Good morning lizards!

Some sad news from the sports world…

Pa. city losing hockey team, just like ‘Slap Shot’

JOHNSTOWN, Pa. – In the 1977 cult hit movie “Slap Shot,” when player/coach Reggie Dunlop learns his minor-league hockey team will fold, he boosts player morale by planting a phony story in the local paper: The Charlestown Chiefs are moving south.

And now, 22 years after they were founded in a moment of inspiration from the film, the real-life Johnstown Chiefs really are moving to Greenville, S.C.

But the move is doing anything but boosting the morale of this gritty town, where the economy and its people never recovered from the steel industry meltdown of the 1970s and the last of three titanic floods.

The movie, starring Paul Newman, was shot in Johnstown as a barely disguised homage to the beloved Johnstown Jets. The team folded the year the movie was released, after floodwaters damaged ice-making equipment at the team’s riverside arena.

The Johnstown Chiefs were founded in 1988, and a succession of owners has labored to keep the team alive, largely because “Slap Shot” stoked interest in the city’s tragicomic love affair with what the movie called “old-time hockey.”

“‘Slap Shot’ was a big factor in me, personally, having the team here, owning the team,” said majority owner and head coach Neil Smith, 56, who played for the New York Islanders’ farm system. “I was fascinated by that: the original building, the small town, the whole thing.”

Formerly the general manager who led the New York Rangers to their last Stanley Cup championship in 1994, Smith bought the cash-strapped Chiefs in 2002. He promised not to move them for at least two seasons but sought a local buyer sentimental enough to keep the team in town and rich enough to write off the team’s perennial losses.

(Movie irony: The rich owner in “Slap Shot” folded the team as a tax write-off.)