http://www.mcnsports.com/en/node/7547
NHL, MLB, NFL, NBA Win, Hamilton and Balsillie Lose
By Evan Weiner
September 30, 2009
10:30 PM EDT
(New York, N. Y.) -- So Jim Balsillie has dropped out of the bidding for the bankrupt Phoenix Coyotes National Hockey League franchise after a bankruptcy judge in Phoenix, Arizona decided that sports leagues are a private entity and that sports owners have a right to pick owners and territories. The judge, Redfield T. Baum, turned down Balsillie's bid and an offer by the NHL to buy the financially ailing franchise that sits in Glendale, Arizona not in downtown Phoenix because of a terrible decision by the sitting city council in the late 1980s when they buckled to Phoenix Suns CEO Jerry Coangelo's want for the perfect basketball arena with perfect seating for HIS customers and not approve an all purpose use for the building.
The saga of the Phoenix Coyotes should be studied by urban planners and sports business management professors, experts and students as soon as possible because of the action of the elected officials of Phoenix who made a badly flawed decision which resulted in an arena that could only sell 75 percent of the available seating because of obstructed views. Coangelo wanted a hockey team in the building but not own it. He wanted money off of the team as he got the lion’s share of the revenues of any activity in the building because of the lease he demanded and got from the Phoenix officials. Coangelo knew an NHL franchise could not succeed in that building and various Coyotes owners reached the same conclusion very quickly.
The Coyotes franchise became a piece of real estate with a subsequent owner coming up with a plan to try and build an arena in Scottsdale less than five years after Richard Burke and Steven Gluckstern purchased the Winnipeg Jets and moved the franchise to the Valley of the Sun in 1996. Gluckstern quickly cashed in and bought the New York Islanders in what was a real estate grab that did not work out for him in Nassau County, N. Y.
Burke sold the Coyotes to real estate developer Steve Ellman in 2001.
Eventually, after no arena materialized in Scottsdale, Ellman found a willing partner in Glendale and built the arena as part of a real estate development deal.
In 2006, Ellman sold the majority stake of the Coyotes to one of his real estate partners Jerry Moyes in a deal that gave Moyes the hockey team and allowed Ellman to take over the development of the real estate parcel in Glendale. Within two years, Moyes threw his hands up and walked away leaving the NHL apparently to pay off the bills. In May 2009, Moyes decided bankruptcy was a good option and found a willing individual to buy the franchise in Balsillie in a bankruptcy proceeding. The NHL apparently was trying to sell the team to Chicago White Sox and Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf as Moyes walked into Judge Baum's court.
Reinsdorf's Major League White Sox franchise was already doing business in Glendale as Reinsdorf moved his spring training headquarters from Tucson, Arizona to Glendale in the winter/spring of 2009.
Balsillie had twice before gone after an NHL team. He had an agreement to buy the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2006 and dropped out after to agree to some NHL stipulations. In June 2007 he made his biggest mistake in his dealing with NHL owners and NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman. Not too long after he signed an agreement to buy the Nashville Predators from Craig Leipold, he announced that he planned to relocate the team to Hamilton, Ontario in 2008-09. Soon after his plans became public, the deal was called off.
Balsillie is obvious a smart guy given his success with Research in Motion and BlackBerry but he actions in the Nashville matter and subsequent behavior in the Phoenix dealings were silly. Prospective sports owners have to understand that becoming a major league sports owner is not a right but a privilege. You have to prove that you a worthy to join their private club, Balsillie might be raking in the cash with BlackBerry but that does not mean that he will be allowed in the brotherhood of owners.
There must have been a huge sigh of relief from the law offices of Major League Baseball, the National Football League, and the National Basketball Association when they found out that Judge Baum in his decision wrote.
"In the final analysis, the court cannot find or conclude that the interests of the NHL can be adequately protected if the Coyotes are moved to Hamilton without first having a final decision regarding the claimed rights of the NHL."
Judge Baum understood from day one that the NHL is a private entity that has its own rules not too much different than a golf course which can allow or reject prospective members. Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis was able to move his team to Los Angeles after the National Football League blocked his planned relocation in 1981 by a 22-0 vote with five abstentions by joining with the Los Angeles Coliseum Commission's lawsuit which charged that the NFL violated antitrust laws by not allowing the move. Davis and the Coliseum Commission won the case, Davis moved the team to LA and the NFL was forced to tighten up its relocation rules. The NFL has not stopped any moves since the Davis case as Robert Irsay took his Baltimore Colts to Indianapolis in 1984, Bill Bidwill took an offer from Tempe, Arizona in 1988, Davis moved back to Oakland in 1995, Georgia Frontiere moved her Rams from Anaheim to St. Louis in 1995, Art Modell accepted an offer from Maryland and pulled his Cleveland Browns out of the Ohio city in 1995 with the team landing in Baltimore in 1996. Bud Adams finally made good on his threat to move the Houston Oilers in 1996 and took them to Nashville in 1998 with a stop over in Memphis in 1997.
