First off, a special note of thanks to all the FoS supporters who get daily posts by email for your patience while I’ve spent the last week or two figuring out how to make the formatting more readable on mobile devices. (The actual code took just a few minutes to write; figuring out where to insert it in the convoluted system that sends out notices as soon as posts are published was a much longer saga.) I hope this reduces your eyestrain, even at the risk of easier access to stadium news raising your blood pressure.
And speaking of stoking ire, here’s the rest of this week’s news items that didn’t make the daily cut:
- New Orleans Pelicans owner Gayle Benson is reportedly working on a lease extension with the state of Louisiana to be signed by the end of this year, which could be a 10-year deal with additional five-year options like Benson’s Saints got. No one’s saying a word about the important stuff — how much the state would kick in for arena renovations as part of the deal, and whether Benson would pay any added rent or revenue sharing to help repay the state’s costs — but given that the Pelicans owner has previously said she wants more luxury suites with crushed velour furniture in order to boost the team’s profits, which are currently only about $77 million a year, don’t hold your breath on this “public-private partnership” including a ton of private.
- A Kansas City labor organization has succeeded in getting enough signatures to put a vote on the November ballot on whether to use city money to fund a new Royals stadium. Mayor Quinton Lucas has declared “the train’s already left the station” and threatened to get the deal signed off on before November, to preclude the public from having a say; the group Missouri Workers Power has threatened to sue to block Lucas from doing so, citing legal precedents where courts struck down legislative actions taken on issues where voter initiatives were pending.
- North Carolina house speaker Destin Hall is not so crazy about the idea of setting aside a pile of state money to build a Raleigh-area baseball stadium for a proposed MLB expansion team, saying, “Private companies should pay for their own facilities instead of relying on the General Assembly. However, if someone presents a proposal showing that North Carolina taxpayers would get a strong return on the investment, I am willing to consider it.” State senate leader Phil Berger, who lost his primary by 23 votes in March, has been the main advocate of a stadium funding bill; both Hall and Berger are Republicans, while Democratic Gov. Josh Stein said this week, “We’re eager for this opportunity to be considered, and we’ll do all we can to support it.”
- Some Illinois state legislators don’t seem inclined to revisit tax subsidies for a Chicago Bears stadium no matter what Gov. JB Pritzker says: Comments this week (all from Pritzker’s fellow Democrats) included, “What the Bears wanted was a blank check We not only said no but, excuse my language, hell no,” “If you come to the table in Springfield and you are a liar, it doesn’t bode well for you,” and “The big issue that came about was, Are we going to give billionaires more taxpayer dollars?”
- A Cuyahoga County councilmember is suggesting using part of the proceeds of a 0.25% sales tax surcharge meant to cover building a new jail and repairing a courthouse to instead pay for repairs and upgrades to the Cleveland Guardians stadium and Cavaliers arena, because surely there’s nothing else the county could use that money for. Just not paying for unlimited upgrades ad infinitum and daring the team owners to give up their sweetheart leases — or even threatening to do so in order to get the team owners to agree to a compromise solution — remains an option, guys.
- Neighborhood leaders around the Chicago Fire‘s proposed stadium at the The 78 site say if the city is going to devote tax money to parking garages for the stadium, it should also kick in for a community benefits agreement to provide funding for transit access, affordable housing, anti-displacement protections, public infrastructure, and support for local businesses. Whether to view this as a vital instrument of democracy to ensure that regular citizens can get dealt into public spending priorities or just a way for developers to buy off local community leaders by cutting them in on the deal is, as always, a reasonable question.
- Most of the news coverage of the economic impact of the World Cup has disappeared as coverage of the games themselves has taken over, but Seattle’s KUOW did check in on local businesses this week and found that food outlets near the stadium that sell drinks or quick grab-and-go food items are doing great while businesses farther away or those that sell things fans may not crave before or after a soccer match (Vietnamese cookies, vintage clothing) are having a miserable time of it. Yup, checks out!
- Buffalo Bills ticket prices are too damn high, clearly we need to reduce red tape so the Bills can build more seats.
