Anyway, it sounds like the response to the prospective new owners’ plan to have Glendale give them $15 million a year for the next 15 years, and for them in exchange to accept $15 million a year for the next 15 years, didn’t go over all that well:

One council member left the closed-door briefing early, saying prospective Coyotes owner Renaissance Sports & Entertainment was getting preferential treatment by her colleagues.

“I couldn’t take it anymore,” Councilwoman Norma Alvarez said as she made an early departure from the executive session.

Okay, Alvarez was already counted as one of the seven-member council’s likely three no votes. What about Gary Sherwood, Manny Martinez and Yvonne Knaack, the three likely yes votes, and Mayor Jerry Weiers, considered the swing vote?

According to Fox Sports Arizona:

“What I thought would happen, happened,” Sherwood said. “When you go through some of the deal points, I thought there would be a hang up or two, and there were.

“But I think they are easily overcome, and I think there will be another meeting this week. I’m optimistic because I think that what we need to do is pretty simplistic and it’s easily doable.”

And according to the Arizona Republic:

After hours of meetings in private, Councilman Manny Martinez said, “We had long discussions as you can see, because we’re just now getting out, but we just don’t have the right decision yet.”

Martinez said the council will likely not vote on the matter during its next scheduled voting meeting on Tuesday. All the council members have questions about the proposal, he said.

Mayor Jerry Weiers said, “There’s been no decision made by the council, so right now, that’s all I can tell you.”

That’s right, the Arizona Republic is resorting to reporting non-statements by the mayor, because the council meeting was held behind closed doors. Because they don’t want anyone to know what they’re talking about until they’re good and ready. Except, presumably, the NSA, because they have nothing to hide from them.

UPDATE: According to Fox Sports Arizona’s Craig Morgan, there could be another closed-door meeting this Friday, with public discussion on June 25, and a vote possibly on June 28 or July 2. No word on how the public will know what to discuss when what’s being voted on remains a secret, but you know, people can usually find something to talk about. The weather is always good.

Whether that’s true or how it will work — especially without an NBA or NHL team as an anchor tenant — remains to be seen: The arena’s project manager says the model is Sprint Center in Kansas City, which despite being jam-packed with concert booking still doesn’t come close to repaying all the public money that that city pumped into it. I guess it’s conceivable that Las Vegas draws enough tourists with money burning a hole in their pockets that MGM can make money by selling tons of tickets to tons of events, a la the Brooklyn Nets‘ Barclays Center (though that has an NBA team to fill 41 nights, plus soon an NHL team to fill another 41). Or maybe it’ll be a loss leader to get people into MGM’s casinos. Who really knows — when it comes to Vegas economics … I was going to say “all bets are off,” but that’s probably not the right wording.

The problem Sunday, he said, was that someone jammed something down a toilet that didn’t belong, clogging a line. The line has been cleared and it’s undamaged, he said.

Incidentally, he said, the city of Oakland and Alameda County — which run the Coliseum complex — are on the hook for “tens of thousands of dollars” to clean up the mess.

Seriously, just let the jokes run wild. Here, I’ll start: What, did Jose Canseco come for a visit?

Let’s be clear: This is potentially a huge deal. (Though also potentially not a huge deal — more on that in a moment.) Not so much because of the merits or lack thereof of San Jose’s case — I’m the farthest thing from a lawyer, and in any event the prior rulings around sports league practices have been thin and contradictory — but because MLB is deathly afraid of anything that might risk its precious antitrust exemption, which was handed down by the Supreme Court in 1922 under the bizarre argument that baseball isn’t interstate commerce. The last time a serious antitrust threat was levied against MLB was 20 years ago, when Giants owner Bob Lurie tried to move his team to St. Petersburg, and the league blocked him, forcing him to sell to local owners in San Francisco. When Florida threatened to sue, MLB quickly summoned the Tampa Bay Devil Rays into existence to make the challenge go away.

There are differences in the San Jose case, obviously. First off, MLB hasn’t actually blocked Lew Wolff from moving the A’s to San Jose; the league has simply told him if he wants to do it, he’ll have to negotiate a territorial rights payoff to the Giants, and it’s up to them to work that out. (Actually, the league has publicly just said, “Hang on, we’re still thinking about it,” but everyone knows that behind closed doors it’s “Talk to the Giants, we’ll be over here.”) Also, Florida by all accounts has some of the toughest state antitrust laws in the nation, so a California suit may not hold the same level of threat.

NBC Sports’ Craig Calcaterra, who is a lawyer, goes so far as to call the San Jose suit “more full of crap than Bob Melvin’s office was on Sunday afternoon,” mostly because the city doesn’t actually have a deal for the A’s to move there, and so doesn’t have standing to sue. If Wolff had sued, writes Calcaterra, “claiming that MLB is preventing them from moving and that MLB’s insistence that they stay in Oakland has caused them financial damages, I think it would have a puncher’s chance.” The suit, he says, reads more like a p.r. document than a valid legal challenge.

