Thursday, May 24, 2007
Balsillie At It Again In Nashville
A few months ago, Jim Balsillie made an offer to buy the Pittsburgh Penguins. It fell through when Gary Bettman stepped in at the last minute and forced him to agree to keep the Penguins in Pittsburgh. It seems Balsillie wanted to move a team to Southern Ontario.
Pittsburgh is a relatively strong NHL market that was having trouble blackmailing a new arena from local taxpayers. That problem has been solved so Balsillie has to look elsewhere for a team to move. Fortunately for him there are several teams in the non-traditional American markets that are having trouble drawing fans.
One of these teams is Nashville. They are a team that finished with fourth seed in the West Conference and even added Peter Forsberg for their short playoff run. However, they have done this with a significant amount of revenue sharing money and since they have not been able to get attendance about 14,000 per game (despite some success on the ice) this revenue stream is likely to dry up. Thus their owner Craig Leipold, who has done a good job of hiring a good GM in David Poile and letting him build a good team, is looking to move on. Balsillie has entered into an agreement to buy the Predators for $220 million (which represents a tidy profit for Leipold who paid an $80 million expansion fee and claims to have lost $70 million over nine years).
This would give Jim Balsillie a good team that he could move to southern Ontario.
The question is how will the NHL react. Will they admit that the southern US expansion is a failure and let the teams begin to move north to where they are wanted or will they continue to fight for a national US TV deal and maintain these teams that are failing financially Will the lockout and CBA, which was apparently done to help teams like Nashville survive, be shown to be a failure in that goal this quickly into it?
Here is the TSN story on the potential sale.
Pittsburgh is a relatively strong NHL market that was having trouble blackmailing a new arena from local taxpayers. That problem has been solved so Balsillie has to look elsewhere for a team to move. Fortunately for him there are several teams in the non-traditional American markets that are having trouble drawing fans.
One of these teams is Nashville. They are a team that finished with fourth seed in the West Conference and even added Peter Forsberg for their short playoff run. However, they have done this with a significant amount of revenue sharing money and since they have not been able to get attendance about 14,000 per game (despite some success on the ice) this revenue stream is likely to dry up. Thus their owner Craig Leipold, who has done a good job of hiring a good GM in David Poile and letting him build a good team, is looking to move on. Balsillie has entered into an agreement to buy the Predators for $220 million (which represents a tidy profit for Leipold who paid an $80 million expansion fee and claims to have lost $70 million over nine years).
This would give Jim Balsillie a good team that he could move to southern Ontario.
The question is how will the NHL react. Will they admit that the southern US expansion is a failure and let the teams begin to move north to where they are wanted or will they continue to fight for a national US TV deal and maintain these teams that are failing financially Will the lockout and CBA, which was apparently done to help teams like Nashville survive, be shown to be a failure in that goal this quickly into it?
Here is the TSN story on the potential sale.
