Tag Archives: Gary Bettman

Ford Gets to Celebrate. He Deserves It.

Posted on June 3, 2011 by Scott Taylor| 2 Comments

Darren Ford was neither cocky nor boastful. He sat back back in his chair on the patio at Hu’s on First, sipped on a cup of coffee and kind of just sucked it all in. After nine years of hope and tears and, sometimes, ridicule, the young man who started www.jetsowner.com, finally got to take a break.

He got to flash a big smile, as well.

The NHL had returned to Winnipeg and while radio and TV were all over him for interviews, he just wanted to relax and then party with his friends. Darren Ford had won. He’d won big. And yet, to some extent, he wasn’t even sure what all the fuss was about.

“All I did,” he said, “was start a website. Just a place for people like me who still couldn’t understand why we’d lost our favorite hockey team, to come and vent and say the things we felt we needed to say. Just a place to give people some hope and let them talk to other people who dreamed of the day when the NHL would return.”

It’s true, that’s all he did. He’ll even be the first person to admit he didn’t even come up with the name for the site. However, he did do something that was very important and in the end, even Mark Chipman, the team’s new owner, and Gary Bettman, the commissioner of the NHL who took his team away in 1996, both acknowledged it: Every day, Darren Ford gave people hope.

“All I was was a fan who wanted to be able to watch the NHL and cheer for a team in my hometown,” he said modestly. “And for the most part, that’s exactly the way the people were who came to the site. They just wanted to talk about ways in which they could help bring the NHL back to Winnipeg.”

What Ford did was harmless and actually Quixotic in a rather positive way. But he sure took some crap for it. One of the most important radio stations in town constantly chastised him for, “giving Winnipeggers too much false hope.” My old newspaper bosses thought he was a “nut” who should not be given any ink whatsoever. As you can probably tell this past week, those old bosses are long gone. And Darren Ford, in a way that even embarrasses him, is a bit of a local hero.

Tuesday, Mark Chipman invited him to the news conference (“I almost cried,” he said) and on Friday, he’ll hold a party at 4-Play Sports Bar for anyone who just wants to, “have a beer and talk about the NHL being back in Winnipeg.” It’s $20 at the door and you get one free beer and a T-shirt.

It will be a fitting conclusion to a wonderful ride and now, after nine years at the helm of jetsowner.com, did he have one particular memory that stood out in his mind?

“Getting to know Mark Chipman,” he said. “And finding out what a wonderful, old school type of businessman he is. Everything he did, he did with class. He’s my hero in a big way.”

Perhaps what is most interesting about Mr. Ford is the fact that over the nine years he ran jetsowner.com, he got married, changed jobs, fell in love with the liquor business and eventually, in an effort not to be transferred out of the city, started his own company — Decanter Wine and Spirits. It’s small, but growing.

Kind of like jetsowner.com

“When I started the website, I had the Jetsmeter at 8 per cent. I believed we had an 8 per cent of getting an NHL team,” he said. “When I put the Jetsmeter on the site to 100 per cent last week, I really couldn’t believe it. It’s like a dream. But I wouldn’t change it for anything.”

 

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The NHL Returns to Winnipeg.

Posted on May 31, 2011 by Scott Taylor| Leave a comment

I spent lunch hour at the Forks yesterday and it was invigorating. Hundreds of people converged on Winnipeg’s meeting place to celebrate the return of the NHL to Winnipeg.

Perhaps I should make that a little clearer: “Return of the Jets.” Some kids who were barely out of diapers when the Jets played their last game in 1996 were sporting Jets jerseys at the Forks yesterday. Although it’s likely this team will not be the Jets — we’ve heard Manitoba Somethings, maybe Falcons or Polar Bears –it’s pretty definite now that 75-80 per cent of Winnipeg hockey fans WANT the team be the Winnipeg Jets.

But yesterday, the name argument took a back seat to the simple realization that the National Hockey League would once again have Winnipeg as a member.

Mark Chipman, David Thomson, Jim Ludlow and, yes, Gary Bettman (looking like a guy who just got punched him the stomach) made it official. The National Hockey League has indeed, returned to Winnipeg.

At a news conference yesterday at the MTS Centre, True North Sports and Entertainment announced that it had completed a deal to purchase the Atlanta Thrashers and the team would begin play this fall at Winnipeg’s downtown arena. Through it all you got the feeling Bettman did NOT want this to happen. His Southern U.S. experiment has started to crumble and his body language suggested he was pained by the fact he had to move a team out of the seventh-largest TV market in the United States and into a city of 700,000 on the Canadian prairie.

