Happy May 26, the last day for stadium legislation to be introduced in the Nevada legislature, unless of course they wait till tomorrow. I’ll be keeping an eye out for any bills popping up, but in the meantime there’s lots of other news to occupy us:
- MLB commissioner Rob Manfred may have paid a visit to Milwaukee to threaten the future of the Brewers if elected officials don’t cough up $360 million in stadium upgrade funds, but that didn’t sway the Milwaukee County Board, which voted unanimously last night to oppose using county money for the Brewers. “I just think about parks, I think about transit. We are $20 million in deficit in transit,” said County Supervisor Sequanna Taylor. “I’m not saying it’s not something that’s needed, but something that’s needed for people to get to work, to get to school, to get to their doctor’s appointments, and we don’t have the funding for even that.”
- Where are the Arizona Coyotes headed now that their Tempe arena dreams have been killed dead by voters? Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont wants it to be Hartford, and the Sacramento Bee wants it to be Sacramento, and a bookie thinks it could be Houston or Kansas City or Salt Lake City, and Bleacher Report thinks it could also be Quebec City or Atlanta. The New York Post says the NHL wouldn’t let the Coyotes move since that would cost it expansion fees, which, the NHL isn’t going to expand to seven cities at once anyway, guys, plus they would then get Arizona back in play as an expansion target. Coyotes Twitter, meanwhile, thinks the team should move to Scottsdale, even though Scottsdale already has plenty of coyotes.
- Speaking of commissioners, NBA commissioner Adam Silver made an attempt to kill every arena bird with one stone this week, telling Nola.com that “every NBA team, regardless of location and market size, needs a model, state-of-the-art arena to compete in the league.” New Orleans Pelicans owner Gayle Benson is seeking publicly funded arena renovations in exchange for a five-year lease extension, because her $3.65 million a year in state subsidies just for the team existing aren’t enough, so presumably that’s what Silver was talking about, but just in case: Every NBA city, you’re now on notice.
- With the Tidewater Landing project on hold, USL team Rhode Island F.C. will officially play its first season in a temporary stadium somewhere — which while maybe not ideal for the team or fans, does at least prove that you don’t actually have to spend $80 million on a stadium to get a USL team, since eventually every human in America will have their own USL team.
- Broomfield, Colorado is closing its 16-year-old arena and likely tearing it down after it turned out spending $60 million on an arena for minor-league hockey and basketball (and, when those teams folded, roller derby) and some mid-size concerts was not, in fact, a path to riches. Who’da thunk it?
- Outgoing Washington Commanders owner Dan Snyder apparently once suggested that traffic problems to a proposed Virginia stadium be solved by building a “Tesla tunnel,” i.e., one of those things that Elon Musk pretends is a subway but it’s just a one-lane car tunnel. This is not the most horrific thing Dan Snyder has done, but it’s impressively close.
“Coyotes predicted to be moving everywhere and nowhere at once”
Schrodinger’s Coyotes?
The true quantum state of the Yotes won’t be revealed until Meruelo splits the universe by agreeing to move the team to Navajo Nation under the condition the team is renamed the “Arid-Zone Peyotes”.
…Or maybe they Yotes are just playing Coy…
Question: Wouldn’t the Coyotes – or any team – potentially have to pay an expansion fee? From what I read, the Thrashers/Jets paid $60m to move to Winnipeg in addition to the $110m they paid for the franchise itself.
I’m assuming that number, just like expansion fee numbers, are just made up in the negotiations.
Expansion fees make sense because adding teams dilutes the value of everyone else’s franchise. But moving a team wouldn’t do that. In this case, moving the team would probably put more revenue in the shared pot. So there’s really no justification for it other than that the owners can vote on relocation and therefore can ask for whatever they want. Whatever greases the wheels, I suppose.
I believe it was Elliotte Friedman or another actually reliable source who said that the league would probably prefer to leave Atlanta and Houston open for an expansion team someday then move the Coyotes there. That makes sense given that neither of them have a very suitable building for hockey, so the whole thing could end up being half-ass just like the current Coyotes. But given the size of those markets, there’s a good chance that owner and/or municipality could make a hockey arena happen eventually so they want to wait for that.
But the same could be said for Phoenix. If they let them leave now, they’re opening up the possibility that a better owner with a better plan for the market could emerge in five or ten years and they can extract an enormous fee from them, rather than continuing this Quixotic effort with the current Coyotes.
I’m amazed by how incredibly bad most of the reporting on all of this on this. So many articles just blindingly speculating based on empty statements from governors and tweets from fans, with no knowledge at all about how the process actually works and all the things that still need to happen for a team to move.
True. The Thomson/Chipman group paid $60m as a relocation fee to move the Thrashers to Wpg. In addition, of course, they had to pay $110m or so for a franchise that may have been worth half that on the open market at the time (literally no-one wanted to own it).
I would agree that the numbers are largely made up based on what Bettman and his employers think a ‘base’ NHL franchise must cost. At least some of that is down to a few other owners being so heavily leveraged that, a decade ago, a sale price that didn’t add up to $170m would have left them fielding cash calls (or dangerously close).
A few years before the Jets were reborn, the Coyotes were bought out of bankruptcy by the NHL for about $170m – even though Bettman and Daly claimed that they already owned the team as Moyes had forfeit his franchise. The Arizona bankruptcy courts thought otherwise, but that didn’t stop Bettman and Daly from standing on the steps of the courthouse crowing about how Judge Baum had “upheld their rights as a league”.