The National Basketball Association blocked the sale of the Minnesota Timberwolves to a group led by boxing promoter Bob Arum in 1994. Arum and his partners wanted to put the team in New Orleans. The NBA led by Commissioner David Stern wanted to keep the team in Minneapolis and found a local owner who bought the team. But Stern did not block Donald Sterling's relocation of the San Diego Clippers to LA in 1985 even though he was against the move. Under Stern's watch, the Kansas City Kings franchise moved to Sacramento, George Shinn left Charlotte for New Orleans; Michael Heisley moved his Vancouver Grizzlies to Memphis and Clayton Bennett has a basketball team in Oklahoma City after leaving Seattle. All of those moves got the approval from NBA owners.
Major League Baseball has an antitrust exemption. They could act without worry but the owners and the Commissioner's office got sloppy and were sued in 1992 by Frank Morsani and his Tampa Bay Baseball Group. Morsani and his investors accused Major League Baseball of reneging on its promise to grant the group an expansion team for the Tampa Bay area. In 2003, Morsani and Major League Baseball reached a settlement in the case.
There are many people who are pointing the finger at Gary Bettman for the Phoenix situation and for what people see as a flawed plan to expand hockey into the southern and southwestern part of the United States. Never let facts get in the way of a good story. Bettman was still in the NBA when the 21 NHL owners in 1990 decided that they needed to expand their league footprint.
Bettman was not the NHL Commissioner when the league split the Minnesota North Star franchise and moved a piece of the team to Daly City, California and the Cow Palace then to San Jose in 1991. Bettman was not there when the league added Tampa Bay and Ottawa in 1992-93 or when Wayne Huizenga's Miami-based Florida Panthers and the Disney-owned Mighty Ducks of Anaheim joined the league or when Norman Green decided to move his Minnesota North Stars to Dallas. All three moves were orchestrated for 1993-94 and even though Bettman joined the league on February 1, 1993, he inherited the business moves.
Bettman's so-called southern strategy wasn't so southern when the league expanded in 1997. Nashville joined in 1998, Atlanta in 1999 but two northern cities, Columbus and St. Paul, Minnesota started play in 2000. The Hartford Whalers owner Peter Karmanos apparently was enticed by Raleigh, North Carolina's plan to build an arena for an NHL expansion team and decided to relocate his team to the Research Triangle area but Karmanos had some good reasons to move. Connecticut Governor John Rowland seemed uninterested in building a new Hartford arena and put turned his attention to building a Hartford football stadium for New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft. Karmanos got a number of perks for his hockey team and his Compuware business with the move.
Bettman and the NHL owners did not stop the sale of the Quebec Nordiques by owner Marcel Aubut to Ascent Entertainment and Charlie Lyons in 1995 after Aubut could not get a new arena in Quebec City.
A sports commissioner can make suggestions to owners but at the end of the day, a commissioner works for the owners, a notion that certain sportswriters, fans and apparently some "experts" who teach sports business classes cannot grasp. Just ask former Major League Baseball Commissioner about autonomy. A Commissioner has some rope but not much. A Commissioner is a lobbyist, in Bettman's case, a negotiator when a collective bargaining agreement with the players is done, and gets TV and marketing deals done. Someone in the NHL decided that Phoenix was an important market and was worth keeping.
The NHL is the only buyer left standing with Balsillie gone. Judge Baum wants the NHL to be kinder to Moyes and Wayne Gretzky in making them whole. The Phoenix area has been hard hit by the recession and the real estate bust but demographers think there could be as many as eight million people in the Valley of the Sun metropolitan area by 2050. Phoenix and the surrounding area was one of the fastest growing United States markets in the 1990s and into the 21st century. But that is in the future. Phoenix has a lot of western Canadian snowbirds along with American Midwesterners who winter in the Valley. Those people are potential customers, the Phoenix business community needs to step up as well to keep the team there. The Coyotes franchise also needs an owner who understands that hockey has to be sold not only on the NHL level but on the youth level.
The Dallas Stars franchise resides in a major Sun Belt market with months of very hot weather yet the Metroplex has embraced youth hockey and Texas has more professional hockey teams than any other state in America.
Balsillie will probably be back but he needs to be rehabilitated if he wants an NHL franchise. He needs to understand that the NHL has rules and regulations and until he gets into the club, he needs to abide by the owners and the Commissioner's wishes.
