The Thrashers owners, Atlanta Spirit, negotiated the sale of the Thrashers to True North since mid-May. The Thrashers’ owners have said in court documents that the team has lost $130 million since 2005.

Sh**, and I just learned what a “Thrasher” was. Fun fact: Atlanta is the only U.S. city to lose a sports franchise to Canada, and they’ve done it twice. The first time was when the Flames left for Calgary in 1980. The Thrashers have been in Atlanta since the league expanded in 1999, and spent most of their time adding black players to the team to try and and get hockey over in urban Georgia. Steven Godfrey of SB Nation has a great retrospective on that little storyline coming to an end, and hopefully they’ll continue to put together the team with a racial bias and make their mascot a big affable flag-waving white guy.

No word yet on whether or not the move will rebrand the team the “Jets,” the franchise that left Winnipeg for Phoenix to become the Coyotes in 1996, but anything else would seem anticlimactic. Think of Cleveland getting their football team back and calling them the “RiverDogs” instead of the Browns.

[via AJC]