What we have here, in the end, is a complicated multi-sided game of chicken in which nobody can quite use all the powers that they have at their disposal. San Jose has nothing to lose by suing, but lousy legal standing. Wolff has a way better case, but also risks becoming persona non grata at the MLB owners’ meetings if he were to try to sue the fellow members of their little club. (It’s worth noting that Wolff backed away from the suit as fast as possible yesterday, saying he had “no details” about it, and that “I’m not in favor of legal action or legal threats to solve business issues.”) MLB has a great chance of winning the case, if Calcaterra is to be believed, but could face public scrutiny of its business practices if it went to trial; and the downside of actually losing — and having the 1922 antitrust exemption be overturned — would be catastrophic as far as the league’s owners are concerned.

If I had to guess, I’d say we’ll likely see MLB try like the dickens to get this suit dismissed as soon as possible, to avoid any chance of an actual trial. If that fails, then you might see some talk of a settlement, with the league pressing the Giants’ owners to cut a deal with Wolff. Though that carries risk, too, because if this San Jose gambit works, what’s to stop, say, New Jersey from suing on the grounds that it’s not allowed to bring the Rays or Marlins there?

In any case, the San Jose council seems to have decided that this is the right moment — especially after last weekend’s shower poop fiasco — to try to shake MLB into some kind of action. It almost certainly won’t work immediately, but if they can whether MLB’s challenges and find a judge willing to let the case proceed, it is the one thing that Bud Selig might just be afraid of. Certainly more than he is of a little raw sewage.

• “It’s all a bunch of crap,” A’s owner Lew Wolff told USA Today’s Bob Nightengale, who suggested that Wolff sabotage the plumbing at the next MLB owners’ meeting “to let his peers know just what it’s like these days playing in the Oakland Coliseum.”
• “As we have stated many times, the Oakland A’s need a new ballpark,” wrote MLB in a prepared statement. “Sunday’s unfortunate incident is a stark illustration that they need a long-term solution. … The situation in Oakland is particularly complicated, evident through the years of work it has required, yet we remain hopeful that a resolution can be reached so that the A’s can secure the 21st Century venue that the franchise and its fans deserve.”

In other words, it’s still the status quo: Wolff still wants a new stadium in San Jose, the San Francisco Giants owners still have no intention of giving up the territorial rights that they got with the franchise back in 1992, and Bud Selig isn’t going to smack any heads together to get this resolved, no matter how many carpets need to be changed.

As for whether all this means that the O.co Coliseum — and man, do you think Overstock.com is happy they bought the naming rights to a building that is getting their name mentioned in this context? — is actually in any direr need of replacement, probably not: The A’s equipment manager told the San Jose Mercury News that plumbing problems have occurred “periodically” going all the way back to 1975, and have always been repaired. Which isn’t exactly reassuring, but given that there have been plenty of bigger crowds over the years than last weekend’s without sewage backups, it does seem that this isn’t a sign that the Coliseum is obsolete for modern crowds or anything; it’s just a building that’s always had somewhat (ahem) crappy plumbing. All should be well for the next A’s homestand; I’ll actually be in attendance at one of those games, so if HTML5 can ever get those <aroma> tags working, I’ll post a full report.

McGinn said they were serious enough, that it led to a conversation between him and NHL Commissioner Bettman.

“I let him know of the situation here, and that we were supportive of bringing the NHL to Seattle,” McGinn said. “We have Key Arena, so we talked about the potential of them being in Key Arena, while we continue to work on a new arena plan.”

NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly would not characterize the discussions between McGinn and Bettman, and told KING5 the conversation was “like any number of conversations the Commissioner has all the time with a variety of people.”

So who exactly are these guys? Bartoszek is a billionaire former oil trader who tried and failed to buy the New York Mets a couple of years ago, and ended up with a minority share of the New York Yankees instead. Lanza, according to his official bio, “has varied experience in the security industry, both domestically and internationally, as a project consultant in business development for both 3DRS International, NSM Surveillance, and Spear International,” which sure sounds like a long-winded way of saying “doesn’t actually have a job.” His dad used to be COO of Lockheed Martin, though, which I guess gives him some cred as a Seattle local, if you squint hard enough.

Whether this pair is actually serious about buying the Coyotes and moving them to Seattle, who knows? The team would have to play at Key Arena at least at first, until Ch

ris Hansen’s SoDo arena is completed; and since that can’t begin construction until Seattle has an NBA franchise, something that’s likely at least a couple of years away, you’re talking about at least four or five years of an NHL team playing in an arena that would have to have hockey shoehorned into a basketball setting, leading to seating plans along the lines of what the New York Islanders will be dealing with in Brooklyn. Which, admittedly, might still be preferable to playing before empty houses in Glendale, but it’s still an awfully big gamble for a pair of sports novices — not to mention for the NHL, which might be better off getting a bidding war going between Seattle, Quebec, and maybe some other cities if it decides to finally move the Coyotes out of Arizona.