There was some talk that if Winnipeg’s owners didn’t sell 13,000 season tickets by June 21, there was a chance the NHL’s board of governors would not allow the team to move to Winnipeg, but that just seemed outrageous. Yesterday, Chipman said that True North had signed off on a deal to purchase the team from the Atlanta Spirit Group and while Winnipeggers were partying at the Forks, the rich guys who own ASG were doing cartwheels in their executive offices, having dumped the Thrashers, a team that has allegedly lost $130 million in five years. One suspects those guys aren’t about to take the team back so if True North doesn’t sell 13,000 season tickets, what’s the NHL going to do? Move the team to Portage? Winnipeg is the ONLY alternative to Atlanta and I’m sure that with the use of some brilliant legal term there was a “no give-backsies clause” in the final sales contract.

Meanwhile, it appears Moose GM Craig Heisinger will play an important role with Winnipeg’s new franchise and last night Atlanta’s president Don Waddell said he would not accompany the team to Winnipeg. Head coach Craig Ramsey was in Winnipeg yesterday and will likely keep his job.

And just to make everyone happy, Bettman said yesterday, if the new owners decide they want to use the Jets name, the NHL will give it to them.

The NHL is coming back to the ‘Peg. Just as we wrote last year, it was the Atlanta Thrashers, not the Phoenix Coyotes who wound up moving to River City.

It made for a very nice day. Of course, so did getting my picture taken with Ab McDonald, Bill Lesuk and Thomas Steen.

 

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Lawyers About to Sign Off on Thrashers Move. Breathtaking.

Posted on May 30, 2011 by Scott Taylor| 2 Comments

The lawyers are about to sign off on a deal that has been done in principle for weeks. The Atlanta Thrashers are about to move to Winnipeg.

Those in the TV and security biz have been told to prepare for a public announcement as soon as Tuesday and as late as Thursday. Regardless, the freight train that was reality could not be derailed. Gary Bettman’s experiment with the Southern U.S. markets has long been in financial jeopardy and now, the Exodus has begun.

The Atlanta Thrashers, long an NHL money loser because its owners didn’t give a hoot about hockey and sucked up all the money from Phillips Arena in order to give it to the basketball team, will soon be no more. Hockey was the poor sister in that college football and basketball town and it was soon to be out the door.

We first reported on this move in February of 2010 and only the legal haggling over price, Gary Bettman’s commitment to his southern dream and a group of league owners who dreaded the day the NHL would return to a city of 700,000 on the Canadian prairie, kept Atlanta’s hopes alive. This Atlanta move to Winnipeg was a self-fulfilling prophecy and now it appears to have been fulfilled.

Our small Western city will soon have the NHL back. It is unlikely the team will be called the Jets and it’s also unlikely it will battle for the playoffs at what is likely to be a $62 million salary cap ceiling. This will be a frugal team, run by frugal people and it’s likely that it will always have to play better than its talent.

For better or worse, the NHL is returning to Winnipeg. Having a team to cheer for again will be breathtaking and so too will the price of the tickets, the suites and the corporate sponsorships.

Still, it’s time for a party, Winnipeg. It’s time to raise a glass to our new-found prosperity. Some very philanthropic business people have handed us a $170 million gift.

And that, too, is breathtaking.

 

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Thrashers Still Not in Winnipeg. So?

Posted on May 28, 2011 by Scott Taylor| 2 Comments

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.

 

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Great For Winnipeg. A Disaster for the NHL.

Posted on May 20, 2011 by Scott Taylor| Leave a comment

The City of Winnipeg still waits for the announcement that will, in all certainty, arrive this coming week.  The Mayor and Premier both say it will come and the Toronto newspaper owned by the man who will purchase the team and give it to Winnipeg has already reported that the deal is done.

So as the city waits for the Atlanta Thrashers to arrive, it’s hard not to suspect that the National Hockey League has had its first domino drop.

Is this the end of the Great Southern Hockey Experiment? It easily could have ended in Phoenix and you have to figure Phoenix will still be the next to go. And, hey, it’s no picnic in Florida, Nashville or Columbus these days either.

Ponder this for a second:

A small city on the Canadian prairie – and Americans have every right to call it “the middle of nowhere” – is now more desirable a place for a National Hockey League franchise than the seventh largest television market in the United States.

