It would appear that the National Hockey League’s cranky old owners are doing everything they possibly can to delay the sale and move of the Atlanta Thrashers to Winnipeg.
It’s not that there is much the league can do. At worst, it can hold up the deal to sell the Thrashers to True North Sports and Entertainment and make it more difficult to sell tickets and corporate sponsorships in Winnipeg.
After all, the Atlanta deal isn’t the Phoenix deal. In Phoenix, the league owns the team and essentially all the revenue from the arena. Any legitimate owner would have that same luxury. In Atlanta, an owner would own the team and not the arena and therefore would not have the ability to raise revenues from the building outside of hockey nights. It’s a bad business model and the NHL knows it. In Winnipeg, True North has the rights to the building and the hockey team and all the revenues. This deal and move is as much about real estate as it is about ice hockey.
However, while Gary Bettman and his bosses continue to claim that the Thrashers-to-Winnipeg deal is not done, there is reason to believe that the main portion of the sale agreement is completed and that the rest is just legal-eze. After all, Atlanta Spirit Group, the current owners cutting the deal to sell to Winnipeg said earlier this week that the deal “is 80 per cent done.”
More than a week ago, Toronto’s Globe and Mail, the newspaper owned by David Thomson, the major financier of the deal to buy the Thrashers and move them to Winnipeg, announced that the deal was done and the announcement would be made on Tuesday, May 24.
The story was written by Stephen Brunt, one of the country’s finest sportswriters and columnists, but also a gentleman who breaks very few stories. In fact, if Brunt breaks a story, one figures that it’s broken. Period. He’s not the kind of guy who turns up two days later and apologizes for being wrong. And to Brunt’s credit, he went on radio shows right across Canada to stand by his scoop.
Now, here we are, four days after the announcement was supposed to have been made and still… insert sound of crickets chirping here. In fact, True North Sports and Entertainment has said without hesitation that the deal is not done and there will definitely be no announcement before NEXT Tuesday.
However, if one studies Brunt’s story, the insider leaks from Atlanta and NHL commissioner Gary Bettman’s almost angry response to anyone who suggests, “the deal is done,” it’s clear that the buyers and sellers have a deal, but the NHL itself is doing everything it can to delay the sale in an effort to (a) find a local owner in Atlanta immediately(?) or (b) hold up the move until the beginning of the 2012-13 season (?) or what?
What, could mean the NHL’s by-laws. Thrashers fans in Atlanta (yes, there are some) dug up the following from the league’s own constitution and posted it on SB Nation Atlanta:
36.1: Investigation
(a) Any Member Club seeking consent for a transfer of its franchise and club to a different city or borough in accordance with Section 4.2 of the Constitution, shall file a written application for such consent with the Commissioner of the League.
(b) Such applications shall be filed no later than January 1st of the year prior to the year in which it is proposed the Club will commence its first season in the new location, unless a majority of the Member Clubs consents to a later filing date.
(c) The application shall include a statement as to why the applicant seeks such transfer. It shall also include a statement of reasons why the applicant believes consent to the proposed transfer should be given and shall be accompanied by such documentation as the applicant deems appropriate, in light of the provisions of this By-Law Section 36 and Section 42 of the Constitution.
The aforementioned could be a big reason why many American owners have no desire to see the Thrashers go anywhere in 2011-12. They want more answers.
And that’s probably why Commissioner Gary Bettman went on his radio show on Friday and ripped anyone who believes the Thrashers are moving. That would include me, who believes the Thrashers deal has been in the works for more than a year and is so close to done, it’s done.
“Maybe at some point there will be a deal, maybe there will never be a deal,” Bettman said during the NHL Hour With Commissioner Gary Bettman on NHL Radio. “But there isn’t one now.”
Bettman claimed there is no deal yet. and that the owners in Atlanta were only “exploring their options,” (that’s a festering pile of excrement).
“If the team gets sold, and if the team gets moved, then there will be a press conference,” Bettman told his radio listeners. “If you keep saying it enough, you might ultimately be right. But the level of accountability, in terms of the willingness to just put anything out there in terms of a news story, is really just ridiculous.”
Bettman took calls from fans on Friday’s show and when a fan in Atlanta asked him about the move, the commissioner said that the team still hadn’t gone anywhere (oh, how observant).
“Well nobody has decided to do anything yet,” Bettman said. “There isn’t a deal. If there is a deal, it has to go through the usual processes and procedures that we have. But the issue, if there’s a problem that’s unsolvable, despite the grass roots hockey, despite all of the corporate headquarters, is there somebody, if it gets to this point where the current owners don’t want to own it anymore, is there somebody who wants to own this franchise in Atlanta?
“The threshold has always been for us, when we’ve had to move a franchise, (nobody wanted) to own the team there anymore. It would be one of those head scratchers where you say, ‘Look at all of this great corporate opportunity, look at all of this grass roots hockey, why doesn’t somebody want to own a team here?’ And that would be a difficult, but unfortunate situation to be dealing with if it has reached, or does reach that point.”
It’s getting late. Every day that the deal is not done is another day the NHL’s board of governors have to debate the legality of this move and vote not to allow it. It’s also another day that True North loses to sell tickets and corporate sponsorships.
One senses this deal has been “done” for some time, but there are, apparently, some things in the way. Those things relate directly to the NHL’s concern about moving a team from the seventh-largest TV market in the United States to a city of 700,000 in the middle of the prairie. They relate directly to the NHL’s concern that Winnipeg can be reached from only two cities in the United States on a regular airline schedule – Minneapolis and Chicago. They relate directly to the fact Winnipeg does not have a five-star hotel for teams to bunk in. They relate directly to the fact Winnipeg would have the smallest arena in the NHL — by a long shot. They relate directly to the fact that if Winnipeg sold out every ticket for every single game the team would be 24th or 25th in league attendance. They relate to the fact that they would be moving a team from a city of six million to a city of 700,000 and from a city that has already lost an NHL team to another city, in a different country, that has already lost an NHL team.
The owners are nervous about all of this and Gary Bettman just happens to be the angry face of that nervousness.
