Monthly Archives: December 2012

We’re not even back yet and I’m thinking about a tank job

Posted on by
2

Reading the Peter Dorion interview over on The 6th Sens this morning in which the depth of the upcoming draft class is mentioned, and it got me to thinking: is there any other season in which I’d rather see the Senators tank for a high pick?

I mean, why the hell not? My interest in hockey has never really been lower. (My girlfriend noted the other day how I suddenly spend my evenings reading books, learning another language, staying fit, and she wondered what had happened. I realized it’s that I’m not spending every other night watching four hours of television in a bar and slowly drinking myself to death.) When the season finally gets rolling it’ll be yet another tainted “season with an asterisk” next to it. Even in the best case scenario, this gong-show of a league has alienated the hell out of all of us.

It’s true that maybe Ottawa’s veterans, the Alifies and Gonchars of the world, can benefit from the shortened season. Maybe the stars will align and our injury prone players, the Regins and Latendresses, can stay out of the field hospital. And I’ll take a strong showing with an asterisk over nothing. But then again, if there’s a season when I’d like to see Ottawa get another top five pick, it’s this one. After all, we’ll only need to put in a half-season’s worth of sucking to get there.

In which case, let’s find those expiring contracts a new home and get ourselves some picks! Gonchar would look great playing terribly for the Capitals or Penguins.

Contradictory messages on hockey economics

Posted on by
5

Two interesting and contradictory stories today that muddy the waters when we try to understand just how profitable it is to own a hockey franchise.

First is this North Texas news story, which features an interesting (and short) audio interview with a sports economist who claims that overall league sustainability sags because of hockey in non-traditional markets. Makes sense conceptually, though he doesn’t offer up much more evidence than “Hockey country in South Florida? No.”

I don’t disagree that building a sport in a non-traditional market is challenging and requires a billionaires’ equivalent of the welfare state in the meantime, but we are talking about huge media markets with mad sports cultures. If hockey is sustainable in cities with a population base like Winnipeg’s, it’s hard to understand how it couldn’t be sustainable in a city where even a fraction of its sports consumers would equal the same number of people.

More to the point, though, is how the angle of this story continues to calculate hockey profitability on a strict hockey-related-revenue-to-hockey-related-expenses ratio. That simply doesn’t reflect the manner in which value is derived from sports franchise ownership.

(One other point made during the interview that resonantes with me more, though, is that owners are emboldened by how strong the fan support was after the last lockout, and how fans are only damaging the long-term stability of the league if they welcome their teams back with open arms. We need to vote with our dollars. End aside.)

Now look at this tellingly contradictory story from South Florida, which says precisely what I and many others have been writing about for some time: those who own their own arenas or have favorable arena deals have a number of non-hockey related events and revenues to buoy their teams. “So what?” you might ask. That’s not hockey related revenue, and so shouldn’t be included when we talk about hockey’s profitability. Except that in many cases you simply can’t get your hands on that revenue without an arena, and you can’t get your hands on an arena without a regular tenant, and that your tenant then eats up a huge amount of your fixed expenses. Simply put, a hockey team might lose money, but your investment still gains.

We start to get a picture of an overall investment strategy: You don’t necessarily want a sports team, you want a sports arena. With an arena you can inflate real estate and land prices in the area, where you can strategically invest beforehand, and/or charge for retail space, and/or derive value from businesses you own nearby. To get an arena, you need a sports team, the cheapest of which is an NHL team in a non-traditional market. Even if you don’t have the arena, get the team and you can agitate for the local government to build you one with public tax dollars.

Once you’ve got your arena and team, your direct hockey-related revenue in-out ratio might produce yearly operational losses – you probably don’t make enough on ticket sales to pay for salaries and arena expenses. But your overall portfolio, made possible by owning the team, is producing value. You may even make a short term profit when you consider revenue sharing, merchandise sales, and television revenues, much of which is not reported. And if you’re lucky, maybe your team goes on a run, wins some playoff games, and you make some bonus short term profit. Meanwhile, your franchise is increasing in value year over year. If it’s in the middle of the pack, that means a 4%-11% return on your $200MM investment every year. All you have to do is have the money to cover any operational losses in the meantime, which some owners (remember those two guys in Tampa?) have trouble doing when all of their other speculative enterprises crumble in a crashing economy.

In the meantime, you can limit your operational losses by slashing payroll and agitating for a lockout to remove player rights. In the end, this narrative of non-traditional teams dragging down the league is only accurate if we continue to look exclusively at hockey related revenue. But owning a sports team isn’t about whether or not the team makes money. It’s about whether or not all of your investments, made possible through the ownership of that team, make money. Which is why the owners’ line about how broken the economics of the game are is so disingenuous.