As far as Hamilton, the city officials of the 1980s were not much smarter than those in Phoenix who knuckled under and gave into Coangelo's demands. The city's arena was built without a thought of the future and lacks sufficient luxury boxes and club seats. The Hamilton building is not up to NHL standards and it will cost taxpayers in an economically depressed city hundreds of millions of dollars to get the building up to snuff. Then there is the question of how much money that a potential Hamilton owner has to pay Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment for invading the Toronto territory and how much money that owner has to give Buffalo Sabres owner Tom Galisano for encroaching the Sabres northern territory not to mention worrying about the United States Senate and New York Senators Charles Schumer and Kristen Gillibrand. The two New York lawmakers were not happy with the thought of a Hamilton team because it might take business away from Buffalo.
For those who think the game is the most important part of sports, think again. Or read Judge Baum's decision.
eweiner@mcn.tv
Showing posts with label jim balsillie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jim balsillie. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Jim Balsillie and Groucho Marx
http://www.mcnsports.com/en/node/7498
Jim Balsillie and Groucho Marx
By Evan Weiner
August 20, 2009
11:30 AM EDT
(New York, N. Y.) -- The gloves have come off and now the battle between the man who wants a National Hockey League team in Hamilton, Ontario, Jim Balsillie, and the very league he is trying to enter has become rather personal. The NHL has accused Balsillie of concocting a "self-serving scheme" by "co-opting" Phoenix Coyotes owner Jerry Moyes to put the business into bankruptcy and somehow insider’s information about the Jerry Reinsdorf bid to buy the business and the Reinsdorf's group negotiations to get a better deal from the city of Glendale to use the municipally built arena for the hockey team was leaked to the conservative, government watchdog group, the Goldwater Institute.
If Balsillie wants to come across as saying the Glendale/Phoenix, Arizona is not a financially solvent hockey market that is fine. But if Balsillie is hiding behind the Goldwater Institute to unmask subsidies that Reinsdorf wants and Glendale is willing to give him to keep the arena occupied then there is something very disingenuous about the strategy. Balsillie’s company Research in Motion was heavily subsidized by the Canadian government in developing BlackBerry technology and Balsillie himself has demanded and received hundreds of millions of Canadian dollars to bring the Hamilton arena up to NHL standards should he get the franchise and move it to the Ontario city.
Balsillie wants to put a team in a city, Hamilton, that has one of the highest rates of unemployment in Canada according to Statistic Canada. The unemployment rate in Ontario in July according to Statistics Canada was 9.3 percent; Hamilton’s unemployment rate is 8.2 percent. Ontario has been crushed by the downsizing of General Motors and Chrysler.
The Goldwater Institute filed a lawsuit to become a party to the bankruptcy proceedings which are continuing. The bankruptcy judge has refused the conservative group's request to join the courtroom battle. Oddly enough the Goldwater Institute was not that critical of the construction of the Glendale football stadium that is home to the Arizona Cardinals in a February 2008 article published by the New York Times.
Balsillie and his lawyer Richard Rodier have fired back and in court papers have said that the NHL has accepted convicted criminals in their ranks to counter the NHL's contention that Balsillie was rejected from being an NHL because of the perception that Balsillie did not "good character and integrity."
Balsillie's lawyer in the court filing went after Reinsdorf because he sued the National Basketball Association in 1990 when the league decided that having Reinsdorf's Chicago Bulls games on United States superstation WGN as Bulls star Michael Jordan was hitting his peak on court was cannibalizing American national cable and broadcast TV rights -- Reinsdorf's team and the Atlanta Hawks games on superstation WTBS were a problem for the NBA in those days -- and New York Rangers owner James Dolan who was upset that the league, not his team, was controlling team websites.
Rodier also went after Bruce McNall, who owned the Los Angeles Kings and ultimately plead guilty to defrauding banks of $236 million, Ottawa Senators owner Eugene Melnyk for violations of Canada's Security Act and one time Nashville co-owner William "Boots" Del Biaggio III who last February pleaded guilty to security fraud in trying to get $100 million in loans by falsifying documents.
Rodier somehow missed John Spano, George Steinbrenner, Harold Ballard, William Cox, Dennis Kozlowski, Eddie DeBartolo, Paul Greenwood and Stephen Walsh in naming a few more sports owners miscreants.
If the co-CEO of Research in Motion, Balsillie, wants to make friends in the National Hockey League and sports, he is sure going about his business the wrong way. Whether people want to admit this or not about sports, whether it is the National Hockey League, Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, the International Olympic Committee, the English Premier League or other sports organizations, it is a private club. Owners can say yes to someone or reject them without just cause.
