Oh this just keeps getting better. NHL is screwing up here, big time.

Posted by Performance Parts on 06/11/09 at 07:35 AM ET

Do they think they are actually going to increase the price so much that Balsillie gives up, or what?  He’s already spent a ton of money on his quest - he isn’t going to back out now, if a few million more is going to get him what he wants.

Whatever else anyone might think of him, he is a very determined man.

Posted by Baroque from Michigan on 06/11/09 at 07:49 AM ET

I think it’s all very funny.

Balsille decided to try to take the back door, if you will, to get what he wanted… and so now the league is going to heap every obstacle on him they can possibly come up with and make it cost as much as possible.

Rest assured that if Balsille gets his way, the first thing the league will see to is that there *is* no realignment for at least a couple seasons, and make that Hamilton team’s travel an absolute nightmare…

Posted by Primis on 06/11/09 at 08:39 AM ET

Hamilton’s travel won’t be any worse than Detroit’s, and it’ll be nice to have a team in the NHL Bettman hates more than the Wings.

And if the NHL is too crazy with their ‘fees’, it’s not unlikely that the judge will throw those numbers out and have them go to mediation.

Posted by HockeyinHD on 06/11/09 at 09:29 AM ET

The judge is the one demanding a number.

The indemnity fee has always been on the table as far as I know, but it hasn’t had a hard number attached to it.

My only beef with this whole thing (beside the jingoistic rhetoric coming from some puffed-up Canadians) is that Jimmy Crackberry may have forced his way into the NHL via court.  I don’t think that sets a good precedent for any of the major sports, which is why they’re fighting this so hard.

Posted by Mike @ MHH from Oklahoma City, OK on 06/11/09 at 09:40 AM ET

Balsillie is only forcing his way into the league because Gary Bettman won’t let go of his ‘put an NHL team in every large US market and keep it there whether it works or not’ strategy.

If Balsillie would have agreed to keep the Coyotes in Phoenix or the Preds in Nashville in perpetuity, he’d have been an owner long before this.

That tells you this issue isn’t a Balsillie problem, it’s a Bettman problem.

As usual.

Posted by HockeyinHD on 06/11/09 at 09:48 AM ET

@Hockey in HD: What makes you so sure that if the team moves to Hamilton, Gary Bettman will be around to hate it?

Posted by Josh from Fort St. John, BC on 06/11/09 at 11:12 AM ET

I don’t see how this gets Bettman fired, if stupidly keeping a team in Phoenix (and elsewhere) when it was clear to anyone with a pulse that they couldn’t be financially competitive unless they were winning 50 games a year didn’t.

Worst case, the NHL makes an extra 100 mil or so in Indemnity/Relocation fees, which I presume gets split between the other 29 owners in some fashion anyway.

I mean, how does Bettman lose a vote at this point?  He’s got Jacobs in his back pocket (or vice versa) and, although it’s stupid of them, probably more than a couple of the owners who have been suckling up to the ‘revenue sharing trough’ the past four years.  God knows the Penguin’s owner probably washes Bettman’s feet twice a week.

Outside of Detroit (and probably Washington since they got screwed in the second round by the refs), there aren’t any owners who have a big anti-Bettman stance that I can think of.

Posted by HockeyinHD on 06/11/09 at 11:32 AM ET

Bettman has staked a lot of his political capital on this. Expanding throughout the sunbelt is his thing. Keeping Jim Balsillie out of the league is something he’s been absolutely resolute about.

I don’t see how he can lose face like this and go on. If it was any other potential owner going to any other potential market, sure, but I don’t see how he maintains the support of the owners after guiding them through a costly legal battle to save a market that they’re going to have to shovel $30 million (at a bare minimum) into next season and to keep out a billionaire who loves hockey.

The owners just can’t have blind faith in anyone like that. They can’t be that stupid.

