Category: Detroit Red Wings

Friday roundup: Utah enters MLB expansion sweepstakes, Bettman’s mouth issues more checks Coyotes can’t cover

access_time personNeil deMause

It was 89 degrees in New York yesterday, which made me think about how the cities most threatened by climate change are only going to be threatened sooner and sooner. It may be too soon for team owners to start thinking about threatening to move to Duluth, but, you know, is it ever really too soon to threaten to move anywhere? Food for thought.

News roundup time!

  • Former Utah Jazz owner Gail Miller, who owns the Triple-A Salt Lake Bees, says she wants to bid for an MLB expansion team when and if MLB starts taking bids. “We believe that as a top-30 media market in the fastest-growing state in the country with the youngest population, that’s where our attention should be,” said Miller Company CEO Steve Starks, and while he’s right about those things — Salt Lake sits at 29th, just behind Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Nashville, and Baltimore — it also could soon be the site of arsenic-mercury dust storms, which may not be the best selling point. Salt Lake City also doesn’t have a major-league stadium, and Gov. Spencer Cox has already declared that he’s opposed to public funding of one … except for tax-increment financing kickbacks, which he’d be just fine with.
  • NHL commissioner Gary Bettman has visited Tempe, Arizona to take in an Arizona Coyotes game and promise that “once this [arena] project is built, this team is never going anywhere. It’s going to be here forever.” So Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo is going to sign a 999-year lease? That’s the only thing he can mean. Hey, everybody, Alex Meruelo is signing a forever lease, Gary Bettman promised, this is great news, Gary Bettman would never lie to us!
  • Philadelphia 76ers owner Josh Harris, who is already wrapped up in seeking a Philadelphia arena that all the neighbors hate and for which he’s been accused of illegally funneling money to a mayoral candidate, may be about to buy the Washington Commanders for $6 billion — at which point he will presumably begin lobbying for all the legislators who stopped pursuing stadium bills because they hated Commanders owner Daniel Snyder to resume their subsidy efforts. Here, let’s listen to effusive pro-stadium remarks in the Washington Post from Jack Evans, who was forced off the D.C. council after accepting tons of money from private businesses whose projects he was voting on. Old bribe-takers never die, they just end up becoming pundits.
  • Did I say last month that “the Detroit city council has awarded developers of the area around the Detroit Tigers stadium and Detroit Red Wings and Pistons arena $783 million in public subsidies“? Turns out the actual figure could be as high as $1.8 billion, according to figures compiled by Bridge Detroit, which quotes me as saying, “Once you get your foot in the door and shovels in the ground then you have the city on the hook. That’s how this becomes a gift that keeps on giving for developers, and it’s ‘In for a dime, in for a billion dollars.” (Okay, I got it right at least one of those times.)
  • Kansas City is going to cancel all in-person K-12 classes for two days at the end of the month to avoid traffic created by the NFL draft being held in the city, this is fine and normal.
  • Finally, enjoy some raves from the Globe and Mail about renovations to the Toronto Blue Jays‘ stadium, if pointing out that the Jays are charging $1 just to be admitted to a new liquor automat where you can pay $70 for a drink “reminiscent of Black Forest cake” counts as a rave. The paper also calls the stadium formerly known as Skydome “ancient,” which may be alarming to any readers born before it opened in 1989, apologies for not adding a trigger warning to the top of this post, my bad.
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Friday roundup: March is for veiled threats (by the Rays, Bears, Browns, burger lovers)

access_time personNeil deMause

Baseball season kicked off yesterday, with the introduction of such new innovations as a pitch clock that drove a sharp increase in the all-important (?) metric of hits per hour of baseball and LED stadium lights that can be made to flicker artistically, even in the middle of a play. Truly, this is the future, if the future even exists.