That says so many things about (a) the bleak U.S. economy, (b) the game of hockey itself (c) the death of the non-traditional market experiment and (d) the simple economics of the game.

The NHL will leave a city that has almost 10 times as many people as its destination and plays in an arena that has 18,545 seats and the league will move it to a city that is only accessible directly by air on a regular schedule from two or three U.S. cities and has an arena with only 15,000 seats.

It’s moving from a $213 million arena built in 1999 to a $133 million arena built in 2004. It is such an incredible example of downsizing that it tells major financial and corporate leaders in the United States that the NHL is a dying industry. There are people in places in the Southern and Western United States who will never buy a ticket to a sporting event that involves a team from Winnipeg because those poor people have no idea what, let alone where, a Winnipeg is.

The owners in Atlanta say the team has lost $40 million a year for the last five years. That’s a questionable number, but it does say clearly that the owners in Atlanta have enough of their “dog” hockey franchise.

As a result, the NHL has now admitted defeat. When you take a franchise out of the seventh largest TV market in the United States and move it to a Canadian city with the same population as Des Moines, Iowa, you have given up. If I’m an American investor and I see you pulling out of cities of nearly six million to head off to cities in other countries with populations of 700,000, I wouldn’t put a plug nickel into your league. Hell, UFC has given no indication it would ever come to Winnipeg. NASCAR couldn’t find it on a map. MLB, NFL or NBA? Bwahahahaha.

The experiment is over. Because if the NHL can’t find an owner in Phoenix, can’t get a building built on Long Island, is losing $25 million a year in Columbus and $10-$15 million a year in Nashville, is a disaster in South Florida and can longer sellout in Dallas or Denver, it’s done. As dead as the Hartford Whalers. There aren’t enough stupid rich people in America left to buy these money-pit franchises.

And what’s going to happen when the NHLPA’s Donald Fehr starts to stare down Gary Bettman? The NBA and the NFL already have labour problems. Hockey is next.

I worry about the future of this league. The hockey is great. But in far too many markets, the business is a mess.

 

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What Happens if the Coyotes Don’t Move to Winnipeg?

Posted on April 21, 2011 by Scott Taylor| Leave a comment

We here at www.rivercitysportsblog.com have been taking a bit of heat for our cynicism.

While I believe Winnipeg will eventually get an NHL franchise, I’m just not sure it’s the Phoenix Coyotes of right now. It might be next year’s Coyotes. Heck, they might show up in Winnipeg in 2013, who knows? It’s just that there are so many young Winnipeggers who so desperately want to believe the Coyotes are coming right this minute that it’s easy to understand why they get so damned defensive when you suggest that maybe the announcement won’t be made for a while yet.

I know NHL commissioner Gary Bettman and I know he is going to do everything humanly possible to keep the Coyotes in Phoenix for as long as he possibly can. That’s just his style. So on Wednesday, when Bettman did the rounds of the Toronto radio shows, I wasn’t surprised to hear him suggest that maybe we should just hold our horses.

I know we’ve been told the Coyotes move to Winnipeg was “imminent” and I know we were told that seven weeks ago on TSN, but based on what I heard yesterday, I would think there are still a few more weeks– and maybe even a few more years — left.

“It’s not days and it’s not years. Obviously, we have to have this resolved before we release next year’s schedule,” Bettman told James Cybulski on TSN radio.

“It’s ironic: I know there were a whole spree of stories on Day 1 of this series that we had a deal, and we were just holding the announcement until when they were done playing. If the Coyotes lose tonight, I assure you I have no announcement to make, we have no deal, other than our efforts are still focused on trying to make it work in Phoenix. We had it done at one point, but the Goldwater Institute blew it up. We’re seeing what we can do. We still have time. I’m not going to tell you when time runs out, but obviously, the more time that elapses, the closer we get to the end, but we’re still hopeful we can make it work.”

When Cybulski asked Bettman if the league was prepared to operate as the club’s owner next season, providing the sale to Hulsizer didn’t go through, Bettman called it “unlikely,” unless the city of Glendale would take care of the financial losses for another season.

“That’s not the plan,” Bettman said. “I know this gets misreported also: they talk about ‘oh, the owners must be so upset because of the money we’re losing’. People tend to forget the city of Glendale is paying this year’s losses, not the NHL, not the clubs so ultimately, for that to happen, Glendale would have to be willing to do that again. But I think at some point, if this doesn’t come together, everybody is going to conclude that everything possible was done and it didn’t work. We’re hoping not to get to that point. And I still think there’s a significant chance that we won’t get to that point.”