- Yes, that Crain’s Chicago Business article claiming Bears tax subsidies weren’t public money was real bad, but as Geoffrey Propheter reminds us, it’s still no Bridge Detroit.
From the Rochester First story on the Bills’ ticket prices:
“It’s scary when you got a family of four or five and you’ve got to pay these kind of prices for tickets,” one fan said.
Actually, you don’t have to pay those kind of prices. You don’t. You really don’t. Just don’t pay them. Just don’t go.
(And as an aside, the dudebro Rob Petree – not the guy from New Rochelle who lives with his wife, Laura- reporting said Rochester story is a can’t miss.)
Bit of a sidebar, but the most interesting thing to me about the Forbes page on the Pelicans wasn’t the operating income; it was actually what they called the “gate receipts.”
Taking Forbes’ numbers at face value, the $40 million worth of gate receipts would come out to roughly $1 million per home game… and taking the Pelicans’ attendance at face value — they were said to have averaged 16,476 fans per game, ostensibly a full house every night, but the courtside photos almost always told a much different story — that would come out to about $59 per ticket sold/distributed.
The NBA’s TV deals must be bonkers if someone like the Pelicans are posting $77 million profits while getting comparatively tiny gate receipts at comparatively much lower price points for tickets. No wonder Gayle Benson wants to hold onto the franchise for as long as she can.
Pelicans tickets reportedly averaged $42 in 2024, though the article doesn’t say whether that’s median or mean. Add in inflation and premium seating options (if those aren’t included in the average but are in Forbes’ gate receipts), and they could be getting $59 per seat or thereabouts.
(And this is why I’ve only gone to one NBA game in the last 15 years.)
https://www.si.com/nba/pelicans/onsi/news/smoothie-king-center-ticket-prices-are-double-edged-sword-for-new-orleans-pelicans
$59 for median ticket to an NBA game is really low. If Gayle Benson wasn’t such a New Orleans homer that team would have been gone a long time ago.
Tom Benson is in the owner subsidy hall of fame, having leveraged HURRICANE KATRINA to sweeten the then sweetest stadium deal in the NFL.
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/magazine/take-the-money-and-stay.html
And since his passing, let’s just say that local power brokers have surely come to owe his widow, Gayle, for more than a few seats in the owner’s box.
https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/43676192/emails-detail-saints-assistance-new-orleans-archdiocese-sexual-abuse-scandal
Great NYT article from back when and it’s lost history to most people. It’s crazy that the relationship between Benson and the state was so toxic before Katrina that there was a very good chance he was moving the Saints to his adopted hometown of San Antonio in 2007. The hurricane stirred up so much goodwill (and federal cash IIRC that went toward the Superdome renovation) that they returned permanently instead.
If the Bears are losing legislators from Joliet, then I think Pritzker’s comments earlier this week may have just been magical thinking.
Or Pritzker doesn’t really care who ends up paying what for the Bears, so long as it’s either state legislators or Bears execs who get blamed for it, not him.
Yeah, my thoughts exactly. These are exactly the type of legislators that they need to pass any bill. Without suburban votes from areas not profoundly impacted by either the move or the construction, a coalition is going to be hard to put together.
Of course party leaders could twist arms, but the last session seemed to indicate they’re completely uninterested exerting the effort over a stadium in Arlington Heights.
In the afterglow of the Stanley Cup Final, the NHL announces preliminary talks for … Expansion! To Texas! Because NHL needs USA for growth!
https://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/49155709/sources-nhl-looking-austin-houston-expansion
Forget the population, Austin and Houston do not have the demographics, plus their sprawl is worse than Los Angeles.
Houston did have WHA and IHL success with the Aeros, but they have no owner and no arena. And those WHA fans are really old now.
Although Houston is the 4th largest city in the country, and Harris County is the second largest county, having just passed Cook, Illinois, throwing $3.5 billion at NHL hockey is money down a rathole. The AHL Houston Aeros were forced to relocate to Des Moines after being thrown out of the Toyota Center. Where would an arena be located, next to the Toyota Center downtown? The Woodlands? Katy? There isn’t a location in Houston that works well for the sprawing, traffic choked metro area. Bettman also wants strike 3 in Atlanta, and to resume the Arizona saga.
