The Latest Headache
While the stories that came out yesterday about the Tampa Bay Lightning ownership squabble obviously represent bad news for the franchise, they don’t make any sense at all to me. Mirtle pointed me to this John Romano story that details differences between the two major owners. Oren Koules and Len Barrie met with Gary Bettman but it isn’t clear whether anything was really resolved.
Even accepting that the two partners have been going at it like cats and dogs, why on earth would Bettman get involved? Unless the league has money at risk what is the league interest? I don’t think we are hearing anything near the entire story here and it is entirely possible that the league is lending money to Tampa Bay as well as to the Coyotes.
Mirtle sees bad things on the horizon:
Yes, the Lightning had won the Stanley Cup in 2004 and that fueled their success, but even with the lockout, the franchise was one of the true success stories of the sunbelt, next to only the Stars in Texas as a sign that “untraditional” markets could not only remain viable, but flourish. Now?
Now the team’s ridiculous owners are headed to the principal’s office to sort out their differences, and the outcome of that business will determine the Lightning’s course in the near term. But you have to worry about the franchise’s financial health given we’ve heard so much about how underfunded it is even with both Koules and Barrie at the helm, and on the ice, there’s little reason for optimism depending on how free agency goes.
I don’t think you can blame all the woes in Tampa on the ownership group although I agree that this has been a circus from day one. I picked the Lightning to be Bettman’s next crisis because they have revenue problems as well as a squeezed ownership group.
I don’t buy the idea that Tampa ever demonstrated hockey could flourish in that market any more than the Panther rat run proved Miami is a good hockey market. Every market can sell the sport with a winner. Viability is determined by the financial performance when the team can’t win. A seaworthy boat survives the stormy seas. Smooth sailing when the sun is shining doesn’t prove anything.
The Lightning are a losing team with unstable ownership in a marginal market during hard economic times. All four of those factors are critical. None of them alone would be enough to sink the franchise. But add them up and Tampa Bay becomes Gary Bettman’s latest headache.
Just a thought, but the OK Hockey ownership application could have had a clause along the lines of “any management disagreement (defined below as x, y, z, etc.) between the principals shall be resolved through binding arbitration with the NHL commissioner as arbitrator (and in accordance with the following arbitration rules…).” Either the NHL or OK Hockey could have forseen these problems given the two-headed nature of their ownership structure and planned accordingly. That said, it’s probably more likely that the NHL is fronting the team some money and that’s why Bettman is involved. And why he’d choose to go with the guy advocating a floor payroll. That said, these guys have been total clowns since day 1 and they deserve this and worse. The only people I feel bad for are Martin St. Louis and Victor Hedman.
The arbitration angle is certainly a reasonable supposition.
I did read elsewhere, though, that the Koules/Barrie group was actually comprised of nine investors, of which they were merely the two largest. Does anyone have concrete data on this?
It is shocking that the Tampa owners are fighting. Who would have guessed? Koules and Barrie are both a little, err, quirky. What’s more, guys like that tend to have outsized egos. That’s normal for high rollers, but that is also why they tend to fly alone. In Vancouver, there is one boss – Aquilini. In Ottawa, it is Eugene Melnyk’s show, period. The committee structure never worked that well in Edmonton, and a lot of the Leafs’ problems can be traced to meddling from the Board of Directors.
The problem in Tampa, of course, is that neither or those two is inclined to buy out the other. (Barrie can’t afford to.) And yes, Gerald, I am also pretty certain they are just the front people for a larger investment group, further complicating matters. The saving grace in Tampa is the arena, which I gather is a pretty profitable and busy building. Without that, you would see yet another team looking northward for a new home.
The saving grace in Tampa is the arena, which I gather is a pretty profitable and busy building.
Indeed. I checked out the arena website and discovered that they host >150 events per year PLUS the Tampa Bay Lightning games (they are currently in the midst of a lengthy Cirque du Soleil run of performances). Compare that to Phoenix’s pitiful 46 non-hockey events.