Read that carefully: “…a significant chance that we won’t get to that point.”

That’s why I don’t think Bettman is in any hurry to cut a deal with Mark Chipman and David Thomson and move the team to Winnipeg.

And then there was this:

“I don’t want to raise expectations (in Winnipeg), because it’s not fair to the fans,” Bettman said. “But if we have to move a franchise, there are places that have expressed interest that we would strongly consider and obviously, Winnipeg is on that list and probably very high on that list.”

Read that very carefully one more time. Bettman makes it clear that there are other cities involved in the bid to acquire the Phoenix Coyotes.

Frankly, at this stage, I don’t think Bettman’s bosses, the NHL’s American owners, are in any hurry to move a team from the United States to Canada. At least, not right now.

But then again, with the NHL, crazier things have happened.

 

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Another Week in the Land of Incredulity

Posted on April 16, 2011 by Scott Taylor| Leave a comment

Forgive me my cynicism. I believe I have heard it all.

This has been an odd week.

1) By Thursday the mainstream American media had reached such a high level of mob mentality in its desperate need to have Barry Bonds convicted of something, that it turned a single conviction for obstruction of justice into something on par with a dozen convictions for mass murder.

At no time, in America’s recent past (excluding the ugly Duke University lacrosse case), has the media so desperately wanted someone to fry for something. For anything.

You could read the desperation in their stories every day:

From Mark Fainaru-Wada, the fraud who wrote the Game of Shadows with more than 200 unnamed sources: ”The jury deciding the Barry Bonds perjury and obstruction of justice case wasn’t provided information that the public has been informed about over the years through other court cases, investigations and documents.” Wah-ahhhh.

From Lester Munson of ESPN, whose anti-Bonds bias highlighted every one of his radio interviews this week: “Bonds attorney Cristina Arguedas, a skilled advocate, worked hard for 51 minutes in a cross-examination of Hoskins and succeeded only in enhancing Hoskins’ veracity. Arguedas, who wears over-sized and mismatched outfits in court, tried to question Hoskins on style. Big mistake. The jurors and the courtroom audience erupted in laughter as Hoskins defined style for Arguedas.” And that proved?

And this is my favorite, from the New York Times: “Even if he is cleared of all charges Bonds will not go unpunished. Now aged 46, he has to all intents and purposes been run out of baseball, shunned by the Major League clubs, all of which passed on the opportunity to sign him, and booed by fans during rare public appearances.”

The media hated this guy and wanted to make sure everyone else did. I interviewed him once in the Giants’ clubhouse in 2002 and he was just fine. I asked him baseball questions, he answered them and that was it. Two guys just doing their jobs. I didn’t care if he liked me. I didn’t care if I ever saw him again. I had a job to do and he let me do it.

But my goodness, there are so many people in the media who just hate this man. And they hate him as much for their own role in ignoring the McGuire-Sosa steroid issue in 1998, as they do for Bonds’ inability to believe the media is somehow important.

Originally, there were 11 charges against Bonds. Six were dropped before the trial, one more was dropped on Day 1 of the trial and of the four remaining charges, all the Department of Justice could do was get Bonds convicted on a nebulous obstruction of justice charge. Then those morons went to their  newspaper cronies and declared victory. Stunning.

However, according to Bonds’ lawyer Allen Ruby: “The government has sought and at least for now” won conviction against Bonds for telling “the grand jury that he was a celebrity child and for saying he was friends with Greg Anderson.” After almost a decade, after more than $400 million and after being egged on by a media horde that was nearly insane in its hatred for a baseball player, that’s all the federal department of justice could get.

To his credit, Sean Gregory of TIME Magazine had the best summation of the Bonds witch-hunt:

“Fans surely weren’t as concerned with these questions back in 2005, when Congress held hearings about baseball’s laughable policing of steroid use. But now what’s the incremental benefit of this trial? It’s certainly not teaching any new lessons. We all know steroids are dangerous, that cheating and lying are immoral. A Bonds conviction won’t add any significant strength to that message. Sure, you can say Bonds deserves to sit through a trial, and perhaps go to jail, because he lied under oath. But is spending so much time and money chasing a liar worth the cost? Especially since many people have lied about worse things, like violent criminal acts, under oath, but have escaped prosecution.