The Aeros were forced to relocate because the Rockets wanted to raise their rent to ridiculous levels. Either the Rockets will have to come to an agreement with Friedkin that would allow them to share the arena, whose lease is coming up in 2033, and would be in line for a replacement, or he will build his own arena. That would leave the Rockets to have to either move in with the NHL Team (like the Pistons did with the Red Wings) or it would be a two-arena metro like Minneapolis-St Paul
Friedkin is kind of like Steve Ballmer was when he bought the Clippers. He has tried to buy 3 different teams in the past year (Celtics, Trailblazers, and Padres) and is tired of striking out.
Les Alexander was forever butthurt about hockey after he failed to get the Oilers in the 90s so that was a sore spot, and Fertitta is such a tightwad that when he tried to buy the Coyotes with coupons the league decided to move them to Utah instead.
It’s not that hockey won’t work in Houston but that the ownership was either too bitter or too cheap to have it.
“$3.5 billion, which includes an expansion fee as well as building costs for an NHL arena” is a very odd way of putting it when no one has any idea where an arena would go, how much it would cost, or how much public money might be involved.
We’re just spitballing here, Neil. This is ESPN!
Yeah, I read that on another site as having been attributed to Bettman. Maybe he did say it.
But the expansion fee ask will likely be between $750m-1Bn (and anyone who pays that for an NHL franchise is batshit crazy…), while the arena – even if it was the most expensive ever built – won’t likely reach the $1bn mark. And the owner (presumably Friedkin) won’t be paying for (most of) the arena anyway.
So, really, it’s a $750m-$1bn ask for the prospective owner. But it makes NHL hockey seem so much more valuable when you create a number like $3.5bn.
On another note, does anyone really believe Foley will pay “$7-10Bn” for an NBA franchise in Vegas?
If he does, the team will need to generate a net $500m annual profit just to cover the interest on the franchise fee.
That is not outrageous at all. By the time this actually happens, the going rate for an NHL team could easily be $2bn. The Penguins just went for $1.7bn. I have no idea if it’s worth that, but those are the going prices.
The owners are really not all that motivated to expand right now given that it would mean diluting their TV deal money yet again. It’s not big compared to the other sports, but it’s a lot bigger than it used to be. And they will have some reluctance to expand to 34 (the biggest of all the leagues) and try again in a big sprawling market, having been burned by their Phoenix experience. So all of that risk, as they see it, is baked into the price.
And you have to figure any new arena would be part of some massive Lifestyle Centre (and it will be spelled that way) a bit like what is contemplated near Atlanta. So the cost of the arena is not just the arena.
https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/nhl-forsyth-county-arena-gathering-mixed-use-cost-skyrocketing
The NHL was smart to play Austin against Houston. They’ve wanted Houston for a long time but the main impediment has been Tilman Fertitta. He has not been willing to buy an NHL team at the going rate or put a team in his arena under attractive terms. So where are they going to put another arena? Who will pay for that?
Austin is probably more appealing. Experience suggests that it is easier to sell a new market on the NHL if the market is not already saturated. In addition to UT, of course, Austin has an MLS team and the NBA is not far, but not in Austin. They don’t have an MLB or NFL team (yet). So an NHL team might get more attention from the media and potential sponsors.
If they find the right owner – so more like Vegas and less like Phoenix – they’ll be able to fill the building and make it modestly successful. This idea that people in hot places just won’t watch hockey has been disproven repeatedly. In a massive city, it should not be too hard to fill 18,000 seats 42 times a year.
But the reason they’re doing this is for TV, and I’m not sure that’s really worth all of this effort.
Eliotte Friedman, among others, has repeatedly reported that the NHL owners, led by Jeremy Jacobs, are hell-bent on being in the biggest US markets. They think they need that to maximize their TV deal and that it would do more to raise their total revenue than adding any more teams in Canada or the northeast. They aren’t necessarily interested in removing teams from Canada – especially if those teams can get favorable arena deals – but they care more about the biggest untapped markets and those happen to be in the southern US.