Inarguably, this is Friday, which means we take a spin through news of the past week, if you believe there was one:

  • Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg says it’s his “belief” and “a very reasonable anticipation” that he’ll have a new stadium deal in either St. Petersburg or Tampa by the end of the year, and that if he doesn’t, “there’s not a deal to be done, basically.” If you didn’t get the veiled threat there, he added, “At the end of the day, it’s all about ensuring that the team is here, throwing out its first pitch in 2028. And then here, throwing out its first pitch in 2053 as well.” Then he held up a stuffed Raymond the Seadog and made a slashing gesture across its throat, while dramatically tilting his head to one side with his tongue out and his eyes rolled back in his head. (Okay, not that last one, but only because Stuart Sternberg has no sense of drama.)
  • Chicago Bears owner George McCaskey said that the team still hasn’t made a decision on “whether we’re going to develop the property” it bought in Arlington Heights and “whether the development is going to include a stadium.” He added, “I don’t have a timeline” for making those decisions, and “we’d like to have” discussions with Chicago about revamping Soldier Field. The Vegas betting line on “Are the Bears just trying to get a bidding war going here?” has now fallen to –300.
  • Cleveland Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam said Monday that “we’re committed to redoing the stadium” and “in all likelihood, it’s not going to have a dome.” Zero details on cost or who would pay for it, but Dee Haslam said “it’s a year-long phase” to get a more concrete plan, while her husband Jimmy said “we’re probably three, four, five years” from a stadium renovation “happening,” so clearly they’re not yet in the Rays/Bears stage of more concrete idle threats and promises.
  • The Detroit city council has awarded developers of the area around the Detroit Tigers stadium and Detroit Red Wings and Pistons arena $783 million in public subsidies, because the last batch of subsidies for the sports venues themselves only created a bunch of parking lots. Will the Ilitches and their developer partners be able to score the elusive triple-dip? Herb Simon and the city of Indianapolis know it can be done!
  • The proposed Oakland A’s stadium project at Howard Terminal cleared a legal hurdle as an appeals court tossed a challenge to the building’s environmental impact statement. Yes, that’s the same legal hurdle that a lower court cleared last September. No, still nobody knows who would pay all the costs of the thing. Yes, you may now move on to the next bullet point.
  • Qatar hasn’t actually yet dismantled and reused its World Cup stadiums that it promised to have dismantled and reused by now. If anyone is surprised by this, they really haven’t been paying attention.
  • Tempe’s duplicate Arizona Coyotes arena vote set for August has been officially canceled as unnecessary since voters will already be casting ballots in May, which is sad news for anyone who was hoping that future Arizona Coyotes seasons would be replaced by the more interesting spectacle of 82 televised arena votes a year.
  • Also just in from Tempe: “We are a community that likes to be outdoors enjoying our Arizona sunshine, having coffee on the balcony, walking the dog, grilling burgers with neighbors. We are not a community that remains inside of a sound-insulated apartment with windows closed.” No, I didn’t expect the Coyotes arena battle to turn on the inalienable right to grill burgers either, but stranger things have happened.
  • New York state is likely to use cash instead of selling bonds to finance a large chunk of the new Buffalo Bills stadium. You’ll notice I said “finance” there instead of “fund”; the amount being funded by the public hasn’t changed (still $1 billion), but how the state will raise the money may change. This is like deciding whether to pay for your new car up front or with monthly payments, and so should be completely uninteresting unless you’re an accountant for New York state, but it made headlines so I thought someone might need a reason to skip reading them, please go read about the liquid trees instead.
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Friday roundup: Guardians issue screwy new seating plans, NYCFC tax breaks hit $516m, Illinois blocks some Bears subsidies

access_time personNeil deMause

All kinds of news for you this week! If you don’t like any of this news, you just don’t like any news at all!