I don’t doubt that some owners are actually losing money, and some owners’ investment strategies haven’t panned out. (Wang on Long Island hasn’t had as much luck getting a new arena as Katz in Edmonton.) But that players and fans should repeatedly pay for the unrealized strategies of various billionaires is asinine. The reason the Coyotes don’t have potential owners crawling all over them isn’t because there’s no appetite for hockey in Arizona. It’s because a state with an economy that runs on real estate sales has crashed and is near bankrupt. No one has any money to spend on anything, so real estate speculation has flatlined. As the economy recovers, look for more potential owners to start sniffing around these supposedly doomed outfits in non-traditional markets.

All of which to say that the owners of sports franchises are looking quite villainous lately. The Senators’ owner, Eugene Melnyk, is fairly mild in comparison – though he does have a tendency to make shitty, misleading statements about relocation right before tickets go on sale, or claim that his club is the second largest employer in Ottawa, which is ridiculous. But when we see the repeated manipulation of fan sentiment to get concession from the public purse, to drive down individual rights in the form of player arbitration (from guys who I would assume are staunch anti-state-interventionist Republicans to boot), and the plainly misleading reporting of franchise values, then I don’t know how anyone can be pro-owner in all of this mess.

Because hockey is hockey, but Star Trek TNG is Star Trek TNG

Posted on by
4

One tragic byproduct of this whole lockout—other than people losing their jobs and stuff—is that our web sphere (that’s a thing) has lost some serious momentum. James is killing it over on Twitter as usual (just over –>), but I don’t have anything to write about except some whiny articles about how I don’t like hockey anymore and how billionaires have billions of aires. I miss being enthusiastic, childlike, idiotic about unimportant entertainment.

So, as a new ongoing feature, I’d like to write about Star Trek: The Next Generation, which was just added to Canadian Netflix, as I watch all 177 episodes in order.

Now, for our American readers, you need to know first that Netflix in Canada stinks. It doesn’t have anything. While in Amurh-ica you have access to hours of quality programming (read: Golden Girls), in Canada Netflix is mostly state-sponsored shows about the joys and mishaps of agricultural life and also some SeaQuest 2032 (R.I.P. Jonanthan Brandis, King of Tiger Beat). For some reason, content rights have to be negotiated fiefdom-by-fiefdom. But Star Trek TNG was just added, and though I shudder (with pleasure) when I see the words “177 episodes” displayed, I only watched the first four episodes this week.

Episode One: Encounter at Far Point

 UntitledThe new series starts out ballsy by following the statement “To boldly go where no one has gone before” with an episode that basically asks “is all this exploring stuff even a good thing to be doing?” Within a few minutes of taking over the ship, Picard and company are confronted by Q, a near-omnipotent creature who appears in the guise of the various phases of human expansion and colonialism. Q then proceeds to put them on trial for the crimes of humanity. You could have ended the entire series right here, with Picard admitting that exploring for exploring’s sake is sort of dangerous and meddling and stupid, that the human race is a virus, and then the screen could go black and giant middle finger could appear. This might be the series’ most meta, first-year-lit student moment. It’s either awesome or stupid, depending on how you look at it.

We also get to see a version of Picard that is irresponsible and dickish. He hates children; he risks an emergency saucer separation at warp 9.8; he makes Riker re-dock the ship manually for no reason; and he’s kind of brattish when standing up to Q, causing the god-like being to repeatedly injure his crew. Kind of awesome, again, for the debut episode to be like, “You want more Kirk? Guess what: Captain Kirk was an asshole. He lost a crew member every single episode. He was a terrible captain.” Then they find a planet where a human is mercilessly abusing a giant space jelly fish, basically admitting that humanity isn’t that much better in the future than it is now.

Oh, also: Shit is dark. Someone actually gets shot with a machine gun in this episode. I think this might be the darkest episode until the one where Tasha Yar has to fight someone with a spikey glove in a cage of death. You know the one. I think it’s an episode or two from now.

Counselor Troi is clearly intended to be this show’s Jonathan Brandis.

Episode Two: The Naked Now

 Untitled2Okay, this is incredible: in only their SECOND EVER EPISODE a space virus makes everyone act drunk and screw each other. That’s not an exaggeration. The Enterprise stumbles across a ship where the crew immediately demands HOT MEN and then proceeds to blow themselves out of an airlock. I’ve been drunk before, even stupidly so, but I’ve raaaaaaarely wanted to kill myself and everyone around me because of it. I can’t speak for my friend Tom, Who Lights Camp Fires with Gasoline. He might be space virus drunk. Also, someone showers in their clothes. That’s just crazy.

There’s a weirdly puritanical subtext to this whole thing, sort of like Reefer Madness. Do you want to get drunk kids? Just know that if you do, you might kill everyone.

So, the Enterprise crew, including, somehow, Data, get infected with this thing, and everybody, including Data but excepting Jordie (Geordie?), gets laid. Wesley Crusher, being a boy, has no interest in being laid, but uses his boy genius to steal the ship. A meteorite is hurtling towards the ship (the odds of a relatively small rock in space arcing toward a relatively small ship, thermodynamically speaking, are astronomically tiny, but whatevs) and Riker, having less than a minute to live, decides to narrate something in his space journal about the situation. Also, the most advanced ship in the history of the race stops working if you take out a bunch of giant microchips.

Untitled3

Episode Three: Code of Honor

untitled4Otherwise known as the most racist episode of Star Trek TNG ever, the crew visits a planet of Africans and makes a series of condescending remarks about how they, the largely white crew, used to be just like them, the Africans. Meaning materialistic, venal, and sexist. Surprisingly, Worf–from the race of Klingons that usually stand in for anachronistic and vaguely ethnic stereotypes–doesn’t even get a line to speak. Seems to reaffirm that you only need as many Others as you need antagonists for your space operas. Anyway, Tasha Yar fights another woman to the death in a laser cage, and everyone moves on to other, hopefully less racist episodes.

We also discover why Star Trek TNG took so long to get to Canadian Netflix: at one point Data calls French an outdated language. Racists AND monologuist. Not exactly the franchise’s brightest moment.

Episode Four: The Last Outpost 

untitled5Ferengis (sp?) shut down the Enterprise, making them totally vulnerable. Picard uses the opportunity to tell Data about the history of human flags. The bad guys stole a T-9 Energy Converter from Gamma Tari 4. This is relevant.

 

Shortly after I’m pretty sure Picard says “merde.” Jordie says, “Come back fighting, woo wee!” then gives a thumbs up. Brilliant.

For the rest of the episode everyone is pretty much useless at their jobs and the ship barely works. Picard seems completely insane, and Riker looks at him like he knows it. Data gets his fingers stuck. The future is a terrible place full of imbeciles.

Should, and can, Bettman go?

Posted on by
4

With this first glitter of optimism we’ve received in weeks—generated, perhaps tellingly, by meetings where the NHL Commissioner and NHLPA head were both absent—I’ve found myself thinking about the prospect of seeing hockey this year. Up until today I’d just about given up on that notion. Goes to show how even the cynical like me can be bent by a mildly positive though largely ambiguous headline.

It also speaks to how little we fans may expect from either side in terms of PR, and how little we received. I’ve never felt like either side was invested in the feelings of the fans, except to the degree they could manipulate fan sentiment as leverage in their negotiations. Such is the magnifying effect of the 24 hour news cycle. What is a group of rich people fighting over how much richer one side gets to be than the other turns into the same group of rich people biting the hand that feeds them. Given how badly this thing has been cocked up, I can’t help but think some kind of overture has to be made to the fans to get them back on side; I’ve never heard people sound as cynical as they have these past two months.

Which makes the following question both a bit compelling and also completely ludicrous: is the best thing the league can do to make amends with the fans to axe Bettman?

It would be succumbing to an unfair stereotype—Bettman answers to the owners, after all. But consider that 1) Bettman is a convenient stand-in for the greediness of the owners and the brokenness of this negotiation process; 2) There are many skilled, cut-throat former lawyers who could play the role of facilitator and administrator, and 3) maybe it’s healthy to have a little bit of turnover at the top, especially when your guy has been in his role for almost 20 years. This track record of lockouts is not synonymous with Bettman’s track record. For better or for worse, Bettman is the brand.

How many more years do you want this guy booed every time he steps up to a microphone, be it at the draft or handing out the Stanley Cup? This is supposed to be the face of ownership, the powerful mask of the league itself. Fair or not, Bettman’s as divisive a figure as you’ll find in professional sports, and after yet another lockout I can’t imagine there aren’t enough owners in that board room to do the ultimate shanking in blaming this whole fiasco on him. They could wash their hands of the whole situation and get back to the business of making money.

Unlikely to happen, of course, as Bettman has created the ultimate insiders’ club. And there’s nothing more appealing to the rich white man who has everything than membership in an exclusive club. He’s ingrained himself with the league’s identity. But we might be starting to see the beginning of a fan backlash that could be counteracted by the appearance, if certainly not the reality, of regime change.