Category: Quebec arena

Friday roundup: NYCFC turf woes, Quebec’s NHL snub, and why people who live near stadiums can’t have nice things

access_time personNeil deMause

And in less vaportectury news:

  • NYC F.C. is having turf problems again, as large chunks of the temporary sod covering New Yankee Stadium’s dirt infield were peeling up at their home match last Saturday. There’s still been no announced progress on the latest stadium plan proposed last summer (which wasn’t even proposed by the team, but by a private developer), and I honestly won’t be surprised if there never is, though Yankees president Randy Levine did say recently that he “hopes” to have a soccer stadium announcement this year sometime, so there’s that.
  • Deadspin ran a long article on why Quebec City keeps getting snubbed for an NHL franchise, and the short answer appears to be: It’s a small city, the Canadian dollar is weak, Gary Bettman loves trying to expand hockey into unlikely U.S. markets, and Montreal Canadiens owner Geoff Molson hates prospective Quebec Nordiques owner Pierre Karl Péladeau, for reasons having to do with everything from arena competition to Anglophone-Francophone beef. Say it with me now: Building arenas on spec is a no good, very bad idea.
  • The Cleveland Cavaliers arena has an even more terrible new name than the two terrible names that preceded it. “I know that sometimes [with] change, you get a little resistance and people say, ‘Why are they changing it?’ and ‘How’s that name going to work?'” team owner Dan Gilbert told NBA.com. The answers, if you were wondering, are “Dan Gilbert is trying to promote a different one of his allegedly fraudulent loan service programs” and “nobody’s going to even remember the new name, and will probably just call it ‘the arena’ or something.”
  • Inglewood residents are afraid that the new Los Angeles Rams stadium will price them out of their neighborhood; the good news for them is that all economic evidence is that the stadium probably won’t do much to accelerate gentrification, while the bad news is that gentrification is probably coming for them stadium or not. The it-could-be-worse news is that Inglewood residents are still better off than Cincinnati residents who, after F.C. Cincinnati‘s owners promised no one would be displaced for their new stadium, went around buying up buildings around the new stadium and forcing residents to relocate, because that’s not technically “for” the new stadium, right?
  • Worcester still hasn’t gotten around to buying up all the property for the Triple-A Red Sox‘ new stadium set to open in 2021, and with construction set to begin in July, this could be setting the stage for the city to either have to overpay for the land or have to engage in a protracted eminent domain proceeding that could delay the stadium’s opening. It’s probably too soon to be anticipating another minor-league baseball road team, but who am I kidding, it’s never too soon to look forward to that.
Share this post:

Quebec arena still set to lose money, will be mostly empty all winter

access_time personNeil deMause

Hey, how’s it going in Quebec City, which opened its new hockey arena one year ago with little fanfare, since it didn’t have a hockey team to play in it? What’s the scoop, Globe and Mail?

It’s early to start bandying terms such as “white elephant”

Oh, that really doesn’t sound good.

In short: The Centre Vidéotron (named for a cable company that’s part of Quebecor, the company that owns operating rights to the arena and also is hoping to land an NHL team eventually) is having trouble filling dates (it only has a measly 12 nights booked with concerts between September and March) and losing money on operations. The arena ran up about $1.4 million in red ink in the four months of 2016 that it was open, half of which has to be covered by Quebec taxpayers according to the arena lease agreement — so it still has a shot at costing taxpayers their entire lease payment from Quebecor, as was projected in June. And, of course, it’s doing nothing to help pay back the roughly $300 million in construction costs that Quebec residents are on the hook for.

Eventually, once the Canadian exchange rate recovers, Quebec will probably get a new NHL team (because Quebecor is almost certainly willing to throw half a billion dollars at the NHL for one, and the NHL is almost certainly willing to take its money), and then everyone will be happy, or at least hockey fans will, which is close enough to “everyone” in the case of Quebec. But man, is this turning into a money pit in the meantime.