For now, though, Bettman and Daly can remain noncommittal, leaving the Glendale city council to imagine the moving vans instantly pulling up should they reject the Coyotes’ lease subsidy demands. According to the Phoenix Business Journal, there are three members of the council solidly in favor of giving the Coyotes what they want, and three solidly opposed — leaving the deciding vote in the hands of Glendale Mayor Jerry Weiers, old “Glendale is not your cash register” himself.

The PBJ notes that as a state legislator, Weiers sponsored a short-lived bill to kick back state sales tax revenue to local governments to be used for sports subsidies. That’s certainly the kind of thing that elected officials might consider to be “Coyotes-related revenue streams” — no, not every dollar spent within two miles of an arena is because of the Coyotes, but they can pretend it is — but it’s also solidly in the jurisdiction of the state legislature, not Glendale, so it would require kicking this whole Coyotes mess into the state’s lap. Which I suppose would be one way of Weiers getting out of this pickle: Hey, I came up with a plan to keep the Coyotes, it was up to the stupid state to approve it!

We may get some hints of where all this is headed at the council meeting tonight. I doesn’t look to me like there’ll be any streaming video of the meeting; if I’m wrong about this, I’m sure I’ll be quickly corrected in comments.

The Miami Heat has begun talks to rework a deal for public subsidies at AmericanAirlines Arena in exchange for a longer lease and a significant upgrade of the 13-year-old facility.

Citing mounting costs for keeping the 19,600-seat arena competitive for concerts and to provide basketball fans more amenities, Heat executives say they will need more help from Miami-Dade to sustain the arena’s current top-notch quality into the middle of the century. They warn that without the start of a new wave of upgrades, the facility faces the fate of the team’s original home at Miami Arena, which was demolished five years ago.

Okay, so the Miami Heat‘s original home of Miami Arena was demolished because the Heat successfully got Miami to approve building them a new arena in 1996, even though their previous one was just eight years old at the time. So this “warning” is, in essence, a threat that if Miami doesn’t agree to give the Heat money for a refurbished arena, they’ll risk losing the team to … a new arena that Miami will build? What?

Anyway, this is yet another sign that asking for subsidies to fund renovations is the new asking for subsidies to fund new stadiums — all the kids are doing it! And also that team owners are realizing that when your team is in the championship finals is probably a good time to go asking for money, especially when it’s a team whose superstar is a free agent at the end of next season. (Send us money or we’ll shoot Lebron!) If nothing else, maybe it’ll distract everyone’s attention from whether the Heat has been stiffing Miami-Dade taxpayers on their share of profits.

The Utah Jazz on Monday will make a “major facility announcement,” and are expected to unveil plans to update EnergySolutions Arena…

The downtown arena seats 19,911 but has been has surpassed by newer, flashier arenas with more premium amenities since its construction in 1991. In recent years, the Jazz have made minor improvements, such as adding restaurants and clubs. However, by NBA standards the arena boasts relatively few suites (50) and even less luxury seating near the court.

There’s definitely going to be a new scoreboard involved, but as for whether a more extensive renovation is in the works, and whether public money will be requested, we’ll have to wait another few hours.

UPDATE: Turns out it was $15 million worth of new video screens and new kitchens in the luxury suites. That’s a major arena announcement? Utah Jazz p.r. department, I will never believe your hyperbole again.

BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) — About 200 people burned tires and blocked the main road in front of the Brasilia stadium that will host the Confederations Cup opener Saturday.

The protest was organized by local groups complaining of excessive costs of the Confederations Cup and the 2014 World Cup.

A black cloud of smoke was seen near the stadium Friday morning as protesters held banners complaining about the local government. Firefighters and police were called to the scene but there was no confrontation with protesters. The road was cleared early in the afternoon.

Protester Edson da Silva said the demonstrators opposed “all the money that was spent by the government” for the World Cup.

Not saying that’s a better way, mind you. Though it is worth noting that there’s no statutory limit on burning tires.

Brazil, if you’re scoring at home, is spending about $3.3 billion on new or refurbished stadiums for the World Cup, three of which are in cities that don’t even have major soccer clubs. The 71,000-seat Brasilia stadium has now held 57 matches and drawn fewer than 50,000 fans in total. Brazil is currently run by a leftist government that has been making good strides in reducing poverty, even establishing a stronger system of welfare payments — hey, another way it’s different from the U.S. — but this just goes to show that government subsidies to major sports organizations aren’t a left or a right thing, they’re a systemic “resist the power of the global sports-industrial complex at your peril” thing.

Asked about his team’s need for a new stadium, team president Michael Crowley said, “It’s clear, right? This isn’t the first time this has happened.”

I’m not actually sure that faulty plumbing is generally considered grounds for demolition, but it’s still better than saying nobody wants to play there because they’re afraid they’ll trip on the grass.