Their math might be right in the near term. Certainly, they could add more fans by putting a team in Houston than in Quebec. But the future of TV sports rights is very unclear right now. To me, at least, it is not at all clear that “more big markets” will mean what it used to mean.
And, from a fans perspective, 34 teams is just too many teams. There are already too many teams. There’s just too much distance from the bottom to the top and too many cup finals in markets with a fairly low ceiling on overall interest. Sure, Vegas and Raleigh have strong local support. But there is not much potential to expand the fanbase beyond that core local group.
The NHL was really psyched about US TV ratings of 1.8 million or thereabouts. Add in a few more million in Canada and Europe – despite the lack of Canadian representation – and maybe they got 5 million on average. Probably a bit less. Great.
Meanwhile, the NBA is crowing about 33 million. Obviously, things could not have lined up much better for them, so it’s not an entirely fair comparison, but the gap is enormous. At some point, I’d hope some owner has a moment of clarity and just says “Guys, what the hell are we doing?” Anyway you look at it, the NHL is never going to be the NBA (let alone the NFL) and it really needs to stop trying to be the NBA. It has so many things going for it the NBA does not.
It’s the same advice we give to 14-year-old girls. “Just be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.”
If the NHL is doing this for TV markets then the league is stuck in a time warp. Linear TV is at or past the point of no return. Regional sports networks no longer work unless they’re owned by the teams involved.
Austin bleeds burnt orange (Hook ‘Em Horns!) and Houston has a strong college influence (U-H Cougars, Texas Aggies mainly). Plus the Lone Star State is now aligned with the biggest college conference (S-E-C! S-E-C! S-E-C!) That audience has no need for a winter sport that has its origins in Canada.
All bets are off once the boom in AI and data centers turns into a full-scale crash.
Houston would be serviceable but not an overwhelming success. An arena development west of downtown or around Astroworld/NRG stadium probably works out ok for the NHL but it’s also a weirdly oversaturated sports market with pitiful hockey history. Much better chance there then Atlanta though.
It sucks for Canada that their economy is so far behind their southern neighbors. It also kind of hurts them that they’re so into hockey already it’s not like there’s fans in places like Quebec City or Saskatoon or Thunder Bay that the NHL isn’t already reaching
What you are describing is basically the same problem every league has. There are no more “excellent” or even “good” markets to expand to. So – if you want to expand – you are going to be going to marginal markets that don’t really add much to your bottom line.
Yes, you can add a few significant Nielsen markets. But does it move the needle on your national TV deals?
Did leaving Atlanta (twice) or Phoenix (once, so far) move the NHL marketing needle in the other direction?
Was there any significant loss of revenue in any of the NHL’s national deals when those teams went to the carousel?
No.
Would they like to be back in those two markets plus Houston? Apparently so. On the other hand, if they want to tout expansion (and dream of that sweet expansion cash from the next bigger idiot…), they have to go somewhere and that spot better have as many TV eyeballs as possible.
Saskatoon (325k) and Thunder Bay (125k) are utter pipe dreams for expansion and always have been. Quebec City is still a possibility, but I agree it’s unlikely in the short term… and the prospective owner there (Peledeau) may have to follow the Winnipeg model and buy an existing troubled asset if he wants to get in the game.
As for the notion that it somehow ‘hurts’ Canada’s NHL base that fans in non NHL markets there are already watching…. You can say the exact same thing about every US market that doesn’t presently have an NFL team. That hasn’t stopped the league allowing relocations or expansion franchises in the past 25 years.
I’m sure having the Rams back in town has boosted the NFL’s position in the LA market. But I’m also sure that the league did just fine in that market for the 20 years they didn’t have a local team to root for in LA. And in LA’s case, you also need to balance the boost in the local market with the loss of viewership/presence in the Rams/Chargers former markets.
I don’t doubt they are still ‘ahead’, but it’s always a net calculation. Leagues just love to ignore the loss while touting the gain.
For a league that is happy with 1.8 million US viewers for its Final, new markets wouldn’t have to add all that many viewers to make it worthwhile for the league as a whole.