Share this post:

Quebec arena could cost public $370m after city pays half its operating losses

access_time personNeil deMause

Quebec City is not getting an NHL expansion team today (Las Vegas is), but it still has the $400 million arena that taxpayers put up around $330 million to build. And quelle surprise, it’s already losing money:

The $400-million arena opened its doors to the public last September and ran an operational deficit of $1.4 million in its first four months.

That’s not good.

The contract states that the city has to pay 50 per cent of the operational deficit incurred by QMI Spectacles, an affiliate of Quebecor, up to the amount of the arena’s rent.

That’s even worse! CBC News says this will cause Quebec to have to pay the arena operators $730,000, but if you project it out over a full year, it’ll be a $2.2 million check, or a rebate of almost the entire $2.5 million annual rent payment from Quebecor. That would bring the total public subsidy for the new arena to around $370 million, which would be a crazy-high amount to get an NHL team (you could buy a slightly used one for less than that price), if they were getting an NHL team for that price.

The lesson here is … well, all the usual lessons about not spending so much public money on a sports venue and hoping you’ll earn it back on new revenues, and not building on spec, and so on. Mostly, though, it’s that when the mayor jokes that his cousin will be the main attraction at your city’s new arena, be afraid, be very afraid.

Share this post:

NHL reportedly rejects Quebec expansion bid because Canadian oil is too cheap

access_time personNeil deMause

When the NHL indicated last summer that it could be interested in expanding by two teams in exchange for half-billion-dollar expansion fees, and then only two cities, Quebec and Las Vegas, bothered to submit bids, everybody figured that Quebec and Las Vegas would be getting NHL expansion teams soon. As it turns out, everybody figured wrong:

Former player Georges Laraque told a Montreal radio station yesterday that the NHLPA has been informed that Quebec City is no longer under consideration for a new team, at least not in this round of expansion.

The problem is apparently the weak loonie — no, not that one, but rather the crashing Canadian dollar, which currently sits at 75 cents thanks to low oil prices (Canada produces a lot of oil by digging up all of Alberta and running it through a sieve). So despite a relatively strong fan base, an ownership group led by the former prime minister, and a new arena with around $300 million in public subsidies, the NHL has apparently decided that Quebec will need to wait on the sidelines until it can confirm that it will generate more than Monopoly money for league coffers. (“Apparently” because the NHL has denied it, but only with a “no final decisions have been reached” no-comment denial.)

So what does that mean for Las Vegas, which initially sounded like the even-crazier expansion idea? Will the NHL really go ahead with adding just one team, in a market that would be the league’s smallest and most desert-surrounded? The NHL has refused to issue any timetables for expansion, so who knows? It’s entirely possible that the league could just go back to the drawing board and issue a new call for expansion bids — after all, if you’re going to get a bidding war going, you really want more than two cities going after two slots. You can smell the excitement in Seattle already!

Share this post:

Vegas, Quebec now frontrunners for NHL expansion teams, because nobody else bothered to bid

access_time personNeil deMause

Official bids to own an NHL expansion franchise (assuming the NHL actually expands) were due yesterday, and of the several motley candidates, only two ended up submitting an actual bid, along with a $2 million non-refundable deposit: The Bill Foley/Maloof brothers group in Las Vegas, and Canadian telecom company Quebecor in Quebec City.

If the neo-Quebec Nordiques and Las Vegas Black Knights (that’s seriously what they’re considering calling the team — one can only hope their team motto will be “Tis but a flesh wound!“) happen, it will be because the NHL thinks it can get $500 million apiece in expansion fees, which would be worth the roughly $20 million a year in TV revenues the other teams would have to give up to each of the new franchises. Neither city would be a guaranteed success — Quebec probably has a better shot, if only because people actually watch hockey there, but they’d both be among the NHL’s smallest markets — but then, if there were an obvious expansion market, it would already have a team by now.

There was one bigger market considering a bid, or actually two bids: Seattle, where both Chris Hansen and Ray Bartoszek were reportedly interested in teams for their prospective arenas in downtown Seattle and suburban Tukwila. Neither ended up bidding, though, which would leave Seattle looking at being the home for a relocated team at some point, assuming either Hansen or Bartoszek is really that interested in the NHL.