“The Bonds case could also bode well for (Roger) Clemens, and maybe Lance Armstrong. The perjury trial against Clemens, who denied using performance-enhancing drugs to Congress, starts in July. Can the public stomach any more federal expenditures in pursuit of a jock who hasn’t played in three years? And if the government eventually indicts Armstrong, who has also denied drug use despite rumors and reports to the contrary, will that case be worth it too? He last won a Tour de France in 2005. Many of his competitors probably cheated, so he may have gained no real advantage even if he had used performance-enhancing drugs. And his prodigious fundraising efforts on behalf of cancer research will always make him a hero to many.

“The government needs to move on, just like the public it supposedly serves.”

Thank you, Sean Gregory.

2) This week, here in Winnipeg, we have once again read that the return of the NHL to our city is imminent. We’ve have not read any direct quotes that would suggest it is imminent, but the belief is clear: The NHL is coming back, maybe even as soon as this week.

My problem with that is four-fold. There are only four things I have heard that people in the NHL or people involved with the deal will put their names to:

a) That the alleged deal in the desert is not done and that the NHL will continue to be patient and attempt to make the bond sale work (from NHL assistant commissioner Bill Daly).

b) That time is certainly running out on the City of Glendale, Ariz., but there is no deadline. The only deadline the NHL set was Dec. 31, 2010 and it was ignored (from NHL commissioner Gary Bettman).

c) That the NHL has brought high-powered Arizona lawyer John Kaites back onto the scene in hopes that he can fix the political mess in the desert (from John Kaites).

d) That potential owner, Matthew Hulsizer says he hasn’t backed down, will still honor his original agreement and if the city can sell the bonds, he’ll assume ownership of the team (from Matthew Hulsizer).

It seems everyone is convinced the Coyotes will be moving to Winnipeg soon, but no one at the executive level of the NHL, no one close to the potential ownership group in Winnipeg (that one I certainly understand) and no one in Arizona will put their names to that claim.

Until that happens, which we’re told could very well could happen after the Coyotes are eliminated from the playoffs, I’ll keep waiting for the official announcement.

3) The Boston Red Sox entered Saturday’s play 2-10 while the Cleveland Indians were 9-4.

Addition:  The Red Sox finished Saturday 3-10 while the Indians won again and are now 10-4. Amazing.

It was just an odd week.

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Just Waiting For an Announcement

Posted on April 13, 2011 by Scott Taylor| Leave a comment

It would appear the Phoenix Coyotes are now, officially, on life support. Not on the ice, but off it.

The deal in the desert is as troubled as it was six months ago and once again, the NHL has called upon Winnipeg to pick up a franchise that never should have left the city in the first place. Unless there is some sort of miracle — and it appears at this stage that it would indeed be a miracle — the NHL is probably going to try and find a new home for a franchise that has been a financial failure for more than 15 years. That home is, more than likely, Winnipeg.

The ownership in the ‘Peg is ready to negotiate  and the league probably has no choice. The optics are dreadful (frankly, Bettman should resign if he has to re-locate this team to its original home) and by moving back to a city that it left a decade and a half ago, the NHL is admitting that expansion into those non-traditional U.S. markets was an abject failure.

Be sure, Phoenix isn’t the only failure. Atlanta, Florida, Columbus and Nashville are all struggling. Dallas’s ownership situation is a mess. St. Louis is looking for a new ownership arrangement. Colorado doesn’t sell enough tickets anymore. Tampa has a great owner, but a lot of empty seats. And the Islanders are just a money pit. From a competitive standpoint, the NHL has the best hockey league on the planet. From a business perspective, the NHL is a mess.

Barring a miracle, it seems pretty clear that despite its own wishes, the NHL has only two alternatives — continue to own the team in Phoenix, a team that will lose about $30 million this season, or sell it to a very rich man representing Winnipeg.

Both options are not ideal from the league’s point of view. If the move to Winnipeg seemed like a good idea, it would have been done last year. Now, however, it might be the only idea.

Here in Winnipeg, we’ll just sit back and wait for the announcement. It’s an announcement that some well-connected folks in Toronto believe is inevitable.

And wouldn’t it be fun if Phoenix’s last game was a 4-1 loss to the Detroit Red Wings in Game 6 of the opening round of the playoffs?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The NHL Does Everything it Can to Avoid Winnipeg.

Posted on April 1, 2011 by Scott Taylor| Leave a comment

There are a lot of things I don’t understand, but this one takes the chocolate mousse. Have you noticed that the National Hockey League has brought Chicago White Sox and Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf back into the negotiations to purchase and then save the Phoenix Coyotes?