Balsillie has become the anti-Groucho Marx. Julius Henry Marx, better known as Groucho once quipped "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member." Groucho could not get into any Los Angeles area country clubs because of anti-Semitism in the 1930s. Balsillie cannot get into the NHL private club because of the way he has conducted himself in the past when trying to buy NHL properties in Pittsburgh and in Nashville.
It was the Nashville experience that soured the NHL as Balsillie purchased the franchise from Craig Leipold in June 2007 and immediately began selling tickets to Hamilton Predators games in 2008-09. Balsillie soon lost his chance to buy the Nashville team.
Here is a free history lesson for Balsillie that perhaps Rodier can use. Owners reject potential owners for various reasons or just reject them. In Major League Baseball history, there are plenty of examples of that and in fact, Major League Baseball enjoys an anti-trust exemption from a lawsuit filed by the owners of the Federal League's Baltimore Terrapins. Terrapins ownership was left out of the agreement when the American and National Leagues reached a deal to pay off the Federal League to go away in 1915.
The Terrapins owners sued and eventually the Supreme Court of the United States heard the case and ruled against the Baltimore club and added baseball was a sport not an interstate business in 1922. In the 1980s, Major League Baseball twice rejected a bid by Edward L. Gaylord to buy the Texas Rangers from Eddie Chiles.
The reason?
Gaylord owned a TV station in Dallas that was a "superstation" that was picked up by 400 or so cable systems in the United States southwest. Major League Baseball saw Gaylord's purchase of the Rangers as a threat to national television contracts. Ironically the Chicago White Sox’s Reinsdorf was one of the owners who said no Gaylord. Texas was eventually sold to a group that included the son of the sitting President of the United States, George Bush. The son was George W. Bush. Gaylord would eventually own a piece of the Rangers beginning in 1995.
Major League Baseball also turned down repeated attempts by Frank Morsani to put a team in Tampa, Florida. Eventually Morsani and Major League Baseball reached a settlement after Morsani filed suit against the baseball that shut him out.
The National Football League said no to John Bassett and his Memphis team along with the owners of the Birmingham franchise in the World Football League asked to be included in the NFL after the two year old WFL folded in 1975. A court agreed with the NFL.
The National Basketball Association said no to Bob Arum in 1994 after his group bought the financially troubled Minnesota Timberwolves and planned to move the franchise to New Orleans. In the end, the NBA found a local buyer and Arum walked away.
It is a private club; the owners can pick and choose their partners. Balsillie is not one of them and his actions have offended club members. But Balsillie is continuing his fight and the referee in this case, Judge Redfield T. Baum is letting the fight go on although Judge Baum has ruled that the NHL is a private club and one of the biggest creditors in the bankruptcy proceedings, the computer magnate Michael Dell has endorsed Reinsdorf’s bid.
Balsillie has won no friends in this fight except maybe the Goldwater Institute and Balsillie has been lucky that he has a bunch of lapdogs in the Toronto sports media who are on his side no matter what. But the fight will go on and now it is getting down and dirty.
eweiner@mcn.tv
Jim Balsillie and Groucho Marx
By Evan Weiner
August 20, 2009
11:30 AM EDT
(New York, N. Y.) -- The gloves have come off and now the battle between the man who wants a National Hockey League team in Hamilton, Ontario, Jim Balsillie, and the very league he is trying to enter has become rather personal. The NHL has accused Balsillie of concocting a "self-serving scheme" by "co-opting" Phoenix Coyotes owner Jerry Moyes to put the business into bankruptcy and somehow insider’s information about the Jerry Reinsdorf bid to buy the business and the Reinsdorf's group negotiations to get a better deal from the city of Glendale to use the municipally built arena for the hockey team was leaked to the conservative, government watchdog group, the Goldwater Institute.
If Balsillie wants to come across as saying the Glendale/Phoenix, Arizona is not a financially solvent hockey market that is fine. But if Balsillie is hiding behind the Goldwater Institute to unmask subsidies that Reinsdorf wants and Glendale is willing to give him to keep the arena occupied then there is something very disingenuous about the strategy. Balsillie’s company Research in Motion was heavily subsidized by the Canadian government in developing BlackBerry technology and Balsillie himself has demanded and received hundreds of millions of Canadian dollars to bring the Hamilton arena up to NHL standards should he get the franchise and move it to the Ontario city.
Balsillie wants to put a team in a city, Hamilton, that has one of the highest rates of unemployment in Canada according to Statistic Canada. The unemployment rate in Ontario in July according to Statistics Canada was 9.3 percent; Hamilton’s unemployment rate is 8.2 percent. Ontario has been crushed by the downsizing of General Motors and Chrysler.
