ยป Further Hamilton Coyotes Analysis
Suddenly the rhetoric softens.
Yesterday Balsillie said he’s willing to keep the team in Phoenix for a year, which crushed the NHL’s complaint that moving the team would disrupt the schedule.
Back-pedaling furiously, Bettman now says he’d rather the team move back to The ‘Peg. I’m reasonably sure that the MTS Centre’s 16,000 seats won’t sell out. They represent about 2.5% of the total metro population, compared with Copps which is 19,000 seats in an estimated market of 2.5 million, or less than 1%. If you charge $100 per seat for regular season games you only need about 7,000 people per game to cover $50 million cap, but I don’t know if the Winnipeg market can bear that — lots and lots of those 700,000 people are quite poor.
I was thinking that TV broadcast is probably where all the money is, but it’s only a couple hundred million for league-wide rights. There are 30 teams and the minimum salary cap is, what, like $40 million? Tickets and merchandise still seem to be what’s paying the bills, which means you need a big market full of rich people who like attending hockey games.
Bettman gets a lot of flack, but I appreciate his business acumen. Moving league TV licensing revenues from $5 million to $120 million per season is nothing to sneeze at, and growing the game with expansions into the American market is a no-brainer. I think his (under-reported) point was that he’d rather the team stay in Phoenix, then would rather they move to another western American market, then would rather they move to Winnipeg, and finally would accept them moving to Hamilton as a dead last resort.
Kansas has a population of 2.6 million, and Las Vegas 1.8 million plus tourists. Better to move the team there, or sell an expansion in both of those, or some other large, willing American city to balance the move of the Coyotes out East. Of those two I’d love to see a Vegas casino get a franchise.
And it turns out Moyes had authority to sell the team when negotiations started! He’s also accusing the league of fraudulently trying to snag the team from him. Oh, snap!
And check out this disgusting display of yellow journalism. I read it to get some idea of the history of the league’s business side.
Notice all the snide parasitism in the tone? MacKinnon writes simultaneously as though Balsillie should act only for the public good, and then chastises his overtures to same.
The writing is so confused one wonders at MacKinnon’s point. For example:
Cumbersome, flawed, nonsensical systems should be fixed, not followed.
Jack
18 May 09 at 5:37 pm
Do you think that Bettman’s claim that the team should move to Winnipeg, if it moves anywhere in Canada, is anything other than an attempt to create division among the many Canadian supporters of the attempt to get the team?
Don
19 May 09 at 7:33 am
Hahahah, I suspect that’s exactly what it is.
The thought crossed my mind when I was writing the post, but I didn’t mention it because I was worried I was just being paranoid
Still, it’s not paranoia if they’re actually out to get you.
Jack
19 May 09 at 10:02 am