The Globe & Mail reported this morning that Reinsdorf is likely back in the picture even though he’s already blown off the NHL once before. Not even with a truckload of public subsidies would Reinsdorf want any part of a hockey franchise that’s losing $30 million to $40 million a season. One thing about rich people. They like being rich and when business “opportunities” arise that will probably make them less rich, they tend to head for the hills.

If this news item is true — and in these types of negotiations there is always reason to believe that it’s not — it just goes to show the depths to which the NHL will go in order to save a dead dog like the Coyotes. And, in the process, avoid having to go hat in hand to the Thomson/Chipman group in Winnipeg and move a team from a community of 3.5 million people to one with 750,000 people.

The deal in Phoenix is a mess. If it’s not dead, it’s on life support. Nobody really wants to own a hockey team in the desert. I mean, really? The freakin’ desert?This franchise has been a money-losing fiasco from the day it arrived and the more money it loses, the dumber it makes commissioner Gary Bettman look.

Meanwhile, Winnipeg has a passable building, great fans, real winter, a hockey history and a couple of owners who would do a great job. So why hasn’t the league just cratered the deal in Phoenix and returned to Winnipeg?

The answer is obvious. If you’ve reached the point where you have to bring back a guy who already told you the deal is stupid, you are now at the point where you are doing everything humanly possible to keep this team out of Winnipeg. And while Bettman is the commissioner, he works for the owners. The owners tell him when he can go to the toilet  and right now they are telling him to do whatever he can to keep that team in Phoenix.

Nothing about the Phoenix situation makes any sense. A couple of years ago, before the NHL took over the team and, rather surprisingly, turned it into a good team, club president Doug Moss said to me, “If we ever put a winner on the ice, fans here will respond.”

There is now a winner on the ice and the fans are still AWOL. Sadly, a very good team that is 8-1-1 in its last 10 and could very well go two or three rounds in the post-season, just drew an announced crowd of 12,541 to a big shootout win over Dallas. It doesn’t work, it’s never worked, it won’t work and yet the NHL simply will NOT stop trying to find a sucker to buy this dog and keep it in the desert.

Call me crazy, but the league should have stuck to its original Dec. 31, deadline and simply asked David Thomson (thank you Winnipeg Jets) to make an offer. This drawn-out negotiation and the ensuing fight with the crazy Arizona Republicans has cost the NHL millions in bad money and bad PR.

So why then, is the league so convinced that it has to find an owner in Phoenix and seemingly avoid Winnipeg at any cost?

I know the answer, but I’ll leave it to you to discuss amongst yourselves.

 

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Here Come the Coyotes

Posted on March 19, 2011 by Scott Taylor| Leave a comment

No, the headline has nothing to do with the Phoenix Coyotes moving to Winnipeg. Even Winnipeggers who absolutely believe that the Coyotes will be moving to Winnipeg are smart enough to know that NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, who currently operates the team, isn’t going to announce any kind of move until after the playoffs.

And this year, those playoffs could last a long time.

Friday night, the Coyotes went into Vancouver and beat the best team in the NHL on their own rink. In fact, the Coyotes went 4-0 on their recent Western road trip, became the first and only team to win IN Vancouver twice this season, and finished the 2010-11 campaign with a perfect 6-0-0 record in Western Canada. According to the NHL’s communications department, it’s the first time any team has done that since the St. Louis Blues in 2000-01.

Head coach Dave Tippet’s Coyotes will now go back to the desert for a six-game homestand as the fourth-place team in the Western Conference with 89 points — four ahead of fifth-place Los Angeles and just one behind San Jose for the Pacific Division lead.

Considering all this poor, tread-upon franchise has been through this season, the players have completely put the thought of moving to Winnipeg — or Kansas City, Seattle or Las Vegas — out of their minds and concentrated on playing hockey.

And in a way, it’s quite ironic.

In 1995-96, the lame duck Winnipeg Jets made the playoffs despite knowing they were off to Phoenix at the end of the season. They didn’t care where they were going. They just played hockey. This year, the Coyotes, who have been told they could be going back to Winnipeg, will not only make the Stanley Cup playoffs, they might win the Pacific Division and finish as one of the Top 3 seeds in the West.

I wonder what will happen to that franchise — a franchise that isn’t a lame duck franchise yet — if they take a long, successful run through the post-season?

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