And that, ultimately, is what the NHL would be giving up here, even more than a sliver of TV revenues: leverage. Right now, cities undergoing arena battles face a slew of marginally believable bogeymen where their team could be said to be relocating to if they don’t agree to demands. If Vegas and Quebec get new teams, the league would pretty much be down to Seattle as a threat, and while one city will certainly suffice for this (look at what the NFL has done with L.A.), it’s less than ideal.

All of which is to say that Glendale officials should probably feel comfortable taking a hard line with the Arizona Coyotes owners in their lease battle. There’s reportedly been some progress in those talks, but if the worst-case scenario ends up being that the Coyotes might move back to a new arena in Phoenix, leaving that city stuck with how to keep afloat a money-losing franchise with subsidies, that’s the kind of chance that Glendale should feel comfortable taking.

UPDATE: Deadspin thinks that this is going to hurt the NHL’s leverage in getting the highest price for expansion teams, since now they can’t get a bidding war going. I’m less sure — the league can still refuse to assign any new teams at all if it doesn’t get what it wants — but this certainly doesn’t help the NHL’s racket, let’s put it that way.

Share this post:

NHL to take expansion bids from Vegas, Quebec, Seattle, etc. because MONEYYYYYY

access_time personNeil deMause

The NHL is taking bids on expansion franchises starting July 6, which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to expand, but does mean it’s testing the waters. And given the price tag, it’s easy to see why:

https://twitter.com/TravisSBN/status/613809224594763776

That’s kind of aggressive, considering that Forbes estimates the average NHL team to be worth $490 million, and given the markets we’d be talking about here (more on that in a minute), these teams would be below average. But then, the magazine’s team value figures always seem to lag a bit behind actual sale prices — as Forbes notes, there’s a bit of a bubble thanks to the fact that “Wall Street guys like Joshua Harris (New Jersey Devils) and Andrew Barroway (trying to buy a controlling interest in the Arizona Coyotes) are willing to pay a lot of money for hockey teams that lose money.” (It also doesn’t hurt that they can get huge tax breaks on their purchase price.)

The next question, obviously, is where, and everybody from Deadspin to the New York Times is assuming that one of the cities will be Las Vegas. This seems pretty daft from here — Las Vegas would be the second-smallest NHL TV market (ahead of only Buffalo), it’s in the middle of the Sun Belt where hockey franchises go to die, and it has a relatively poor permanent population. (A proposed Vegas team has managed to get $150 deposits on 11,500 season tickets, though those are refundable if there’s no team starting in 2016.) But it does have a new arena going up, and those things are guaranteed gold mines, right?

If Vegas were one team, the other would likely be either Quebec (where telecom giant Quebecor is almost certain to throw its hat in the ring) or Seattle (which has interest but still no solid NHL arena plan). Quebec would actually be the smallest media market in the NHL (smaller than Flint, Michigan!), but it’s in Canada, so maybe that compensates? Also, new arena!

If nothing else, all this means that Glendale should probably feel relatively secure in playing hardball with the Coyotes owners over their lease, since the NHL is unlikely to encourage the team to move to a new city if that would jeopardize a half-billion dollars in expansion fees. And with that, let’s go look as some photos of the under-construction Las Vegas arena:

Yeah, that, um, looks like an arena. With two levels of luxury suites, which I guess is standard these days, but makes for just awful views from the top deck. But hey, not like anyone’s likely to be sitting up there anyway, amirite?

Share this post:

Quebec gets ready to open big empty hockey arena, mayor jokes that “my cousin Réjean” will play there

access_time personNeil deMause

That Quebec City Mayor Régis Labeaume is such a card! Check him out talking about the hockey arena that he saddled taxpayers with between $270 million and $330 million in payments on, in order to get an NHL team, and which now persists in not having an NHL team:

“What are you going to put inside?” host Marie-France Bazzo asked the man who was the project’s biggest booster.

