Saturday night on Hockey Night in Canada, Al Strachan was at it again. Strachan told a breathless audience that “two Toronto businessmen are close to purchasing the Atlanta Thrashers so they can move them to Winnipeg.”
How many different ways can you say, “crock of crap?”
Strachan was once a big-time hockey writer with Sun Media. He had an inside line to agent Don Meehan and in order to keep that line free, he publicly promoted the demands of the NHL Players (read: Agents) Association. Far too much of Strachan’s scribbling wasn’t based in reality so it was not surprising when he cooked up this rumour.
Now to be fair, the sale of the Thrashers is not particularly far-fetched. The team is a complete disaster in Atlanta so why not sell it to somebody who can make the thing work. Canada is obviously the only place where big-time hockey can work and even though Canadian teams playing in the United States seem to be the scourge of American hockey marketers, it’s already been proven that six Canadian teams generate about 33 per cent of the NHL’s total revenue. The NHL needs more Canadian-based teams, not fewer.
So, naturally, the Thrashers denied that the team was for sale and got rather testy when www.rivercitysportsblog.com asked if the team was being sold to “a couple of guys from Toronto,” who had plans to move it to Winnipeg.
“Completely false,” said Thrashers GM Don Waddell.
While it IS likely the Thrashers are for sale and eventually will be sold to new owners, who may or may not ask to re-locate the team, Atlanta is not the launching pad that will generate Winnipeg’s next NHL franchise.
The launching pad is still Phoenix. The Coyotes will probably lose upwards of $100 million this season. The Coyotes don’t play at home until Saturday night and et they’ve already started reducing ticket prices to $25 in the lower bowl. The NHL will soon take over ownership of this mess in the desert and you can bet they won’t be flushing money down that giant toilet for more than one year.
To their credit, the Thompson family from Osmington Inc. and Thompson Reuters, the people who own the majority of shares in True North Sports and Entertainment, have been working quietly and professionally to bring the NHL to Winnipeg. They will succeed.
But when you start believing the gibberish that is generated at Hockey Night in Canada, you will be stuck believing things that simply aren’t going to happen.