There is more potential to add new fans in the US than there is n Canada. Quebec has about 850,000 human beings. Atlanta has about 6.3m, Houston has 7.8m and Austin has 2.5m. That’s a much higher ceiling. Those markets also have a lot more people who currently do not watch the NHL but might if they were exposed to it. There are people like that in Quebec too, no doubt, but a lot fewer of them.
The only economic benefit of adding another Canadian team would be to increase the odds that a Canadian team will go on a long playoff run, which does help their TV ratings in Canada. That might make a difference. But if that is the case, another team in Southern Ontario would be a more appealing option than a team in Quebec. We’ll see, there appear to be a lot of moving parts in the Canadian media market so the future is not clear.
It’s fun to mock the Coyotes or the Thrashers and pretend like we can predict what will happen with teams in Houston or Atlanta, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the people ready to spend $2-3bn on an enterprise have probably done a lot more market research than any of us.
Also, we just don’t know until it happens. Nobody does. That’s what all the money is for. It’s a risk.
From a cold business perspective, the NHL’s recent record appears to be pretty good compared to other kinds of speculative ventures, especially in entertainment. In the Bettman era, the league has added 11 expansion teams all of which are still in business somewhere. Revenue is growing steadily. They have a hard salary cap and no more signs of labor problems on the horizon. As of now, no franchises are seriously (or even unseriously) threatening to move or fold.
The biggest mistake they’ve made in that time was choosing who they chose to own the Thrashers rather than holding out for something better. That was a complete own goal.
The Coyotes fiasco was not actually all that dumb from the owners’ perspective. All of that nonsense was part of a strategy to extract a new publicly funded arena in a massive market. The fact that it ultimately failed doesn’t mean it was a dumb business strategy. It was/is immoral, but it wasn’t necessarily dumb.
The NHL’s ability to run their business also compares favorably to the NBA, which is often lionized as the most brilliant sports league to ever exist. The fact that the NHL and NBA were once roughly the same size says far more about the shortsightedness of basketball owners of the 70s and 80s than it does about the NHL. Basketball was always destined to be much bigger than hockey for a bunch of reasons, but hockey has done pretty well within its inherent limitations.
And recall that the NBA moved teams from Seattle to Oklahoma City and from Vancouver to Memphis. That’s far dumber than any of the moves the NHL has made in that time, including the Phoenix mess.
It’s also worth noting that owners don’t really care about any of this. They aren’t buying pro sports franchises because it’s an optimal use of capital. They’re doing it because they’re plutocrats who believe that a status symbol like that will somehow give their life more meaning.
If you were expanding the NHL right now and were putting 2 teams in the best position to make money- you’d have a southern Ontario team and a team in Houston.
Just like MLB expansion should be in San Jose and Northern New Jersey.
I walked around the site of the 78 about a month ago. I still don’t see how you’re going to get vehicles onto that site to use said parking garages in any significant amount. Access is only off of Wells Street coming off Polk Street. They could extend Wells to meet Wentworth off of 18th St., but 18th is not designed to handle gameday traffic. There is access off Roosevelt Rd to the train yard, but that’s the other side of the river. There’s a dummy intersection on upper Clark just south of Roosevelt, but that’s probably going to be mostly for pedestrian access coming from the Roosevelt Red/Orange/Green line stop. There are train lines flush against Clark Street for the whole site except at that intersection, not sure what you can build to get down to the site from there.
I’m sure they have a plan, but it’s going to be expensive.
Bars in Chicago are also packed with World Cup fans. Even though there are no games held here. So maybe spending money to host games in your city is not wise.
Which is why Chicago said no.
Starting from a very low baseline, the overall vibe has been remarkably positive. So much so that this has probably helped the image of the US, Canada and Mexico as potential tourist destinations. If I were in Europe or South America watching the scenes of happy Scots in Boston and Miami and all those Norwegians doing the rowing thing, etc, etc, I would think that looks like fun and that America doesn’t look so bad.
I’d guess that there are more cost-effective ways for those cities to boost international tourism and that boosting international tourism is probably not the best use of those dollars anyway.
But all of does show that no matter how hard the greedy bastards try to ruin everything for the rest of us, that we all still have the power to make it suck a bit less or, perhaps, not at all. That is inspiring.