The Goldwater Institute filed a lawsuit to become a party to the bankruptcy proceedings which are continuing. The bankruptcy judge has refused the conservative group's request to join the courtroom battle. Oddly enough the Goldwater Institute was not that critical of the construction of the Glendale football stadium that is home to the Arizona Cardinals in a February 2008 article published by the New York Times.
Balsillie and his lawyer Richard Rodier have fired back and in court papers have said that the NHL has accepted convicted criminals in their ranks to counter the NHL's contention that Balsillie was rejected from being an NHL because of the perception that Balsillie did not "good character and integrity."
Balsillie's lawyer in the court filing went after Reinsdorf because he sued the National Basketball Association in 1990 when the league decided that having Reinsdorf's Chicago Bulls games on United States superstation WGN as Bulls star Michael Jordan was hitting his peak on court was cannibalizing American national cable and broadcast TV rights -- Reinsdorf's team and the Atlanta Hawks games on superstation WTBS were a problem for the NBA in those days -- and New York Rangers owner James Dolan who was upset that the league, not his team, was controlling team websites.
Rodier also went after Bruce McNall, who owned the Los Angeles Kings and ultimately plead guilty to defrauding banks of $236 million, Ottawa Senators owner Eugene Melnyk for violations of Canada's Security Act and one time Nashville co-owner William "Boots" Del Biaggio III who last February pleaded guilty to security fraud in trying to get $100 million in loans by falsifying documents.
Rodier somehow missed John Spano, George Steinbrenner, Harold Ballard, William Cox, Dennis Kozlowski, Eddie DeBartolo, Paul Greenwood and Stephen Walsh in naming a few more sports owners miscreants.
If the co-CEO of Research in Motion, Balsillie, wants to make friends in the National Hockey League and sports, he is sure going about his business the wrong way. Whether people want to admit this or not about sports, whether it is the National Hockey League, Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, the International Olympic Committee, the English Premier League or other sports organizations, it is a private club. Owners can say yes to someone or reject them without just cause.
Balsillie has become the anti-Groucho Marx. Julius Henry Marx, better known as Groucho once quipped "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member." Groucho could not get into any Los Angeles area country clubs because of anti-Semitism in the 1930s. Balsillie cannot get into the NHL private club because of the way he has conducted himself in the past when trying to buy NHL properties in Pittsburgh and in Nashville.
It was the Nashville experience that soured the NHL as Balsillie purchased the franchise from Craig Leipold in June 2007 and immediately began selling tickets to Hamilton Predators games in 2008-09. Balsillie soon lost his chance to buy the Nashville team.
Here is a free history lesson for Balsillie that perhaps Rodier can use. Owners reject potential owners for various reasons or just reject them. In Major League Baseball history, there are plenty of examples of that and in fact, Major League Baseball enjoys an anti-trust exemption from a lawsuit filed by the owners of the Federal League's Baltimore Terrapins. Terrapins ownership was left out of the agreement when the American and National Leagues reached a deal to pay off the Federal League to go away in 1915.
The Terrapins owners sued and eventually the Supreme Court of the United States heard the case and ruled against the Baltimore club and added baseball was a sport not an interstate business in 1922. In the 1980s, Major League Baseball twice rejected a bid by Edward L. Gaylord to buy the Texas Rangers from Eddie Chiles.
The reason?
Gaylord owned a TV station in Dallas that was a "superstation" that was picked up by 400 or so cable systems in the United States southwest. Major League Baseball saw Gaylord's purchase of the Rangers as a threat to national television contracts. Ironically the Chicago White Sox’s Reinsdorf was one of the owners who said no Gaylord. Texas was eventually sold to a group that included the son of the sitting President of the United States, George Bush. The son was George W. Bush. Gaylord would eventually own a piece of the Rangers beginning in 1995.
Major League Baseball also turned down repeated attempts by Frank Morsani to put a team in Tampa, Florida. Eventually Morsani and Major League Baseball reached a settlement after Morsani filed suit against the baseball that shut him out.
The National Football League said no to John Bassett and his Memphis team along with the owners of the Birmingham franchise in the World Football League asked to be included in the NFL after the two year old WFL folded in 1975. A court agreed with the NFL.
The National Basketball Association said no to Bob Arum in 1994 after his group bought the financially troubled Minnesota Timberwolves and planned to move the franchise to New Orleans. In the end, the NBA found a local buyer and Arum walked away.
It is a private club; the owners can pick and choose their partners. Balsillie is not one of them and his actions have offended club members. But Balsillie is continuing his fight and the referee in this case, Judge Redfield T. Baum is letting the fight go on although Judge Baum has ruled that the NHL is a private club and one of the biggest creditors in the bankruptcy proceedings, the computer magnate Michael Dell has endorsed Reinsdorf’s bid.
