MentalPolyphonics

The Leafs were sold yesterday, and Football started! Sports are hotting up after the Summer cool-down.

Balsillie’s scheme to gain control of the Coyotes is coming down to the wire. The NHL’s position is that their $100 million lower offer is better because they voted near-unanimously against letting him join as an owner.

We should win because our board of owners voted that we should win.

Yeah, okay. Whatever. Democracy in action, just like Saddam’s 100% election victory before the invasion. Equally lovable.

The judge asked Balsillie for an extension on the deal’s September 21st deadline — he needs time to write his decision. Depending on how flexible that deadline is (or how fictional it is) I’d seriously consider giving the judge another week, or until the end of the month.

It seems as though Baum’s indicating a Hamilton win, so why not? Why would he ask for an extension if the decision was against our fellow Canadian? Plus, it never hurts to curry favor.

The National Post liveblogged Tuesday’s bankruptcy court appearance.

5:56 p.m. Seems to be agreed among Canadian reporters in the back row that Judge Baum sounds an awful lot like Jimmy Stewart. An awful lot.

Long story short: The judge ordered the Coyotes and NHL into meditation to determine WTF all their conflicting paperwork actually means. He didn’t issue a ruling, just scheduled some future dates.

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!

The Post reports that my intuition about Reinsdorf’s offer for the Coyotes was dead-on. His offer was $130 million as opposed to Balsillie’s $200 million-plus.

The NHL also released a better talking point about its position: What Moyes sold is the right to relocate the team, which he doesn’t own.

After discussing the situation with hockey fans, I agree that the structure of the NHL itself is what’s in play. Moving the Coyotes East unbalances the divisions. But then: I’m in favor of Western teams getting bye weeks.

Hamilton voted to lease Copps Coliseum to Balsillie, and he pledged to renovate it with government support, which Horwath wants too. I saw an interview with her on TVO — She claims to be an unabashed socialist critical of The Third Way, but apparently is also pro-business.

But now I’m holding a politician to a standard other than political expedience: My bad.

In the same show I watched some Marxist academic, who also thought Horwath wasn’t a big enough lefty, claim that what government needed was a more entrepreneurs willing to work for public sector salaries. Typical socialist: Trying to guilt dynamic, creative people into accepting less of the pie than they deserve to drag the masses kicking and screaming into a brave new world.

Peddle that slave morality elsewhere. I’d rather feed my family by charging full market rate. The government already takes its cut in the form of progressive taxation. Expecting talented people to willingly forgo compensation on top of that is just naked greed, and short-sighted from a tax base perspective.

I do like his point about nationalizing the banks, but really: Just join (or start) a credit union. More competition won’t hurt the situation.

But back to the business of hockey. The haters are saying that spending on professional sports is the last thing the government should do during a recession. Apparently they believe that shrinking business investment is an appropriate response to an economic slowdown — evidently they have no background in economics and so should STFU. Renovating a stadium creates employment, which creates spending, which creates employment.