After they paid for the asset they claimed they already owned, of course.
This was a period where the franchise was losing $35-40m annually on operations (Moyes lost that much, then the NHL proceeded to lose that much for at least two years after claiming that Moyes had inflated his losses – which he may have, but the league doing the same hardly proved their point re: inflated losses…)
FWIW, I don’t really think allowing a franchise to relocate “uses up” an expansion location. Seattle or Vegas could have been destinations for the Coyotes, but in both cases the league thought (correctly as it turned out) that there were owners willing to pay more for a “new” franchise than they would have for the Coyotes.
If the Coyotes leave the ASU campus for Houston, for example, they would be leaving behind a market about the same size as the one they are moving to. Even if they move to KC (2m), that move leaves both Houston and Phoenix open for future use if the league wants to extort more arena cash. It’s a net zero in either case, although I’ve no doubt the league would charge a much higher relocation fee for Houston than it would for KC or Quebec City, for example.
In Davis v NFL ii, (more commonly referred to as Raiders II), the league successfully argued that sports leagues had the right to charge a team for moving based on a notional formula of the value of the destination market less the value of the market being vacated. How these values are calculated is anyone’s guess… I certainly wouldn’t have put the value of a Seattle NHL franchise at five times the value of the Columbus Panthers or Nashville Predators, but whatever.
Even though the calculation suggests the a relocation fee can be a negative number (moving from a market of 6m to a market of 2m, for example), I think it unlikely that any league would ever offer a market refund. There’s probably a base number that applies to any move. Maybe it’s $60m as it was for Winnipeg, maybe it’s $100m now. Who knows.
Good synopsis. Only correction is that Greater Houston has over 2 million more people than Metro Phoenix.
It’s a fair comment if you are considering the entirety of the MSA. What is considered the Phx metro area is about 15,000 sq miles. The vast majority of the people in that area live in or around Phx itself.
The Houston MSA is comprised of many smaller cities and towns and is just 10,000 sq miles (give or take). If you look at the population of Harris & Maricopa counties, for example, the population around the centre of the metro area is similar.
The census bureau “urban” population of both cities maintains the roughly 2m gap you describe. The urban ‘area’ of each city is substantially different… Houston’s is about 1650 sq miles while Phoenix’s is a little over 1100 sq miles. Houston’s urban population is significantly greater while Phoenix has a slightly higher urban density, even accounting for the fairly sparsely populated outlying communities.
Do sports owners care what the overall metro population is if a significant portion of it is outside the main drawing area? I guess it’s potentially good news for TV rights (except for hockey in Phx obviously), but does it translate into butts in seats?
Moving does “use up” an expansion location but it also opens one up, potentially, as you say.
That would be true here, but it isn’t always.
Quebec moving to Denver took a prime expansion possibility while leaving open a market the owners don’t really want to be in, apparently.
Hartford to Raleigh vacated a market they didn’t really want about to enter another market they probably didn’t really care about. Carolina may be doing ok – under the current owners, at least – but there’s little chance the league as a whole would prioritize expansion there.
Hey, I’ve officiated the world roller derby championships at that arena in Broomfield (and got an IV in some sort of health office in the concourse after getting food poisoning). It was a nice venue but not one that anyone will miss or anything. Gotham’s multi-year winning streak came to an end there, so that’s one sports-historic thing that happened there…
Sorry about the food poisoning!
Broomfield is approximately halfway (12-18 miles each direction) between Denver and Boulder. Housing in place of that arena should bring in some decent property tax revenue.
Would the Knicks really leave NYC if the city and/or state don’t pay money to upgrade MSG? Lakers? Bulls? I believe the Vikings were asking for stadium money and Jesse Ventura said no.
True, but then Minnesota became the land of Pawlenty.
(stop throwing things. No really.)
The Milwaukee Brewers will be gone. If you lookat the last 7 years Big market cities won the World Series to make up the money MLB lost during the pandemic. The Brewers should have won the World Series in 2019, but Manfred doesn’t want a small market team in there. Now they want money for American Family Field. When the accident happen in 2000 of the building of Miller Park The Brewers got $439 MILLION in insurance money. $99 million went to the three Iron workers widows,so $33 million apiece. It was going to take $100 million to make repairs. So what happened to the other $240 MILLION??? The tax payers in five counties paid taxes for 20 years. Now we’re paying for a arena downtown, because the NBA told us too or they were going to move the Bucks. At least the NBA gave the Bucks a title,but it’ll never happen again for another 25 years.
The Brewers probably won’t leave. Not soon, anyway. There’s really nowhere better for them to go – as we’ve seen with the A’s situation – and contraction isn’t viable. Yet.
The richer teams win titles because the players have successfully prevented a real salary cap and the owners have prevented a salary floor.
That’s just how the MLB CBA works. It’s not a secret nefarious scheme by Manfred. It’s all out in the open.
There hasn’t been enough economic pressure to force them to work out a better system.
And even if there is, it’s likely that the owners and players will never make the compromises needed to preserve baseball as a major sport and will drive it all right off a cliff. But that will take a while.
“The richer teams win titles” in baseball indeed. Yankees last won the World Series in 2009; Mets last won the World Series in 1986.
Richer, not necessarily the richest.
The expansion of the playoffs has made it harder for the most talented team to always win the series, but they usually win their division.
If you really think all of the leagues are fixed, why do you care about sports at all?