Balsillie has won no friends in this fight except maybe the Goldwater Institute and Balsillie has been lucky that he has a bunch of lapdogs in the Toronto sports media who are on his side no matter what. But the fight will go on and now it is getting down and dirty.
eweiner@mcn.tv
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Why Jim Balsillie should scare local politicians across the United States as well as newspaper executives
http://www.mcnsports.com/en/node/7297
Why Jim Balsillie should scare local politicians across the United States as well as newspaper executives
(New York, N. Y.) -- The guy who was generously helped by Canadian taxpayers in becoming a billionaire named Jim Balsillie should be scaring all of those local and state politicians who pushed for publicly funded sports facilities along with newspaper executives who are ignoring a developing story that could have political implications across the United States.
Balsillie is pursing a scorched earth policy in trying to purchase the National Hockey League's Glendale, Arizona-based Phoenix Coyotes. The hockey team's owner Jerry Moyes declared bankruptcy and Basille has decided to overpay for a fiscally distressed business and now the whole dispute is paying out in a bankruptcy court. While newspapers executives met in Chicago on Thursday discreetly in a session that might have violated American antitrust laws to discuss a plan to save themselves by charging for newspaper content on the web, their papers are missing the opportunity to report on what is the sports industry's biggest story since the 2004-05 National Hockey League lockout. The newspaper and media industry under reported that story, no wonder why newspapers are suffering.
Here is the story the media is missing. If Jerry Moyes is successful in unloading his team and break a multi-decade lease with Glendale, taxpayers are left holding the bills to pay off a building that will become a white elephant. If Moyes is successful, what would stop Charlotte Bobcats owner Bob Johnson, who has announced his intentions to sell the five year old franchise playing in a municipally funded new arena from doing the same thing? Johnson could theoretically sell the team to Chinese interests who could move the team to Beijing in a bankruptcy proceeding and until the question of whether a league has the right to approve territories is resolved, there is nothing taxpayers, municipalities or leagues can do but watch.
Balsillie, whose Research in Motion company came up with BlackBerry, has gotten Hamilton, Ontario elected officials to pony up more than one hundred million dollars, Canadian, to renovate the city's arena should he be successful in getting the Coyotes franchise and is able to move the team to the city. Hamilton elected officials will soon find out that the actual bill when the debt is factored in will not be the figure that they think it is. Balsillie, the white knight of Canada, has the Canadian sports media waving red and white pom poms and cheering make it seven, as in a seventh Canadian National Hockey league franchise. There has been no due diligence about Balsillie and how he made his money in the back of Canadian taxpayers.
That would ruin the narrative of the white knight rescuing Canadian hockey from the evil American Sun Belt cities. It would also require some work on the part of writers who cover hockey in the Toronto area although this New York-based writer knows the Research in Motion subsidy story.
A newspaper editor curiosity should take hold and someone should have been assigned to see just how Balsillie made his money but the thought of Hamilton getting an NHL team is enough.
The newspaper executives who met in Chicago are missing an opportunity to talk to the two New York senators about their support for the NHL by laws which give the league's owners the right to assign territories and how the courts and possibly Congress may have to get involved in the business of sports to protect taxpayers who have put up billions upon billions of dollars for major and minor league sports facilities around the country.
The Charlotte Bobcats story is simple right now. Johnson is looking for a buying and has not threatened bankruptcy. Charlotte has had a mixed history of success in the NBA. The original Charlotte Hornets franchise was a major success. George Shinn's Hornets began in 1988 and at one time sold old the Charlotte Arena for 358 consecutive home games or almost nine seasons but off court activities including the death of a player and sordid details of Shinn's personal life turned people away from the arena and eventually Shinn asked for a new, publicly-funded, arena complete with numerous luxury boxes and club seats to replace the Charlotte Arena which opened in 1988. Charlotte voters said no to a new arena by a 2 to 1 margin in 2001.
Shinn moved to New Orleans in 2002 but city leaders and NBA Commissioner David Stern didn't believe the results of the referendum were totally reflective of the feelings of Charlotte residents. After Shinn left, the city's mayor Pat McCrory set out to build an arena with taxpayer’s dollars without going to the voters to ask them if they wanted a new arena. McCrory and Stern worked out a deal and the city promised it would build an arena if the NBA would return. Johnson bid for the franchise and won spending about $300 million for the right to run the franchise.
The return of the NBA to Charlotte has not been as warmly received as the original Hornets franchise was back in 1988.