  • Cleveland Guardians management has released some details of how they plan to spend their new $435 million renovation fund ($285 million of it from city, county, and state taxpayers), and the answer is: on $202.5 million of renovations now, then bank the rest for future maintenance and upgrades. Progressive Field Reimagined is focused on creating new “social spaces,” which from the looks of things include some kind of seating terrace where fans will sit on sofas, some of them facing away from the game, plus, if you look real fast at WKYC’s video, turning much of the outfield upper deck into a giant sun-shaded outdoor concessions plaza that you can’t actually see the game from. (Right now much of that area is currently taken up by giant shipping containers that serve as ad boards because nobody wants to sit there, so maybe this isn’t too much of a loss.) It’s also amusing to see that some of the “Terrace Hub” weird-facing sofas will be behind, yes, pillars, that favorite bugaboo of stadium designers that many a team owner has declared to be the reason they need to replace existing stadiums, but apparently set to make a comeback now that a team owner realizes they need them to hold the upper deck up, physics FTW!
  • Turns out when sports economist Geoffrey Propheter estimated that NYC F.C.‘s full property tax break on its new stadium would cost taxpayers between $132.5 million and $197 million, he was lowballing a bit; his former colleagues at the New York City Independent Budget Office have now crunched the numbers and come up with a total tax-break cost of $516 million in present value. Add in city infrastructure costs that will likely top $100 million and whatever the benefits are of getting the use of city land for 49 years for just $30 million in rent, and we’re looking at well over $600 million in subsidies for a stadium that Mayor Eric Adams touted as “100% privately financed.” But then, that’s kind of a tradition in New York.
  • An Illinois state bill to create a $400 million “large business attraction fund” has had an amendment added to bar any of the money from going to “a professional sports organization that moves its operations from one location in the state to another location in the state,” which it doesn’t take a lot of reading between the lines to see means the Chicago Bears. A Bears stadium in Arlington Heights could still receive other state subsidies, as well as local subsidies like the property-tax kickbacks they’re reportedly considering, but at least it’s an indication that Illinois state legislators aren’t quite so dumb that they think paying a sports team to relocate from one part of the state to another is good policy. (Them thinking that paying other businesses $400 million to relocate to Illinois is anything other than wasted money is another story, but one baby step at a time.)
  • What should Miami Heat fans call their arena now that their crypto naming-rights partner is going out of business and its founder is in jail? The Arena, says a spokesperson for Miami Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, “with a capital A.” No, I don’t know how one pronounces a capital A differently either, but I guess this counts as Branding™, whereas just letting people call it “the arena” would be a failure of leadership or something.
  • What do you do when a local sports team owner, in this case the Detroit Red Wings‘ Ilitch family, gets $400 million in public money to build a new neighborhood and then just doesn’t? Why, give them another $797 million to not build more development, of course! Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan must figure he doesn’t have much choice, given that the rest of his city is just a blank gray void.
  • Opposition continues to build to the Philadelphia 76ers owners building a new arena right next to the city’s Chinatown, with 87 of around 100 local business owners signing a petition opposing the plan, and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund looking into legal action. “This is something that will destroy Chinatown,” said Steven Zhu, head of the Philadelphia Chinese Restaurant Association, and given what happened with Washington, D.C.’s arena, he may have a point.
  • Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin says he’s ready to talk about building the Washington Commanders a new stadium in Virginia as soon as Daniel Snyder sells the team, because doing so while Snyder still owned the team turned out to be a non-starter.
  • Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis is reportedly “embarrassed” that so many visiting-team fans are flying in to Vegas to watch Raiders games, which, has he forgotten that the whole pitch for Nevada building him a stadium was so that it would bring more tourists to town? Or, now that Davis has his $750 million in state cash in hand, he just doesn’t care about economics and only wants to see more fans rooting for his team? Almost certainly one of those.

I’ll be traveling the next two weeks, so if posts here are a little irregular or appear at weird hours of the day, don’t worry yourself over it. Have a good long (if you’re in the U.S.) weekend, and see you back here on Tuesday or thereabouts!

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Friday roundup: Bengals naming rights deal called “(XXX)” and other titillating stadium commentary

access_time personNeil deMause

Well, that was certainly another week. Thanks to all who engaged in the spirited comment debates about Garth Brooks an Andy Zimbalist and other celebrity stadium experts, and thanks also to all who responded to my latest fundraising appeal — I look forward to a productive weekend of mailing out Cab-Hailing Lady art prints.

But first, we have more news for the roundup to round up:

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Friday roundup: Charlotte approves $35m in soccer subsidies, NYC spends $5m on stadium upgrades for team that may disappear, NBA joins NFL in welcoming fans back to giant virus stew

access_time personNeil deMause

Even after dispensing with that crazy San Jose Sharks move threat story, there’s a ton of leftover news this week. So put down that amazing Defector article about how the British have fetishized the Magna Carta as a declaration of citizen rights when it’s really just about how the king can’t unreasonably tax 25 barons, and let’s get right to it:

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Ilitches offer Detroit quarter-acre of vacant lots to make up for Red Wings arena being surrounded by vacant lots

access_time personNeil deMause

This article in the Detroit News on developments surrounding development surrounding the Red Wings and Pistons arena requires a bit of unraveling to get to the bottom of, so bear with me for a minute:

Once upon a time, a city named Detroit gave the local pizza barons $261.5 million in city and state funds plus $50 million in free land to build a new hockey arena, then another $34.5 million to the local basketball team to move into the new arena, then $74 million more to build themselves two parking garages, a pizza company headquarters, and a Google office with all of 100 workers that’s actually inside the arena itself. All this was in hopes the arena would spur lots of additional development, but in reality it’s surrounded by vacant lots, lots and lots of lots.

The pizza barons felt bad about this, possibly because they’d agreed in their deal with the city to already start developing this land two years ago. (The Detroit News article is silent on whether there were established penalties in place for missing this deadline; a Crain’s Detroit article from last month says the Ilitch family was “in violation” of the 2013 agreement to start construction by the end of 2017, but not what the consequences of this were.) So they came up with a new plan: Buy another three years of time to come up with a plan — making them five years late in total — by giving the city two pieces of vacant land totaling a quarter of an acre:

The Brush Park lot that may become a city park is at 242 Watson. It’s 0.172 acres. The Ilitch-linked entity bought it for $3,000 in 2009. It is currently valued at $390,000, according to property tax records.

The other property that may become a park is a 0.065-acre  lot at 3118 Fourth. The land is valued at $111,600, according to property tax records.

So that’s $500,000 in vacant land in exchange for a three-year extension on meeting the requirements of a deal that got the Ilitches $385.5 million in cash and land. You can sort of see why Detroit is handing them more rope — city officials want the promised development, and the Ilitches are their best hope for making it happen — but you can also see where this will be the exact same case three years from now, meaning the Ilitches can always offer up another 100-by-100-foot lot (that’s how big a quarter of an acre is) then if they still don’t feel like building anything.

All of which is a excellent cautionary tale about handing over control of your city’s land, plus hundreds of millions of dollars in arena money, to a single developer in hopes that they’ll make it bloom, especially if you have no Plan B for what to do if they decide, “Enh, the real estate market isn’t hot enough this decade.” A spokesperson for Mayor Mike Duggan told the News that the latest deal includes “potential penalties” if the Ilitches blow off the new deadline, including possibly having the city retake ownership of the property that was sold to the Ilitches as part of the arena deal — that’s something of a hammer, anyway, but even so it will have allowed the Ilitches to control most of downtown and hold it hostage to their own business whims for nearly a decade, which isn’t really the best way to get people interested in moving to your hollowed-out city. And there were almost certainly more effective ways to spend that $385.5 million — but then, those ways weren’t being pushed by the local pizza baron, and that’s what makes all the difference.

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Friday roundup: Red Wings owner touts his “passion” amid sea of parking lots, cities are terrible stadium negotiators, newspapers are terrible newspapers

access_time personNeil deMause

The cryptocurrency-based journalism startup Civil couldn’t have gone much worse, but it did spawn a couple of successes, none more welcome than Hmm Daily, the news commentary site from former Gawker and Deadspin editor Tom Scocca. Or as I will always think of him, the co-founder of Funny Paper, the now virtually unfindable-on-the-internet weekly(ish) political analysis of daily comic strips that was the greatest such enterprise until the great Josh Fruhlinger elevated it to an even higher art form. I’ve been enjoying Scocca’s excellent columns on the militarization of language and how big a giant bee is for months now, but I didn’t feel compelled to bite the bullet and kick in any money until I spotted this photo caption in an article by Scocca’s Funny Paper co-conspirator Joe MacLeod: “I have no beef with the M&M’s homunculus infesting the menu.” If you know me at all from reading this website, you know that I immediately pulled out my wallet and became a paying Hmm Daily subscriber (at the $5 a month level, though the reward at the $50,000 level is truly amazing).

Anyways, on to the sports stadium and arena newses:

  • The District Detroit development around the new Red Wings arena still consists mostly of some state-subsidized parking lots, but Red Wings exec Christopher Ilitch says that’s okay because “Our timelines may change. Our passion, the energy, the way we feel about this community has not.” And truly, who can put a price on feels?
  • The Voice of OC cites “experts” as saying that Anaheim may not be driving a hard enough bargain with Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno on a price for stadium parking lot development rights, and oh hey look, it’s me. Also Holy Cross economist Victor Matheson, who says, “Cities tend to be remarkably bad negotiators when it comes to professional sports,” which, yup.
  • Politifact Wisconsin did a fact-check on claims that the state of Wisconsin will get a “tremendous” payback on its Milwaukee Bucks arena subsidies and found that that’s only if you assume the Bucks would have moved without them, and assume that Bucks fans would have all stopped spending their money in Wisconsin without them, and assume that NBA salaries will quintuple by the 2040s, and further found that Villanova sports stadium researcher Rick Eckstein calls the revenue estimates “fantasy figures,” and concluded that this makes the claim Mostly True. It is just slightly possible that having staff members of the local newspaper that has a record of overarching credulity on the arena deal do fact-checking on it might not be the best idea.
  • The people trying to get an MLB franchise in Portland are running out of momentum as MLB waits for the Tampa Bay Rays and Oakland A’s to work out their stadium situations before considering expansion, but at least they got a meeting with MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred — no wait, the news report has corrected itself, they didn’t even get that. Well, at least they have weirdly non-Euclidean renderings.
  • Speaking of MLB expansion hopefuls, Montreal’s would-be neo-Expos owner Stephen Bronfman has a deal in place on land for a new stadium … not on buying the land, mind you, but with a developer to help develop the non-stadium part of the land once they buy it. This could be a while.
  • And speaking of the Rays and of terrible newspapers, the Tampa Bay Times’ John Romano wants to know when St. Petersburg and Tampa officials will stop bickering and get to work on throwing money at Rays owner Stuart Sternberg already?
  • The New York Times is a significantly less terrible newspaper, but a profile on A’s president Dave Kaval with the headline “Can This Man Keep the A’s in Oakland?” is not only pretty sycophantic in its own right, but it assumes a lot about the team owners moving without a new stadium when they’ve already gone a couple of decades demanding a new stadium and not getting one and still not moving.
  • Henderson, Nevada, is giving $10 million to the owners of the Vegas Golden Knights to build a practice rink, which is dumb but less dumb than some other cities’ expenses on similar projects.
  • The Arizona Coyotes are getting a new majority owner and the Phoenix Suns are up for sale, according to Sportsnet’s John Shannon, who added, “as one NHL official told me yesterday, when I asked that very question, I said, ‘Does this new owner mean that there’s an arena closer to fruition?’ And the answer was, if you get a new owner, there’s a better chance of a new arena. So you can put two and two together, Steve.” Then the Suns owners and a report in The Athletic on the Coyotes completely refuted what Shannon said, so maybe you’re better off putting two and two together without his help.
  • I was about to write up this news story about a potential rezoning approval for Austin F.C.‘s new stadium, but then I saw that KXAN managed to write “Austin’s Planing Commission” and “this ammendment” in the first three paragraphs, and now I gotta go cry all day about the death of copy editing, sorry.
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Red Wings owners to get $74m bonus subsidy for building parking garages for themselves

access_time personNeil deMause

If you’ve been remotely awake the last couple of weeks, you’ve no doubt heard about the controversy around the Detroit Red Wings arena, which the team’s owners the Ilitch family promised would create tons of new development in the surrounding district and which instead led mostly to lots of parking lots. Injury, get ready to meet insult: The Ilitches are about to pocket $74 million in bonus subsidies from the city because they built, among other things, parking garages:

Ilitch-owned Olympia Development has made at least $200 million in building investments within the arena district, popularly known as District Detroit. That spending fulfills the organization’s minimum legal commitment for so-called “ancillary development” around the new sports venue where the Red Wings and Pistons have played since fall 2017…

The $200 million goal was met by development of two parking decks, the Google office at the south side of the arena and the still-under-construction Little Caesars headquarters on Woodward.

That Google office, which opened last year, employs all of 100 people and is actually in the arena itself, so it’s hard to call it additional development. The parking decks are for the Red Wings (and their tenants, the Pistons), while the Little Caesars headquarters is for the pizza company owned by the Ilitches. (One garage will feature some ground-floor retail stores, at least, if anyone rents the space.) So while that’s all certainly an “investment” by the team owners, it’s an investment in their own business, for which they’ll now be collecting a check from city taxpayers covering 37% of their $200 million cost.

The Detroit Free Press has this as increasing taxpayers’ total arena outlay to $398 million; there are so many moving parts to this deal — stadium construction bonds, demolition costs, free city land, etc. — that I can’t confirm that independently, but it sounds about right. The lesson here, as the lesson pretty much always is, is for god’s sake don’t sign leases allowing team owners to rake in additional subsidies for easily attainable goals that gain local residents pretty much nothing. It would have been easy enough to tie the bonus subsidy to jobs created instead of money spent, or exclude spending on the Ilitch’s own businesses, or any number of other requirements, but the state officials running Detroit when the arena deal was agreed to during the city’s bankruptcy seem not to have been interested in any of that. I would say that I hope at least future elected officials in Michigan and elsewhere would learn from this mistake, but given past experience, really I don’t hope that hard at all.

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HBO Real Sports is latest to notice that Red Wings arena development promises were a lie

access_time personNeil deMause

I just this morning got around to watching Tuesday night’s episode of HBO’s Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel on District Detroit, the development that was supposed to spring up around the new Detroit Red Wings arena, but hasn’t — something that’s been covered by other outlets in the past. While trying to remember how to log in to HBO Go, I had already learned that the Ilitch family, owners of the Red Wings and Tigers, had called it “a self-interested, sensationalized and inaccurate report designed to attract viewers instead of a balanced report on the rebirth of Detroit and our contributions to City’s turn around,” so needless to say I had high hopes.

And I can now say that … it’s fine. It lays out all the main plot points of the District Detroit saga — rich family meets struggling city, rich family that kept property blighted for years promises city new development in exchange for public money, rich family builds parking lots for its own profit instead of new development — in that breezy eyebrows-furrowed narrative style that’s been familiar ever since 60 Minutes launched back in the late Paleozoic. Aside from a debatable dig at how the city’s literally crumbling schools were denied funding as a result of the arena subsidies (the state claims that it reimbursed the city schools, but it’s complicated), there’s nothing that hasn’t been reported many times before, let alone that could be considered “inaccurate.”

The most enlightening parts are the segments interviewing former state representative John Walsh, the sponsor of the Red Wings bill (and now president of the Downtown Detroit Partnership), who is helpfully unrepentant about helping to birth this whole mess:

Real Sports correspondent David Scott: “Did you consult any independent economists about it?”

Walsh: “I didn’t consult any, but I did plenty of research. I am known as a data-driven person.”

Scott: “The North American Association of Sports Economists — I don’t know if they came up in your research? They concluded that sports subsidies have no consistent positive impact on jobs, income, or tax revenue.”

Walsh: “If they’re only looking for dollar-for-dollar return, I agree with them—”

Scott: “But they’re not. They’re talking about job creation, they’re talking about local economic development.”

Walsh: “How do you quantify that? At some point you have to have a level of faith in a project.”

My expectations of American elected officials, especially American elected officials who immediately jump from public office to working for local business lobbying groups, couldn’t be lower, but still hearing one say “I am known as a data-driven person” immediately followed by “At some point you have to have a level of faith” is impressively horrifying. This isn’t going to displace John Oliver’s report on stadiums as my favorite YouTube video on the sports subsidy scam — especially since HBO hasn’t put it on YouTube, though I’m sure if you dig around you can find it somewhere — but if it convinces some future legislator somewhere that “hmm, maybe we should have checked to see how this worked out in other cities first, using actual math,” then it’s 17 minutes of air time well spent.

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Friday roundup: Raiders’ Oakland deal still not done, A’s stadium plan gets rounder edges, Flames arena vote delayed

access_time personNeil deMause

Let’s get right to the week’s news roundup:

  • NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport reported on Monday that Oakland Raiders owner Mark Davis was on the verge of an agreement with Oakland officials to stay put in Oakland for 2019 and possibly 2020, and four days later, they still appear to have moved no closer than the verge. More news as events warrant, if they ever do.
  • We have new renderings for the proposed Oakland A’s stadium at Howard Terminal, and they look slightly less doofy than the old renderings, or at least somewhat less angular. Odds that any ballpark will look remotely like this if a Howard Terminal stadium is ever built: two infinities to one. Odds that a Howard Terminal stadium is ever built: Somewhat better, but I still wouldn’t hold your breath.
  • The Calgary city council put off a vote on a term sheet for a new Flames arena on Tuesday, after a marathon meeting that the public was barred from. They’ll be meeting in private again on Monday, and still plan not to tell anyone what the deal looks like until they’ve negotiated it with the Flames owners, which Calgary residents are not super happy about.
  • Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer still really really wants a new arena of his own by 2024, and documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times show that he met with Inglewood Mayor James Butts as early as June 2016 to try to get Madison Square Garden to give up its lease on his preferred arena site before they found out he wanted to build an arena there. This is mostly of interest if you like gawking at warring sports billionaires, but if you do you’re in luck, because the battle seems likely to continue for a long time yet.
  • The Miami Marlins are turning the former site of their Red Grooms home run sculpture in center field into a “three-tier millennial park” with $10 standing-room tickets, because apparently millennials are broke and hate sitting down? They’ve gotta try something, I guess, and this did help get them a long Miami Herald article about their “rebranding” efforts, so sure, millennial park it is.
  • Building a football stadium for a college football team and hoping to fill it up with lots of Bruce Springsteen concerts turns out, shockingly, not to have been such a great idea. UConn’s Rentschler Field loses money most years, and hasn’t hosted a major concert since 2007, with the director of the agency that runs it griping, “The summers are generally slow, the springs are generally muddy, and the falls are UConn’s.” And nobody built lots of new development around a stadium that hosts only nine events a year, likewise shockingly. It still could have been worse, though: Hartford could have spent even more money on landing the New England Patriots.
  • Speaking of failed sports developments, the new Detroit Red Wings arena district is “shaping up to be a giant swath of blacktop,” reports Deadline Detroit, which also revealed that the city has failed to penalize the team’s owners for missing development deadlines, and has held out the possibility of more public subsidies if he ever does build anything around the arena. At least the Ilitches are finally paying for the extra police needed to work NHL games, though, so that’s something.
  • Oklahoma City is considering using up to $92 million to build a 10,000-seat USL stadium that could later be expanded for MLS, because of course they are.
  • Here is an article that cites “an economic development expert” as saying that hosting a Super Bowl could be worth $1 billion in “economic activity” to Las Vegas, saying he based this on the results of last year’s Super Bowl in Minneapolis. Actual increased tax receipts for Minneapolis during the game: $2.4 million. It took me 30 seconds to research this, but apparently the Las Vegas Review-Journal is too high and mighty to use Google. Do not reward them with your clicks.
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