Category: Hartford NHL team

Friday roundup: Newspapers love stadium propaganda, like really love it, like would marry it if they could

access_time personNeil deMause

One thing that both cheers and puzzles me is all the comments that surely elected officials are about to start saying no to stadium and arena shakedowns, even as they keep on saying yes. I’m not entirely sure whether it’s a dedication to optimism or a commitment to burn down the system and start anew, but I’ll just say what I’ve been saying in this situation for 20-odd years now: I hope you’re right and I’m wrong, but I’m not holding my breath.

And now that I’ve put the Neil back in nihilism, on with the news:

  • Two guys in Oregon want to build a Major League Baseball stadium in the Portland suburb or Gresham, and build it entirely out of wood, and I’m sorry, I kind of stopped reading after “iconic all-wood stadium,” but I did see there’s a rendering of people petting dogs and roller blading outside a stadium, because who doesn’t like dogs and roller blading?
  • Sports columnist Mike DiMauro of The Day, which I know is a newspaper in Connecticut but which always just makes me think of this, has written one of those “What’s taking so long to throw public money at a sports project, dagnabit?” columns, complaining of the “tediousness” of inaction on renovating Hartford’s arena, which is “creaky” and “squeaky,” and that the problem is the “fundamental moral outrage” of the “Chorus Of Aggrieved Taxpayers” that is leaving renovations “moving forward with the acceleration of an arthritic snail.” (Snails, of course, are invertebrates, so wouldn’t be affected by arthritis. Lucky snails!) Asks DiMauro, “What other Hartford-area project is of more benefit to a wider range of people than a bustling downtown arena?” Try not to answer all at once.
  • Construction of F.C. Cincinnati‘s new stadium is complete, and the team’s press release includes a photo of it empty that is a bit drab with no lens flare or people pointing at the sky, but makes up for that with some impressively purple prose about such things as how “the back shelving of the club’s bar was inspired by the jaw-dropping five-story stacks of the Old Cincinnati Library. If that’s not worth $97 million in taxpayer money, what is? (Try not to answer all at once.)
  • Still not random enough stadium cheerleading for you? How about a local TV news exclusive video of St. Louis stadium construction workers doing stretches in unison?
  • The Palm Springs Desert Sun reports that Oak View Group wants its proposed $250 million arena in Palm Desert to be powered by solar energy and entirely carbon neutral, but complains it’s being stymied by the local power company, which is … sorry, no room for a comment from the power company, need to leave space for the note about the Desert Sun’s upcoming “informational webinar series” in partnership with Oak View Group about its new arena, something that is no doubt entirely unrelated to the four different OVG execs and architects quoted in the story.
  • The Calgary Flames arena project may require chopping down a 125-year-old elm tree, but it’s okay because someone took a 3D photo of it first.
  • Two Arlington Heights–area state lawmakers say they wouldn’t want to use public funds for a new Chicago Bears stadium in the suburban city, while one says he “probably” would. Given that “no public funds” can be defined pretty much however elected officials like these days, not to mention that no one is actually proposing to build a stadium in Arlington Heights, this maybe seems like a waste of a reporter’s time, but … oh, never mind, they just let the intern whose Twitter bio brags about their “bad sports opinions” write it, it’s all good.
  • And finally, we have the Sacramento Bee’s report that Sacramento Republic FC is showing it’s serious about moving up to MLS by … changing the name of its stadium from one corporation to another? That’s what it says in the team’s press release, anyway, gotta get that right into print, that’s what journalism is all about!
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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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Friday roundup: Cincy official wants soccer subsidies back, Hartford mayor wants arena spending now, and why billionaires are jealous of other billionaires

access_time personNeil deMause

Just how far have we fallen in the last few weeks? Far enough that I wrote an article on how New York City is managing to feed at least a few of its millions of suddenly hungry people, and I considered this a positive article. I promise we’ll get back to more analysis of how rich sports people are attempting to steal a few billions in taxpayer money in short order, but right now it’s a little hard to focus on run-of-the-mill horrors when there are so many new ones every day.

But there was some news this week, not all of it pandemic-related! Enjoy, if enjoying is still a thing we do:

  • Cincinnati city councilmember Chris Seelbach says that in light of crashing city budgets in the wake of the coronavirus crisis, he plans to introduce a bill asking F.C. Cincinnati to return 25% of its $33 million public stadium subsidy, the same percentage that city social service agencies are being asked to cut. The bad news: City officials say it would be up to the team to voluntarily accept the funding reduction, so maybe don’t hold your breath on that.
  • Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin says it’s a great time for a $100 million renovation of his city’s XL Center since the arena is just sitting there right now doing nothing but losing money, so it’s a great time for construction! Connecticut is currently facing a projected $1.9 billion loss of tax revenues from the pandemic, in case you were wondering.
  • The New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs, and Los Angeles Dodgers would each lose more than $300 million in revenues if no fans were allowed to attend games in 2020, according to Forbes’ Mike Ozanian, while other teams like the Miami Marlins would lose only $47 million, since nobody goes to Marlins games anyway. But Ozanian notes tha teams would also cut back on their revenue sharing expenses, and while he doesn’t do the math on this, we can: With revenue sharing running at about 48% of local revenues (actually slightly less since even the Yankees get back a small share of the overall cut), this means those teams’ bottom-line losses will only be about half what Forbes is reporting. In other words, coronavirus will likely be only slightly more of a disaster for the Yankees than signing Jacoby Ellsbury.
  • Delaying the Tokyo Olympics for a year is expected to cost organizers $2.8 billion for things like additional rental costs on private venues and the athletes’ village — which already has private buyers who were expecting to move in in September — and the International Olympic Committee isn’t exactly saying whether it will cover these costs or the Tokyo organizing committee will be stuck with them, though you can certainly guess, based on past IOC behavior. And that’s assuming that the 2020 Olympics can take place in 2021, which is still not a sure thing.
  • And speaking of coronavirus shutdowns possibly lasting into 2021, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has told city agencies that “large gatherings such as concerts and sporting events may not be approved in the city for at least 1 year.” That doesn’t rule out TV-only sports with no fans, and also it’s important to remember that memos like these are just contingency plans, and no one knows what things will look like this fall (or, for that matter, in fall of 2021). Maybe hold off on buying your 2020 NFL season tickets, though, just to be on the safe side.
  • Amazon is reportedly considering bidding for naming rights to Tottenham Hotspur‘s new stadium, which given that naming rights are mostly good for boosting brand recognition and Amazon is already the world’s biggest brand is kind of weird. Though given that the company is now making $11,000 in sales per second what with everyone trapped in their homes, maybe they can afford to blow some money on something stupid.
  • And speaking of Amazon, Bloomberg reports that Jeff Bezos only asked for billions of dollars in subsidies for a new second headquarters because he was jealous of Elon Musk getting billions of dollars from Nevada for a new Tesla plant. Which we pretty much knew was Bezos’s inspiration, but it’s still a worthwhile reminder that corporate barons are just as much driven by envy of the next corporate baron down the block as they are by any rational economic motivations.
  • Here are some photos of the early years of the original Yankee Stadium, which are being reported as a sign of the team’s impact on its surrounding Bronx neighborhood, which is probably wrong since it’s more likely the impact of the new elevated subway line that opened in 1918 (and helped inspired the Yankees to move to the Bronx). Though they do give a sense of how teams used to build stadiums in phases — expand by a few thousand seats, then once those sell out use the proceeds to add a few thousands more — to make them more affordable with private cash, something you usually only see now in European soccer stadiums, which is surely just coincidental to the fact that European soccer stadiums mostly don’t get huge public subsidies.
  • And speaking of European soccer stadiums, here are some photos from what is described as an “insane new video” of Real Madrid‘s proposed $625 million stadium renovation, which leads me to believe that SportsBible, whatever that is, has never seen a truly insane video.  I do like the news, though, that “the capacity of the iconic venue will be reduced by one to 80,242,” which leads me to believe that at least the stadium architects have a sense of humor.
  • Since we haven’t featured any dumb sports news articles yet this week, how about this one from the New York Post that claims the New York Islanders moving to Brooklyn worked out well because it kept the team from moving to Quebec? Asked and answered, people!
  • Superstar Los Angeles Angels outfielder Mike Trout has declared MLB’s Arizona biodome proposal to be “pretty crazy” since it would keep players away from their families for months, but the Arizona Republic’s editorial page editor says there are “scientific reasons” for doing it like “MLB players are already guinea pigs” and “there is always risk in life” and anyway baseballllllllllllll! More science to drop soon on this, I sorely hope.
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Saturday roundup: Manfred endorses Tampontreal Ex-Rays, NYCFC readies Bronx stadium plan (maybe), everybody in Nashville sues everybody else

access_time personNeil deMause

Man, I sure picked the wrong week to get so sick that I couldn’t post for a couple of days! But even if it’s now the weekend and I’m only at about 80%, the news is at 110%, so let’s get to it:

  • First up is Thursday’s declaration by MLB commissioner Rob Manfred that he and baseball owners are “100% convinced” that having the Tampa Bay Rays play half their games in Montreal “is best way to keep Major League Baseball in Tampa Bay.” That’s not entirely surprising — I mean, it’s surprising that we have a major sports executive saying that the best way to keep a team from moving is to let it move half its games, but no more surprising than when Rays owner Stuart Sternberg first said it last June — since it’s very rare for sports commissioners and fellow owners to stand in the way of their fellow owners’ stadium or relocation plans, especially if it doesn’t infringe on their territories. (Speaking of territories, Toronto Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro said, “We are supportive of them exploring it,” if you were wondering.) The plan itself remains, in the words of the great unemployed sports editor Barry Petchesky, “completely batshit,” not least because it would require getting not one but two cities to build not one but two new stadiums just to land half a team, but also for a billion other reasons. It still makes the most sense as a Madman Theory strategy by Sternberg to scare Tampa Bay or Montreal into competing to build him at least one stadium — can you imagine the headlines to come about “Montreal is moving ahead with its stadium while Tampa lags behind?” or vice versa? — but sports owners are just rich, not necessarily smart, so who the hell knows what Sternberg really intends to do? Whatever it is, though, he’ll have Manfred’s support, because Manfred knows who signs his checks.
  • NYC F.C.‘s plan for a new stadium just south of Yankee Stadium has been reportedly almost ready for more than a year and a half now, but now it’s supposedly really almost ready, according to a different New York Times reporter than the one who reported the initial rumor. The outline of the plan remains roughly the same: The Yankees owners, who are minority owners of the MLS club, would allow the city to demolish a parking garage that their lease otherwise requires remain in place, a private developer would take the garage and a parcel across the street and the street itself (plus a highway off-ramp) and build housing and a hotel and other stuff on part of it while leasing the rest to NYC F.C. to build a stadium on, which would — again, supposedly — allow the whole thing to move forward without public money being used for construction. Being used for other things is another story: The Times doesn’t mention whether the team or developers would pay the city anything for the section of East 153rd Street that would need to be demapped and buried beneath a soccer pitch, or how much the developers would pay to lease the garage site, or if either parcel would pay property taxes. (The Times reports that “Maddd and N.Y.C.F.C. [would] convey the [street] property to the city” then lease it back, which certainly sounds like an attempt to evade property taxes.) City officials said that “a deal has not been reached, and more conversations are needed,” so maybe none of these things have even been decided; tune back in soon, or maybe in another year and a half!
  • The lawsuit filed by Save Our Fairgrounds claiming that Nashville S.C. stadium project would take up too much public land needed for other uses is moving to trial, and Nashville S.C. has sued to intervene in their lawsuit, and everybody’s trying to figure out if NASCAR and soccer can coexist on adjacent parcels, and soccer fans are mad that that stadium isn’t getting built yet, and the community coalition that negotiated a community benefits agreement to go along with the stadium plan is mad that nobody’s consulting them about any of this. It’s only a matter of time before Jimmy Carter is called in to resolve this.
  • Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont has put $55 million into his state budget proposal over the next two years to renovate Hartford’s arena, with the rest of the cost — estimated at between $100 million and $250 million, depending on how extensive it is — to be paid off by private investors who would get … something. The state is studying it now! Get off their back!
  • A bunch of the Carolina Panthers fans who bought “permanent seat licenses” to help finance the team’s stadium back in 1993 have found that the “permanent” part isn’t actually so much true: About 900 seats in the front of one end zone are being ripped out to make way for luxury suites for soccer (or a standing-room “supporters’ section — the latter makes more sense, but the Charlotte Observer article on this is frustratingly unclear), so fans with PSLs there are being offered either to move to other nearby locations or to sell their licenses back to the team for 25% over what they initially paid for them. No wonder everyone else started calling them “personal” seat licenses!
  • Also, the Panthers are having their stadium property tax bill reduced by $3.5 million a year, because they asked nicely. Or just asked, and are a major sports franchise and therefore an 800-pound gorilla, with all the privileges that go with that. One of those two.
  • The Jacksonville Jaguars are going to play two home games in London next year, which the team’s website says is “strategically aligned” with development in their Jacksonville stadium’s parking lot, somehow, though is one extra week of construction time really going to help them all that much? Or maybe this is some weird kind of brinkmanship, as in “approve our Lot J development, stat, or we’ll keep moving games to London?” Anyway, cue people freaking out about the Jaguars moving to London again now, which team owner Shad Khan can’t be unhappy about because savvy negotiators and leverage and all that.
  • A poll by the Oakland Athletics on where the team should build a new stadium found that Oakland residents backed the team’s preferred Howard Terminal site by 63-29%, but a poll by a group that opposes the Howard Terminal plan found that residents prefer the current Oakland Coliseum site by a 62-29% margin. Reminder: Polls are garbage!
  • This video of an entire Russian hockey arena collapsing during reconstruction work, with a worker clearly visible on the roof as it gives way, doesn’t actually have much to with stadium subsidies, but it sure is impressive-looking, in a horrific way.
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Friday update: Bad D.C. arena math, bad Bucks arena math, bad Columbus ticket tax math

access_time personNeil deMause

It must be September, because my TV is filled with Jim Cantore and Anderson Cooper standing ankle-deep in water. But anyway:

  • Washington, D.C., is about to open its new Mystics home arena and Wizards practice facility, and Mayor Muriel Bowser says it’s a model of how the city would build a new NFL stadium as well. “We know [sports] can help our bottom line by attracting people to our city, but it also has a big impact when we’re winning on our collective psyche,” says Bowser of an arena that got $50 million in public subsidies for two teams that were already playing in D.C. anyway. Maybe she should go back to using her terrible soccer stadium deal as a model instead.
  • People in Calgary are starting to ask whether, if the city is looking to spend $3 billion on hosting the 2026 Olympics, maybe it should build a new Flames arena as part of the deal? Camels, man.
  • Buffalo Bills co-owner Kim Pegula says she’s going to wait until after the gubernatorial elections this November to start negotiating a new stadium with whoever ends up in charge of the state. It won’t be the lox-and-raisin-bagel lady.
  • Speaking of the Pegulas and New York’s current governor, they’re planning an $18 million upgrade of Rochester’s arena that hosts the Rochester Americans minor-league hockey team (which the Pegulas also own), with costs to be split among the owners and city and state taxpayers. Split how? Sorry, no room in the Associated Press article, ask again later!
  • The AP did find time to fact-check Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s claim that the new Milwaukee Bucks arena would return three dollars in new taxes for each one spent, and found that “Walker omits some of the state money spent on the 20-year arena deal and relies on income tax estimates that experts call unreliable.” I could’ve told them that — in fact, I did, three years ago.
  • “‘Ticket tax’ proposal could lead to higher prices on movies, theater, sports in Columbus” reads a headline on WSYX‘s website, something that the station’s reporter asserts in the accompanying video without saying where he got it from. He’s at least partly wrong: Ticket prices are already set as high as the market will bear, so unless the ticket tax changes the market — in other words, unless people in Columbus are forced to spend more on movies and theater and such because the other options (staying at home and watching TV, going out to eat) aren’t good enough, mostly this will just mean prices will stay roughly the same but a bigger share will go to theater/team owner’s tax bills. (I could try to find an economist to estimate exactly how big a share, but isn’t that really WSYX’s job?)
  • Former Oakland A’s exec Andy Dolich says the team owners may be looking at buying both the Howard Terminal site and the Oakland Coliseum site, and using the revenues from one to pay the costs of prepping the other for baseball, which, if the Coliseum site is such a cash cow and Howard Terminal such a money pit, wouldn’t they be better off just buying the Coliseum site and developing that? Or is the idea that Oakland would somehow give up the Coliseum site at a discounted price in order to get a new A’s stadium done? I have a lot of math questions here.
  • With nobody wanting to spend $250 million on a major renovation of Hartford’s arena, the agency that manages the XL Center is now looking for a $100 million state-funded upgrade instead. Still waiting to hear whether this would actually generate $100 million worth of new revenues for the arena; if not, the state would be better off just giving the arena a pile of cash to subsidize its bottom line, no?
  • Cobb County is only letting the Atlanta Braves owners out of part of the $1.5 million they owed on water and sewer costs for their new stadium. Yay?
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Columbus arena hurt by lack of ticket tax, Hartford arena hurt by presence of one?

access_time personNeil deMause

Columbus’s Nationwide Arena, the privately built and publicly bailed-out home of the Blue Jackets, is running out of money unless the county rides to the rescue with a citywide tax on sports and entertainment tickets:

The initial proposal outlined in January was for the city to levy a tax of 3 to 8 percent on tickets to arts, cultural, entertainment and professional sporting events within the city limits and for Franklin County to contribute sales-tax revenue.

Together, those sources could generate $15 million to $20 million a year, with $4 million being earmarked for the arena and the rest going to artists and organizations that the arts council supports.

Basically, what’s going on is that the county funded the arena bailout, including future renovations, with a casino tax, and Columbus residents just haven’t been gambling their money away like everyone had hoped. And while initially the county arena authority proposed just a tax on tickets at the arena, that’s expanded to a tax on all tickets anywhere in Columbus, and arts groups and their supporters are understandably miffed about the prospect of having to be taxed in order to fund a competing entertainment option just because the Blue Jackets needed to make more money.

(Ticket taxes, as has been covered here ad infinitum, tend to come out of the pockets of those selling tickets, not buying them, as they’re already charging the maximum that the market will bear; though there’s some argument that a citywide ticket tax would hit ticket buyers a bit harder, since they wouldn’t be able to avoid it by going to see some event other than hockey.)

So we have the specter of Don Brown, executive director of the Franklin County Convention Facilities Authority, saying of a money-losing arena, “To keep that magic happening, we have to keep reinvesting in the arena itself.” Magic!

Plenty of other local governments have funded their sports venues with ticket taxes, of course, among them Hartford, Connecticut — where the public operators of that city’s arena want nothing more than their ticket tax to go away:

The overseers of the XL Center in Hartford say the venue is feeling the sting, in more ways than one, from a 10 percent state admissions tax that kicked in six months ago.

The levy has played a role in the 16,000-seat arena striking out on as many as a dozen events, mainly concerts, that it bid on, according to Michael Freimuth, executive director of the Capital Region Development Authority (CRDA), XL Center’s management overseer…

The problem, Freimuth said, is that the tax curtails a show’s potential profit margin “by such a degree that it results in the building losing actual events and the subsequent revenues.”

Connecticut’s is a statewide tax (though some venues have gotten exemptions, including the Hartford arena at times in the past), so it’s not entirely clear what the arena managers or concert promoters are griping about — it’s not like they can get out of the tax by just going to, say, Bridgeport. Though I suppose griping is how concert promoters get better deals — Freimuth told the Hartford Business Journal that “They say ‘you just took my margin down, split it with me,'” which indeed sounds like something a concert promoter would say.

The lesson here is: You can’t get blood from a stone, or much more money from a concert industry that has other options, especially when you’re a market like Columbus or Hartford that big-name acts can just skip if they aren’t feeling the profits. Though if you’re a concert promoter, you totally can try to get a state to cut your taxes to boost your profits by threatening to blacklist them. And if it seems like letting sports teams and promoters play states off against each other in a bidding war to the bottom is bad public policy, yeah, maybe Congress should have listened to David Minge.

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Friday roundup: Graceland seeks arena money, Marlins and Cards seek spring-training stadium money, guy in Raleigh seeks MLS stadium money

access_time personNeil deMause

In no particular order, or as we call it in New York, Mets style:

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Connecticut puts Hartford arena up for sale, hints at paying buyer to take it off its hands

access_time personNeil deMause

If you’ve always dreamed of owning the former home of the Hartford Whalers, yesterday was your lucky day, as the state Capital Region Development Authority officially put it up for sale — and the state of Connecticut might help you buy it from itself, what?

[CRDA executive director Michael] Freimuth said the state is not pledging to devote funds for improvements as part of the RFP, but “the state could be a player. I would think honestly whatever proposals come in, it would require some state participation.”

So what this sounds like is that the CRDA is hoping that some state renovation funds could sweeten the pot to get higher bids for the arena, though given that the arena is already owned by a state authority, it would be more straightforward just to let people bid whatever they want without involving subsidies, but of course straightforward isn’t always what state officials (or arena owners) want, because it’s too obvious where the money is going then.

Anyway, Freimuth says that the CRDA has already received multiple bids, which is good, because running an arena in a mid-sized city with lots of competition elsewhere in the state and no major-league sports tenants isn’t exactly the kind of thing that sets investors’ hearts a-flutter. Let’s just keep our fingers crossed that whoever buys the building doesn’t demand more in “state participation” than they pay the state in the first place, because that’s the kind of offer that Connecticut can’t afford not to refuse.

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Friday roundup: Spending on training facilities is a bad idea, Portland seeks MLB team, Jays game postponed after roof hit by falling ice

access_time personNeil deMause

I can’t believe none of you wrote in to ask why I hadn’t reported on a Toronto Blue Jays game getting postponed due to falling ice puncturing a hole in the stadium roof, but I guess you’re all acclimated to waiting for the Friday roundup now for that sort of thing. But wait no longer! (Well, wait a few bullet points for that one in particular.)

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Friday roundup: Marlins claim British residency, video football with real humans, and the White Sox stadium that never was

access_time personNeil deMause

Busy (minor) news week! And away we go…

  • Derek Jeter’s Miami Marlins ownership group, facing a lawsuit by the city of Miami and Miami-Dade County over the team stiffing the public on the share of sale proceeds they were promised, are trying to stave it off by claiming that (deep breath) because one of the owners of an umbrella company of an umbrella company of the umbrella company that owns the Marlins is a business incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, the case should be arbitrated by a federal judge who handles international trade issues. Maybe the Marlins should quit trying to sell tickets to baseball games and sell tickets to the court proceedings instead.
  • Tampa Bay Rays chief development officer Melanie Lenz, in response to concerns that a big-ass baseball stadium wouldn’t fit into the Ybor City historic district that it would be on the border of, said that “we expect to build a next-generation, neighborhood ballpark that fits within the fabric of the Ybor City community,” though she didn’t give any details. That’s vague enough to be reassuring without actually promising anything concrete, but it’s worth making a note of just in case the historic district ends up becoming a stumbling block in stadium talks, which, stranger things have happened.
  • A guy wants to start a football league where fans vote on what plays to run via Twitch, and build an arena in Las Vegas for people to watch … the players? The voting? The Las Vegas Review-Journal article about it was a bit unclear, though it did say that the organizers want to “create the experience of playing a football video game with real people,” which isn’t creepy at all. It also reports that the league plans to use blockchain technology, which is how you know it’s probably a sham.
  • Something called the Badger Herald, which I assume is a University of Wisconsin student paper but which I really hope is a newspaper targeted entirely at badgers, ran an article by a junior economics major arguing that the new Milwaukee Bucks arena will be a boon to the city because during the first few years “many will come from across the state to watch the Bucks play in this impressive new facility” and after that it will “continue giving the people of Milwaukee a reason to be optimistic.” The author also says that the arena was built after “the NBA gave the Bucks an ultimatum — either obtain a new arena, or the NBA would buy the Bucks and sell the franchise to another city,” which, uh, no, that’s not what happened at all.
  • Here’s a really nice article for CBS Sports by my old Baseball Prospectus colleague Dayn Perry on the Chicago White Sox ballpark proposed by architect Philip Bess that never got built. Come for the cool pictures of spiders, stay for the extended explanation of why supporting columns that obstruct some views are a design feature that stadium architects never should have abandoned!
  • The Los Angeles Rams are trying to pull a San Francisco 49ers, according to Deadspin, by making a run at a Super Bowl in the same year they’re selling personal seat licenses for their new stadium. More power to ’em, but prospective Rams PSL buyers, check how that worked out for 49ers fans before you hand over your credit card numbers, okay?
  • The state of Connecticut has cut $100 million for Hartford arena renovations from the state budget, at least for now, so that it can use the money toward a $550 million bailout of the city of Hartford itself. Is that what they call a “no win-win situation“?
  • NHL commissioner Gary Bettman says the New York Islanders need to move back to Long Island because Brooklyn’s Barclays Center “wasn’t built for hockey,” which he actually pointed out at the time they moved there, but did anybody listen?
  • Alameda County is moving to sell its share of the Oakland Coliseum complex to the city of Oakland, which should make negotiations over what to do with the site slightly simpler, anyway.
  • That Missouri governor who killed a proposed St. Louis MLS stadium subsidy, calling it “welfare for millionaires,” is now under pressure to resign after his former hairdresser claimed he groped her, slapped her, and coerced her into sex acts. Maybe we should just stop electing men to public office? Just a thought.
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