Charlotte is not the only financially distressed NBA franchise. Memphis has been struggling since Michael Heisley moved his Vancouver Grizzlies to the city in 2001. Despite playing in a new, taxpayers funded, arena, Heisley has not been fiscally successful. There are other NBA franchises looking for new arenas in Sacramento and Milwaukee. If Balsillie is successful in his bid to take over the Coyotes, what would stop other owners from going Chapter 11 if there is someone willing to take a debt ridden team off there hands in a bankruptcy proceeding.
Could New York Islanders owner Charles Wang, who admitted that he regrets buying the money losing franchise, do the same thing if he doesn’t get his Lighthouse Project approved? The Moyes/Balsillie tactics could echo from community to community that put out public money for sports facilities both on the major and minor league level.
Glendale, Arizona, on behalf of taxpayers, should unleash a super lawsuit against Moyes for breaking his lease and when that happens, taxpayers will learn whether a lease agreement signed between a franchise holder and the municipality is worth the paper it is written on. Moyes broke the lease. Balsillie's legal team is promising an antitrust lawsuit against the NHL if the league says no to his bid. The NHL, NBA and National Football League do not have antitrust protection, Major League Baseball does and that is keeping the Oakland A's owner Lewis Wolff from moving his team to San Jose and it is why the New York City market has not has three teams since 1957. National League baseball owners in 1957 scoffed at the idea of Cincinnati and Pittsburgh from relocating to New York for the 1958 season.
It is a shame newspaper executives continue to miss stories and maybe they should start examine why they have become so inept and why people have turned away from the industry. Senior citizens are the last generation who are still wedded to newspapers for information. Newspaper execs have lived in a bubble forever and are in denial. Perhaps if they followed the Balsille/Coyotes/NHL saga and explained the implications to taxpayers who are paying extra fees for hotel and motel rooms, for car rentals, for restaurants, for alcohol, for cigarettes, for sewer and water and general sales taxes for these facilities, they would get more readers.
Balsillie's scorched earth policy should scare the living daylights out of elected officials who pushed for stadium/arena building as an economic engine and for newspaper executives whose papers are missing a huge story. Instead, the newspapers are asleep at the wheel saying woe is me. New York's two senators are not fighting for the Phoenix Coyotes but they want to keep Balsillie out of Hamilton because it might hurt the Buffalo Sabres franchise. Strangely quiet on the issue is Arizona's two Senators, John McCain and John Kyl. Perhaps Arizona's newspapers ought to make a call and ask what the two senators are thinking. But that might be wishful thinking asking newspapers to do more than some crime stories, some fluff entertainment stories and some mayhem stories.
eweiner@mcn.tv
Why Jim Balsillie should scare local politicians across the United States as well as newspaper executives
(New York, N. Y.) -- The guy who was generously helped by Canadian taxpayers in becoming a billionaire named Jim Balsillie should be scaring all of those local and state politicians who pushed for publicly funded sports facilities along with newspaper executives who are ignoring a developing story that could have political implications across the United States.
Balsillie is pursing a scorched earth policy in trying to purchase the National Hockey League's Glendale, Arizona-based Phoenix Coyotes. The hockey team's owner Jerry Moyes declared bankruptcy and Basille has decided to overpay for a fiscally distressed business and now the whole dispute is paying out in a bankruptcy court. While newspapers executives met in Chicago on Thursday discreetly in a session that might have violated American antitrust laws to discuss a plan to save themselves by charging for newspaper content on the web, their papers are missing the opportunity to report on what is the sports industry's biggest story since the 2004-05 National Hockey League lockout. The newspaper and media industry under reported that story, no wonder why newspapers are suffering.
Here is the story the media is missing. If Jerry Moyes is successful in unloading his team and break a multi-decade lease with Glendale, taxpayers are left holding the bills to pay off a building that will become a white elephant. If Moyes is successful, what would stop Charlotte Bobcats owner Bob Johnson, who has announced his intentions to sell the five year old franchise playing in a municipally funded new arena from doing the same thing? Johnson could theoretically sell the team to Chinese interests who could move the team to Beijing in a bankruptcy proceeding and until the question of whether a league has the right to approve territories is resolved, there is nothing taxpayers, municipalities or leagues can do but watch.
Balsillie, whose Research in Motion company came up with BlackBerry, has gotten Hamilton, Ontario elected officials to pony up more than one hundred million dollars, Canadian, to renovate the city's arena should he be successful in getting the Coyotes franchise and is able to move the team to the city. Hamilton elected officials will soon find out that the actual bill when the debt is factored in will not be the figure that they think it is. Balsillie, the white knight of Canada, has the Canadian sports media waving red and white pom poms and cheering make it seven, as in a seventh Canadian National Hockey league franchise. There has been no due diligence about Balsillie and how he made his money in the back of Canadian taxpayers.
That would ruin the narrative of the white knight rescuing Canadian hockey from the evil American Sun Belt cities. It would also require some work on the part of writers who cover hockey in the Toronto area although this New York-based writer knows the Research in Motion subsidy story.
A newspaper editor curiosity should take hold and someone should have been assigned to see just how Balsillie made his money but the thought of Hamilton getting an NHL team is enough.
The newspaper executives who met in Chicago are missing an opportunity to talk to the two New York senators about their support for the NHL by laws which give the league's owners the right to assign territories and how the courts and possibly Congress may have to get involved in the business of sports to protect taxpayers who have put up billions upon billions of dollars for major and minor league sports facilities around the country.
The Charlotte Bobcats story is simple right now. Johnson is looking for a buying and has not threatened bankruptcy. Charlotte has had a mixed history of success in the NBA. The original Charlotte Hornets franchise was a major success. George Shinn's Hornets began in 1988 and at one time sold old the Charlotte Arena for 358 consecutive home games or almost nine seasons but off court activities including the death of a player and sordid details of Shinn's personal life turned people away from the arena and eventually Shinn asked for a new, publicly-funded, arena complete with numerous luxury boxes and club seats to replace the Charlotte Arena which opened in 1988. Charlotte voters said no to a new arena by a 2 to 1 margin in 2001.
Shinn moved to New Orleans in 2002 but city leaders and NBA Commissioner David Stern didn't believe the results of the referendum were totally reflective of the feelings of Charlotte residents. After Shinn left, the city's mayor Pat McCrory set out to build an arena with taxpayer’s dollars without going to the voters to ask them if they wanted a new arena. McCrory and Stern worked out a deal and the city promised it would build an arena if the NBA would return. Johnson bid for the franchise and won spending about $300 million for the right to run the franchise.
The return of the NBA to Charlotte has not been as warmly received as the original Hornets franchise was back in 1988.
Charlotte is not the only financially distressed NBA franchise. Memphis has been struggling since Michael Heisley moved his Vancouver Grizzlies to the city in 2001. Despite playing in a new, taxpayers funded, arena, Heisley has not been fiscally successful. There are other NBA franchises looking for new arenas in Sacramento and Milwaukee. If Balsillie is successful in his bid to take over the Coyotes, what would stop other owners from going Chapter 11 if there is someone willing to take a debt ridden team off there hands in a bankruptcy proceeding.
Could New York Islanders owner Charles Wang, who admitted that he regrets buying the money losing franchise, do the same thing if he doesn’t get his Lighthouse Project approved? The Moyes/Balsillie tactics could echo from community to community that put out public money for sports facilities both on the major and minor league level.
Glendale, Arizona, on behalf of taxpayers, should unleash a super lawsuit against Moyes for breaking his lease and when that happens, taxpayers will learn whether a lease agreement signed between a franchise holder and the municipality is worth the paper it is written on. Moyes broke the lease. Balsillie's legal team is promising an antitrust lawsuit against the NHL if the league says no to his bid. The NHL, NBA and National Football League do not have antitrust protection, Major League Baseball does and that is keeping the Oakland A's owner Lewis Wolff from moving his team to San Jose and it is why the New York City market has not has three teams since 1957. National League baseball owners in 1957 scoffed at the idea of Cincinnati and Pittsburgh from relocating to New York for the 1958 season.
It is a shame newspaper executives continue to miss stories and maybe they should start examine why they have become so inept and why people have turned away from the industry. Senior citizens are the last generation who are still wedded to newspapers for information. Newspaper execs have lived in a bubble forever and are in denial. Perhaps if they followed the Balsille/Coyotes/NHL saga and explained the implications to taxpayers who are paying extra fees for hotel and motel rooms, for car rentals, for restaurants, for alcohol, for cigarettes, for sewer and water and general sales taxes for these facilities, they would get more readers.
Balsillie's scorched earth policy should scare the living daylights out of elected officials who pushed for stadium/arena building as an economic engine and for newspaper executives whose papers are missing a huge story. Instead, the newspapers are asleep at the wheel saying woe is me. New York's two senators are not fighting for the Phoenix Coyotes but they want to keep Balsillie out of Hamilton because it might hurt the Buffalo Sabres franchise. Strangely quiet on the issue is Arizona's two Senators, John McCain and John Kyl. Perhaps Arizona's newspapers ought to make a call and ask what the two senators are thinking. But that might be wishful thinking asking newspapers to do more than some crime stories, some fluff entertainment stories and some mayhem stories.
eweiner@mcn.tv
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