“Listen, we’ll have public skating,” Mr. Labeaume joked. “My cousin Réjean wants to play there too,” he added, struggling to contain his own laughter.

Hahahaha! Ha! Ha.

There will be a minor-league team playing in the new arena, but that’s still not exactly what Quebecois had in mind. (Though, you know, I did kinda tell you so.) But Quebec still might get an expansion NHL team, right?

In 2011, the average value of an NHL team was US$240-million, he said. By last year it had more than doubled to US$490-million. The huge investment required to acquire a team, whether through expansion or purchase of an existing team, would make it hard for owners to turn a profit in a small market like Quebec City. The plummeting Canadian dollar only aggravates the situation.

“I don’t see how it can be financially viable in a city of 700,000 people,” Mr. Richelieu said. “To make it past the first two or three years, when the novelty and enthusiasm of having the Nordiques back is past, will be hard. After that, people might find it hard to fork out the hefty ticket price to pay for a major-league-calibre show.”

Economics aside, the league is displaying little interest in returning to the Quebec capital. When possible expansion is mentioned, the names of Las Vegas and Seattle are at the top of the list as the league seeks to balance the number of teams in its Eastern and Western conferences. And NHL commissioner Gary Bettman reiterated on the weekend his opposition to moving an existing team.

Oh, well. Cue the “cold Kansas City” jibes!

Share this post:

Vegas would be “disaster” for NHL expansion, Seattle not much better, according to Fivethirtyeight’s numbers

access_time personNeil deMause

Fivethirtyeight has taken a look at the hard numbers behind the possible NHL expansion targets [or at least as hard as you can get from counting up Google searches for “NHL” — see comments], and pretty much concurs with what I said off the top of my head the other day: Quebec could work, as could Toronto (leaving aside the pesky problem of the Maple Leafs wanting that market all for themselves), but Seattle and especially Vegas would be pretty lousy NHL sites:

Teams in markets with fewer than 300,000 hockey fans, however, have tended to lose money, and that’s where the wisdom of adding franchises in Seattle and (especially) Las Vegas gets iffy. We estimated that Seattle contains about 240,000 NHL fans — fewer than that of Phoenix and Florida’s Tampa Bay, home to two franchises that have struggled to turn a profit for many years. And if Seattle is an enigmatic choice by this metric, Las Vegas would be a disaster. According to our estimates, there are only 91,000 hockey fans in the Vegas media market, which is nearly 40 percent fewer than even Nashville, Tennessee, the least-avid current NHL city, has.

Interestingly, Fivethirtyeight estimates that Kingston and Halifax, and maybe even Moncton, Sherbrooke or Sudbury, could viably support an NHL team better than the U.S. cities under consideration — and better even than five current NHL cities, Phoenix, Columbus, Raleigh-Durham, Miami, and Nashville — thanks to the fact that there are actually people who like to watch hockey in Canada. No doubt there are other factors here at work as well — TV networks, in particular, care as much about overall media market size as whether the market contains any actual hockey fans — but it’s still a worthwhile reminder that just because a city has possible arena plans and some name recognition doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a good place to start up a sports franchise.

Share this post:

NHL to add four new teams for $1.4B by 2017 purple monkey dishwasher

access_time personNeil deMause

If you loved last March’s unsourced rumors about how the NHL is ready to expand, expand, expand, you’ll love today’s similarly unsourced rumors about the exact same thing! Take it away, Tony Gallagher of British Columbia’s The Province:

Sources close to the situation have indicated Las Vegas is a done deal, the only thing to be determined being which owner will be entitled to proclaim that he brought the first major league sports franchise to Sin City…

A new team close to the newly renamed Arizona squad and California’s big three is all but assured, the only question being when and with which other city. Or should that be plural?

With all the activity going on in the Seattle area in the last little bit it would be quite a stretch to imagine that much time and effort being spent by so many wealthy men being frittered away for nothing.

(Is it just me, or does this entire thing read like a gossip column? I kept waiting for “What mid-sized city was spotted on the dance floor, cavorting with NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly?”)

