Our Question of the Week: Is the Commissioner of the National Hockey League Delusional?
In an interview with Fox Sports Arizona on Wednesday night, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said that the Phoenix Coyotes financial problems will be resolved and, indeed, new investors will be coming on board.
It was, essentially, the same line he handed to a group of Canadian business leaders earlier in the week. If those business leaders actually believe Mr. Bettman, then we all know why we’ve had a financial meltdown throughout the business community.
Although Bettman claimed all be well in Phoenix and that there are all sorts of people just dying to flush their money down a giant toilet known as jobbing.com Arena, he did not explain how new fans would come rushing toward the turnstiles. He did not explain how the team’s lousy arena lease deal would be re-written. He has obviously convinced a rich guy to blow his finances on a failing NHL franchise, but he hasn’t explained to that guy how suddenly fans are going to start showing up in a building that’s barely half full most nights.
I mean, come on, Gary, the Coyotes already have a $21.30 All-You-Can-Eat ticket package. You can’t make it much cheaper to attend. And yet, they still aren’t attending in a community where the average wage is $34,000 a year. That’s among the lowest in the United States.
How are the Coyotes EVER going to be successful?
While the rest of the world struggles with bankruptcies, massive unemployment, economic meltdown and government bail-outs, Gary Bettman believes the NHL is on an economic island unto itself. And he believes this, even though he sees the drop numbers on the announced attendances. I was in Tampa last Tuesday when the announced attendance was 15,912. Sorry, but the St. Pete Times Forum wasn’t half-full. There might have been 15,912 tickets distributed, but barely 8,000 were actually in the building (oh, yeah, and most were wearing Canadiens jerseys). Other than the product on the ice and the attendances in Canada, nothing about the NHL appears real.
The man who said, earlier this week, that the NHL’s financials were strong and the future was bright, lives in a world uninhabited by the rest of us.
Please Gary, let us into NHL World, where the streets are paved with gold and every team is the Toronto Maple Leafs.