Posted by Josh from Fort St. John, BC on 06/11/09 at 11:35 AM ET

Also, the Rangers’ fights with League office have been well-documented and if you’ve listened to any of the interviews Bob McCown has done with Canadian owners (outside of the Leafs) on Fan 590 in Toronto, you can certainly read between the lines to get a sense of how they’re not into propping up Phoenix, Florida, Atlanta, etc.

There are plenty of other owners unimpressed with Bettman for reasons bigger than “the refs jobbed my team”. Maybe it hasn’t reached a critical mass yet, but this might be the breaking point.

Posted by Josh from Fort St. John, BC on 06/11/09 at 11:40 AM ET

The owners just can’t have blind faith in anyone like that. They can’t be that stupid.

Jeremy Jacobs.
Charles Wang.
Stan Kroenke.
Whoever owns the Thrashers and hasn’t fired Waddell.
Whoever owns the Rangers and kept Sather.
Whoever owns the Panthers.
Those two idiots running the Lightning.

Josh, not only do I think NHL owners can be that stupid, I think ‘stupid’ would be an upgrade.

Posted by HockeyinHD on 06/11/09 at 11:47 AM ET

The problem is, you’re looking at this from a hockey sense. From a business sense - how did all these guys acquire enough money to buy NHL teams? They might not know enough to fire Glen Sather (though I’d add that in the case of the Thrashers, no one is currently clearly in control of the club, which makes firing executives a bit more difficult), but they know enough, I’d wager, not to support the man who’s taking them down a road that could end with the Coyotes staying in Phoenix, losing the league more money, for seasons to come.

Posted by Josh from Fort St. John, BC on 06/11/09 at 11:53 AM ET

I’m so torn on this one.  On the one hand, I would _LOVE_ to see more hockey teams in Canada.  It’s their sport, damnit.

On the other hand, this would mean the chances of the Wings moving to the Eastern Conference goes into a deep, dark hole.  And I dearly would like to see the Wings in the east again.

Mark my words however, if Phoenix moves, the next thing you’re going to see when the economy strengthens is Jerry Brockheimer get his way at a Las Vegas team, and most likley a Kansas City team to balance it all out, then, perhaps, the Wings could move again.

Posted by Hippy Dave from Portland by way of Detroit on 06/11/09 at 12:02 PM ET

Whoever owns the Rangers and kept Sather.

Cablevision owns rangers. they dont like bettman since website lawsuit. cablevision wants out of the NHL and they are trying to sell rangers

Posted by FlyersFan on 06/11/09 at 12:19 PM ET

I wonder if in some cases the owners haven’t paid much attention to what was going on in Phoenix and have let Bettman make decisions without their input (and by that I mean some owners, who since everything seemed to be fine, were content to let other owners who were more interested have more input into decisions).  Now that the economy is worse, the formerly disinterested owners are acting more like a manager who always had his expensive fancy coffee every day without thinking about the cost, until things got tight and he actually looked at how much he was spending each week and how much he could save by bringing coffee from home.

Posted by Baroque from Michigan on 06/11/09 at 12:43 PM ET

The problem is, you’re looking at this from a hockey sense. From a business sense - how did all these guys acquire enough money to buy NHL teams?

Just because you became rich doesn’t mean you are (or suddenly became) intelligent.

And, as a correllary, even if you do have an arena of expertise that doesn’t mean you would have any idea at all about how that expertise transfers over to a sports league, if it even can.

Just look at Charles Wang.  That guy has NO idea what he’s doing.  None.  Same thing with Jacobs, really.  He was destroying the Bruins as a franchise with his penny-pinching ways for years.

And on, and on, and on.  If an owner, or an ownership group, can’t even handle things like finding competent GMs or removing incompetent ones, why should they be able to address larger, league-wide issues with any more acuity?

And all that aside, more often than not owning a sports team is more of a glorified Bobblehead to these guys than something they are even remotely passionate about.  Their sports teams are status symbols more than anything else.

And, oh man, does it show.

Posted by HockeyinHD on 06/11/09 at 01:54 PM ET