As Deadspin notes, Howard Bloom of Sports Business News then upped the ante by predicting that Quebec, Seattle, Las Vegas, and a second Toronto team will all be joining the NHL by 2017, in exchange for $1.4 billion in expansion fees.

This is simultaneously crazy and not-crazy. On the not-crazy side, $1.4 billion, people! In a world where Steve Ballmer is willing to plunk down $2 billion for an NBA team, and MLS franchises are going like hotcakes, it would be foolish not to at least consider taking some of the money that the world’s billionaires are waving around like drunken sailors.

On the crazy side, with the exception of Quebec, all of these are seriously problematic markets. Seattle doesn’t have an arena that really fits hockey, and any hopes of building one would depend on the NBA first approving a new basketball team for Seattle, which doesn’t sound like it’s happening anytime soon. Vegas is Vegas, which is a small, poor city with a bunch of people with lots of spending money visiting all the damn time, which isn’t a great recipe for season ticket sales. Toronto would run up against the Maple Leafs corporate buzzsaw, which would undoubtedly try to seize a chunk of that expansion fee as payment for incursions into its territory.

So, there are some stumbling blocks that make one wonder if Gary Bettman has really thought this thing out. (Not that thinking things out in advance has exactly been Bettman’s strong point in the past.) If the reports are true, and NHL officials are thinking clearly, it seems far more likely that this is a trial balloon designed to see what arena concessions they can get by waving a possible expansion team under a few municipal noses. Guess we’ll find out soon enough — 2017 isn’t that far away.

Share this post:

NHL ready to expand to Seattle as soon as it builds arena that it’s not going to build for hockey

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s time for another round of “Where will the NHL expand next?” with your old pal, David Shoalts of the Globe and Mail! Shoalts reports that expansion talks are “happening at the highest level,” with Seattle, Las Vegas, and Quebec City “the cities in play.”

Quebec has a ready-made fan base for a reformed Nordiques and an arena already under construction; Las Vegas has more arena plans than you can shake a stick at and a couple of potential ownership groups (one of which, alarmingly, is the Maloof brothers). Seattle, meanwhile, says Shoalts, “seems to be the darling of many NHL governors (even though its arena plans are tilted more to the NBA).”

That’s a revealing little parenthetical, because right now the Seattle arena plans actually require the NBA: Would-be builder Chris Hansen has only committed to the project if he first gets a basketball franchise that he can turn into a revived Sonics. That deal could be revised for hockey, but Seattle city council president Tim Burgess says it probably won’t be:

Responding to an email from Sportspress NW, City Council president Tim Burgess wrote Tuesday that the memorandum of understanding is unlikely to be changed because the financial risk is too high.

“I don’t believe the MOU could be modified to allow an NHL team to go first,” Burgess wrote. “During our initial consideration of the MOU, it was quite clear that the financial risk to the city increased dramatically with the NHL-first scenario.”

And:

A source within the group helping Hansen, the Seattle native who has proposed a $500 million basketball/hockey arena in SoDo, said Hansen has given no consideration to asking the city to change.

“Chris has not proposed changing anything,” he said. “He’s always said he’s a basketball guy.”

What’s so special about basketball, anyway? For starters, Hansen actually likes the sport — all signs are that he’s willing to overpay for both a franchise and an arena if it gets him a hoops team to sit courtside for. Also, Seattle has a proven track record with basketball that it doesn’t with hockey (most of the fans of the 1917 Stanley Cup-winning Seattle Metropolitans aren’t so much around anymore), and the NBA is in general a more profitable entity than the NHL — leaving more money floating around to potentially fill in all those gaping holes in the arena construction spreadsheet.

All this is, of course, subject to change. But right now, it looks more like the NHL is using Seattle for leverage with the other expansion candidates, while holding out hope that somehow an arena deal will emerge overnight once Hansen, Burgess, and the rest catch hockey fever. Shoalts can talk all he wants about how adding two West Coast teams would make conference scheduling easier, but when it comes down to it, this decision is going to be made based on what plan makes Gary Bettman’s owner friends the most money.

Share this post: